Ernest McCray has never stopped to consider whether something is impossible.There’s only one thing he says he isn’t capable of. “I tried to be a grown-up — for about 30 seconds,” he said, laughing.
McCray’s life began in Arizona to a hardworking, music-loving family in which he was raised mainly by his mother. It was a different country then, and Tucson was still enforcing Jim Crow-style segregation.
“I was born in 1938, to give you an idea,” said McCray. “They didn’t desegregate schools in Tucson until I was going into the 8th grade. We couldn’t eat at the white restaurants, we could only swim in the ‘colored’ swimming pool.”
He found refuge from Jim Crow in the local library.
Despite the animus enforced from above, McCray knew he had a voice — and he used it.
“That’s how I make it in the world,” he said. “Through writing and being an educator and a teacher and a principal… I use my writing in school communities and working with kids and turning them on to writing.”
Above all, McCray said, he does everything he can to make the world a kinder place.
“I want a world better for children because children… they mimic us and if we’re not loving, there’s less chance that they’ll grow up loving.”
That has been his ethos through a long life that has seen him making history as an athlete and then as an educator.
’46 points in a game against Los Angeles State’
But before McCray came to San Diego in 1962 to work with children and teenagers in its “inner-city” elementary and high schools, McCray was also a star athlete at the University of Arizona. His legend still resonates: he still holds the school’s record for the most points in a game, with 46 on February 6, 1960.
Young Ernie McCray. (Photo courtesy the University of Arizona)McCray said he didn’t show up that night to do anything extraordinary. In fact, in true college-student form, he’d had a couple of drinks before the event. But by the end of the game, he had received his first standing ovation.
He was also the first Black basketball player to earn a degree from the University of Arizona.
Journalist Greg Hansen, who spent decades as a sports columnist for the Arizona Daily Star, spent years criticizing UA for never inducting McCray in its Ring of Honor.
“McCray’s qualifications are off-the-charts strong,” Hansen wrote in a 2020 column. “For whatever reason, the UA has chosen to interpret his records as not meeting Ring of Honor standards. That’s absurd. If anything, he’s overqualified.”
Hansen said he couldn’t believe the omission.
“I must have written four columns about it,” Hansen said. Thanks to his efforts and others’, McCray was finally inducted into the UA Ring of Honor in 2023.
“His name is up there now with Steve Kerr and all those great Arizona players who went to the NBA,” said Hansen.
“You could do a book or a movie on his life,” Hansen said. “His grandpa was a sharecropper from Georgia who moved here because of the racial violence.”
In the American Southwest, the racial animus against Black Americans was less overtly violent than it was in the South at that time, but it was still visible, tangible, and all-encompassing.
“He told me where he grew up, he told me the address and I drove over there and just looked at it… I just looked and almost started crying,” Hansen said.
Hansen said the night McCray broke that scoring record, he went out to a restaurant to celebrate — and they wouldn’t serve him because he was Black.
Transcendence
But an athletic career wasn’t what McCray wanted. His dreams weren’t to play in the NBA. He wanted to earn his master’s degree and teach.
After he graduated, McCray chose between school districts in San Diego and New York, and came to San Diego. He set himself apart as an educator immediately, shooting hoops in order to build communication and rapport with troubled students. He called opening John Muir Alternative School in 1974 was a career highlight.
“I was the first male in San Diego city schools to take parental leave,” McCray added.
“He transcended all groups and he still does,” said fellow educator Sharon Whitehurst-Payne, who came to San Diego in 1972 and is a board trustee with the San Diego Unified School District. She has worked with McCray for decades and said that his personality and commitment to including everyone set him apart from the start.
“Although he’s an African-American male, he was for all people, and his whole life has just depicted that throughout the ages. That’s my big takeaway about Ernie,” Whitehurst-Payne said.
She added that he has always had the unique gift of seeing past superficial issues and finding everyone’s shared humanity, especially with children and teenagers who can keenly feel the differences between themselves and others.
“I don’t think he focused on any of those differences,” she said. “He just saw people as people…. A lot of people talk about it, but they don’t really have that characteristic.”
Today, McCray’s long official history as an educator is behind him, but he is still speaking out. In February, he gave the second of two one-man shows, “Still Me After All These Years” at the La Jolla Library, reading his original poetry and other writing.
Ernie McCray talks about his life. (Image courtesy the African American Museum of Southern Arizona)He also writes his own Substack, and has a regular column that appears in OB Rag.
”I like popping off and commenting on everything that I see,” McCray said. “Basically, to me it’s just an extension of being an educator, being a teacher.”
As a lifelong advocate for equality and civil rights, he said he is heartened that young people are turning out to protest against racism, inequality, and government violence.
“These kids are doing what Americans do,” McCray said. “Despite all that’s happened, I’ve been more hopeful in the last few years than ever before.”
He said the hardest work for Americans is yet to come — but that he thinks we’re up for the task, if we work together.
“Humanity is going to have to deal with climate change, and if we work against each other with all the prejudices and discriminatory thoughts, we’re not gonna survive.”
But thanks to the gains made during his life, McCray remains optimistic for humanity. He said that he sees people learning every day to build resilience for themselves and each other.
“It’s going to get better. Love wins,” he said. “Hate gets our attention the most. But love wins.”
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