Ray was born on March 10, 1928, in Alton, Illinois. Located fifteen miles north of St. Louis along the Mississippi River, Alton was then a decaying industrial town on the brink of the Great Depression. He grew up in abject poverty in Alton and in nearby, blue-highway pockets of southeastern Illinois and eastern Missouri. His early years epitomized American poverty and family dysfunction at its worst.
Ray’s wretched background and the hardships of his youth could have been a case in point for Martin Luther King Jr. If King had known of the toxic circumstances of Ray’s youth, he might have cited them as an example of the kind of corrosive poverty that compelled him to embark on the Poor People’s Campaign.
Ray was the oldest of nine children born to Lucille and George Ray. Derisively nicknamed “Speedy” because of his sluggish speech, George never was much of a breadwinner. He had bounced from one job to another.2 He was an auto mechanic, used-car salesman, railroad brakeman, and carnival fighter, but nothing lasted long. With little or no money coming in, the family was so poor that sometimes they had only potatoes to eat.3 Lucille, who was known as Ceal, coped as best she could or, when she couldn’t anymore, turned to drink.
By the time Ray was in the first grade, the family had retreated to a dilapidated, tin-roof house on a meager farm near the rural hamlet of Ewing, Missouri, population 324. Farming on their infertile land did not pay any better than Speedy’s modest jobs. Ceal hated country life.
At the Ewing Consolidated Elementary School, James Ray was often the target of ridicule among his classmates. He was painfully shy. Often his clothes were tattered, dirty, and foul-smelling. He did poorly in his studies, though he would test with an average 108 IQ.4 Eight years of schooling was all he could stand, as he would say later.5
As Ray grew older, his life did not get better. It got worse. In his vivid biography, Gerald Posner explains that “there was no guidance in the Ray household, no family member to whom any of the children could look for inspiration, no encouragement to do well at school or to make friends, and no role model who showed it was possible to work honestly and diligently to pull oneself out of poverty.” The Rays reached a point of such desperation that they burned their house piecemeal to stay alive. As Posner describes it: “In 1940 when James was twelve, the Rays began slowly cannibalizing their decrepit house, pulling it apart plank by plank in order to use it as firewood. It gradually disintegrated until they needed a new home.”6
During that time, Ray had his first brush with the law. He was only eleven when he and his brother John grabbed a stack of newspapers deposited by a truck on a street corner for distribution. The Ray brothers were caught and briefly jailed, but the police let them off with only a warning.
In 1951, Ray’s parents separated. By then Speedy had taken up with another woman and Ceal had sunk into utter despair. In her last years she was reduced to loitering in bars or being hauled off by police for drunkenness and disorderly conduct.7 She died of acute alcoholism in 1953.
Most of her children fared no better. All the children were apart from their mother by the age of sixteen.8 One of Ray’s sisters, Marjorie, was six when she burned to death from a fire that she started while playing with matches. Max had severe mental disabilities and was placed in a special home in Aton. Suzan and Franklin were taken from Ceal by court order and placed in a Catholic home in Springfield, Missouri. Melba, who suffered from emotional distress, ended up in a mental institution.9
Ceal’s trouble with the law stemming from poverty and alcoholism paled next to the criminality of her family. When Speedy was twenty-one, before marrying Ceal, he was convicted of breaking and entering, a felony. He served two years in the Iowa State Penitentiary at Fort Madison. A long string of crimes committed by Speedy’s brother, Earl (the inspiration for James’s middle name), including rape, put him behind bars for most of his adult life.10
Two of Ray’s brothers, Jerry and John, seemed to follow in Speedy’s and Uncle Earl’s footsteps. Jerry was sent to a reformatory at fourteen for mugging drunks and snatching purses. Within a month of his release, he was back in prison for grand larceny. At nineteen, John robbed a gas station and was sentenced to two to five years in the Indiana State Penitentiary at Pendleton.11
If Ray seemed destined for a life of crime, he did try to follow a different path. When he was sixteen, he moved to Alton and found work in the dye room of the International Shoe Tannery. Laid off by the tannery, he enlisted in the army at age seventeen.
Military service, however, did not suit him. He showed his contempt for military discipline by flouting the army’s rules of conduct. While stationed in Germany, he peddled cigarettes on the black market. Against army regulations he drank “in quarters”—that is, in the barracks. In a final act of defiance, he went AWOL. He was quickly apprehended and court-martialed. He did not fail at everything in the military. In basic training he qualified for the marksman’s medal, a classification of proficiency, though below the levels of sharpshooter and expert.12 On December 10, 1948, he was discharged from the army for “ineptness and lack of adaptability to
