Dr. Rhonda Muhammed

Early Life

“My mother, Margaret Rose Murray was born, Margaret Rose King. She was born June 20 1931, and she considers herself a depression baby. It was a hard time; that period of time people… had lost their jobs. Money was in short supply. And if you can imagine the economy for people who were working class people. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you have African Americans in 1931 who were struggling there was no civil rights. There total was discrimination. There was total segregation. And so this was a young woman who grew up in a family that came from the South.

And so my mother, my mother's mother and her sister came, migrated from Greenville, North Carolina. And so her parents and her grandmother all migrated from the south to north to Baltimore, Maryland. there was a great migration with African Americans, and they were part of that great migration. She grew up in the school system in Baltimore, Maryland, and she was a very industrious young woman. She married my father at the age of 16, and this was … that her parents wanted or her mother wanted, because she was raised by her aunt and her grandmother. So she has a very strong sense of a strong work ethic. She has a very strong sense of heritage because there were grandparents around who helped to raise her.

So at the age of 16, she met my father Kenneth Murray and they got married, and they began to, as she says, step out on the stage of life. Her thought was, ‘If I can do all this for my family, if I can help pay bills, if I can help work and do all the things that I'm doing to help my family as a teenager, I can do it for myself. That portion of her life, she was also trying to become educated, because education was a big part of our family. And so she enrolled at Morgan State University in Baltimore. I'll have to double check the records. That's something I really want to do before I get too old, is to honor her by by establishing a scholarship at Morgan State in her name.

She had me. I was born in 1951, and she was a very industrious woman. She believed that because of her experience, because of the times, she had a strong sense of heritage. So she did a lot of reading and investigating and research on the history of African Americans. And so with that in mind, that's been a dry that was a driving force for her as she aspired to other things. She had me, she stopped school, and her attention turned more to work, and focusing on , helping to take care of her family with the help of my father as well in1954.

And so in 1958, my father was asked if he would come to North Carolina because one of the brothers who was teaching Islam at that time had family in North Carolina, particularly Durham and Raleigh…. asked if he come and spread the word of Islam here in the South. And then we moved here. My mother packed us up, my two brothers and myself.

We moved here to Durham in 1960.There was a lot going on, unrest in the country. Things were beginning to shift and beginning to change. And so it created…the conditions for a storm, a revolution to happen. So as my father came in and talked and and spread the message of what we understood at that time to be Islam, which had infused social consciousness into it, the community began to grow. So my mother helped with the establishment … she was very business minded, operating businesses.

She worked at a chicken factory. She cleaned up hotel rooms. Nothing was beneath her. This is what I saw with my own eyes. [She] did not believe in welfare, believed in self sufficiency, and wanted, you know, that whole notion of pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. That was her philosophy of life. And so, um, I never forget I was in middle of elementary school, and she took in laundry. And we ironed people's clothes and delivered their clothes. And so, you know, anything that could bring an honest dollar. Those were some of the things that she did.

In 1963, Malcolm X was moving around the country on speaking circuits. He came to our home and here in Raleigh, and it was my father's responsibility. My father was a minister in the Nation of Islam at that time, and it was my father's responsibility to find speaking engagements for him. He went to all of the colleges: Duke, UNC, the Black colleges, North Carolina Central and Shaw University, and none of them would allow him access to the campus.[Malcolm] was considered volatile and so we had a place that we held our regular meetings and so that place was above a cab stand. It had an auditorium that would hold maybe a hundred people. And so my father was able to rent that space. And Malcolm spoke and delivered a message.

Work with Others

“Her thing was personal development. And so she used the religion as a means of helping young women, a lot of the women who were in prison. They were there because they took the rap for somebody else… because they were convincing and, and her talking with them, they were convinced by their partner, whoever, that you don't have a record, you won't serve as much time. So you know you take and, you know, love make you do some crazy things sometimes.

But anyway, her focus extended to women in the prison and, and trying to help them become better, and when they come out, not continuously go back and forth. And so she did that for a number of years, about 25 to 30 years. And they … called her sister, dean. They called her the dean of the women there.

I tell you, she had a sensitivity. She also set up a fund and, I'll never forget, people will come and ask, Mrs. Murray, could you could you, because she's a business person, it's Murray. Could you could you helping my my son was killed, or somebody died, or something like, we don't have, I mean, this was, all of a sudden we don't have the money to buy.

So she set up a fund for people who didn't have money and she would take x amount of dollars every week and put it aside and so the word got around in the city that if you needed some funeral money or burial money you know, check with Mrs. Murray. I think, because she grew up in a time when it was really tough for black folk. Some people would say she was middle class, but she didn't carry herself as if she was over and above somebody else. She always found a way to try to help others. That was just a mission in life.”

Cash Michaels

Memories of Mrs. Murray

“Her manner and style were such that if you never saw her, and you just listened to  her voice, she had a very calming and soothing and reassuring voice and  message. ..she was an educator by trade and as well as a  business woman. 

Such a soothing personality, such an honest personality. And the one thing  about Miss Mary, and I remember that was, was overriding was her laugh. Her laugh was disarming, and in that you would love to hear her laugh. When she would laugh, that would tell you that that no  matter what else is going on in the world, that part of the world, where that  you shared with her, was gonna do okay.

She was someone who she, she had no agendas, no bad  agendas at all. She, she loved everybody, she was truly a color blind person in the  way she treated everyone, even though she was very supportive of the  African American community, very supportive of of Black business and  building Black business.

On Business

“Her and her husband, brother Kenneth Murray Mohammed, they both created something called the Better Building Business Society, the Better Building Business Society,  in order to coalesce Black businesses in South, there, in South East Raleigh  and surrounding areas.”

On the Radio Show

“You could tell, she had an abiding love for the community, and that came out from her and her  program every Saturday morning … She always had a message to share with the community because she  didn't want people to tune in and and not get something relevant and  beneficial from the program. So she always came in, prepared to share with the community. She saw the community as part of her family. There was no mistaking that. So when you worked with her, you couldn't help but to feel as if you were part - an important part - of that  sharing process.”

April Adeeyo

The Vital Link School

“They're African American but also like school, like, you know, and I'm very grateful that I went to Vital Link, because when I left I was not exposed to like the type of like it's cool to be Nigerian … it was not cool. In 1994 it was nice. I didn't know because I was in the environment that I was in, right? So, like, it wasn't until I left Vital Link that, like, I would go home be like, "Mom, what's African booty scratch?” You know why they call me that? I didn't know, because I was not in that. You you see what I'm saying, like, no one would ever fathom saying such at the Vital Link. Or being called a Oreo, I had no context, no idea of what that was like.

And so when I went to um, hundred elementary school was jarring because it, that wasn't my experience. I had no context or anything for that. So the beauty of it was I also had skills and tools to kind of, like, cope with them. Like I would imagine like most kids probably would have fought. I didn't fight. I definitely had an adjustment. I do remember my mom having to come to the school because people perceived me as, I guess you could say, disrespectful, because one, I had never gone to school white children. So I didn't know what that was like. I didn't know what that was like.

And then all other thing was, a lot of Mrs. Murray's relatives also work in school. They were kind of like the equivalent of your big cousins so, like, Angel worked there. And she watched me grow up. And she was in middle school at the time that I was in elementary school. Mrs. Murray's granddaughter, of course, Miss Ronda worked there all my life. She helped run school.”

Judy Richards

Sister Margaret as a Role Model

"She was a teacher…She shared all the time. She shared information. She was a true educator…I was simply like her daughter, and I was just trying to do the work. I was very attentive to my duty. And we would sit at her feet whenever we had the chance, that could be at the dinner table, [or] after a program in the hallways…It could be a community meeting. She would always vocalize. She always had a question. She always could offer guidance, even to her very last days.

Dr. Moses

Crab Tree Valley Mall Boycott

“There was some very serious things that that occurred during that time. One of them was the was a boycott that the Black community was engaged in against the Crab Tree Valley Mall. The Crab Tree Valley Mall, I believe, is the second oldest… mall in Raleigh. And certainly at that time, it was the largest. But they, they were having a hard time with dealing with black youth who chose to visit the mall in the evenings or on the weekends. And it seems that for many youth, the mall becomes the place to go and be because it's exciting. I guess there’re lights and things are going on at that time. I don't think the malls even had movie theaters in them. I think a lot of this, probably a lot of this new stuff that you can find in malls… The mall managers were trying to keep the kids out. Something happened on one particular occasion, and there was a brawl, and there were a lot of Black youth there.

Well, to make matters worse, the the management or ownership of the mall try to convince the city of Raleigh to change the bus routes so that the buses would not bring students up to the mall. And that prompted a great deal of backlash from the Black community. Mrs. Murray was among the leaders of that backlash because while we felt certainly the young people have have to behave themselves in these places, the mall owners really had no right to try and eliminate them. And they target it. I mean, they specifically stated, we want you to change the bus routes because we don't want the black youth up here. Well, if you don't want the black youth coming from Southeast you obviously don't want the dollars their parents are spending because many of the parents also have to take the bus to get up to to Crab Tree. So that went on for quite a while. I can remember, I think it was in December, one year. It was the coldest. I came here from New York. This was a colder day than any day that you can imagine. And we're out there with our picket signs and my hands are freezing, and it's cold, and everybody's shivering. And, you know, boycotting and calling out to the pass the passers by, as cars moved back and forth. And as Murray was there leading the charge, she was the person who was really the center of that whole movement. She gained a lot of my respect for that because while we're not that much different in age she is a little bit older than I am. And so I thought, ‘okay, she can do all these things. I can do these things too.’”

Sister Margaret the Educator

"A lot of what she would talk with students about would be education - just the the the need to continue education. The need to honor ancestors who were at the at the start of our education in these institutions, and being proud of of who you were as a black person in this, in this country. Now, that's not to say that she didn't talk about other things, because again, she might have gone to another department that I knew nothing about to talk, because somebody else invited her to talk about something else, when you mentioned the entrepreneurial things. So somebody may have called her at some point to talk with somebody about that. My focus [was] on the history and culture. And so that's, that's what she came to talk about when she talked with students in my space.”