Farewell to Margaret Rose Murray, educator and ‘necessary thorn’ in Raleigh’s side
As a young girl in Baltimore, while enduring the worst years of Depression, Margaret Rose Murray heard around her school that Black history began with slavery — discouraging words that launched a lifetime of defiance.
Before long, she married a jazz guitar player whom she met in a ice cream parlor — a young bandleader who was just starting to embrace Islam. Wed as teenagers, they moved to Durham in 1957 with just $20 between them, looking to build the state’s first mosque.
And as she looked around her adopted state, Murray found the same small-mindedness in education that discouraged her as a girl. She wanted Black students to know about Garrett Morgan, who invented the traffic signal in 1923 after witnessing a carriage accident, and Benjamin Banneker, who in 1753 carved a wooden clock that struck on the hour.
So she started her own Raleigh private school, Vital Link, in 1964 — starting with just six kindergarten-age children. Over the next five decades, she would teach thousands of Black children about achievements from people who looked like them.
“I don’t believe in African-American history month,” she said, well into her 80s. “I believe in African-American history year.”
Murray died Tuesday at 91, leaving Raleigh as a giant of social justice.
Hundreds poured into the Islam Association of Raleigh on Friday for her janazah, or Muslim funeral service, honoring her with silent prayer.
“Her mantra was she didn’t want to see it for just a few,” said her daughter, Rhonda Muhammad. “She wanted people to be their best and highest self. They shouldn’t see themselves as coming from a condition of slavery.”
Around the city, longtime activists recall her immediately jumping in the path of inequality, and usually managing to knock it down.
In 1989, Crabtree Valley Mall asked the city to stop bus service from Southeast Raleigh, citing unruly behavior from Black teenagers on Saturdays.
“Margaret Rose organized us all of us to come there, and we picketed for weeks,” recalled Octavia Rainey, long an advocate for Southeast Raleigh neighborhoods. “Excuse my French, but we said, “Hell, no.’ “
Years later, in 2002, Murray hounded Mayor Charles Meeker after she organized a jazz benefit concert for Shaw University at a downtown arena and eight attendees had their cars towed during the performance. Meeker told The News & Observer at the time, “We’re going to have to do something about this kind of carrying on.”
Murray delighted in her role.
“I suppose I am a thorn in their side,” Murray told The N&O in 1993. “But perhaps I am a necessary thorn in their side.”
Murray and her late husband, Imam Kenneth Murray-Muhammad, became prominent enough in the Muslim community that both Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali stayed with them in the 1960s.
“He was so vibrant and full of life,” she said of Ali, in an article in the Chronicle of Winston-Salem. ”We were happy to have him come to our home, and he would have been sort of incognito if my neighbor didn’t recognize him and told everybody.”
And while her school grew to add campuses and grade levels, Murray branched out further, hosting a pair of radio talk shows, most memorably “Traces of Faces and Places” on WSHA at Shaw.
Behind that microphone, she brought Raleigh mayors into households they might never have visited in person. If somebody got elected to any Raleigh office, especially from Southeast Raleigh, they faced her questions as a rite of political passage.
And when she wasn’t shaping young minds or putting leaders on the spot, Murray was counseling inmates at Raleigh’s women’s prison, helping them finish school and learn a trade.
She never forgot the limits that time and place tried to impose on her, and she wanted to show the world that those fences can be jumped.
“I’m an incurable optimist,” she told The N&O in 1993. “I can keep doing this because I know it’s going to change, that our people will have our day when we walk on the sunny side of the street with everyone else. I just hope I live long enough to see it.”
After 91 years, few would dispute how much sunnier she made each street she walked.
This story was originally published January 13, 2023 at 5:58 PM with the headline "Farewell to Margaret Rose Murray, educator and ‘necessary thorn’ in Raleigh’s side."