An autobiographical play makes history personal a killing in Choctaw
Carl Ray is local but has performed this piece around the country. In 1962 Alabama, amid the birth of the modern civil rights movement and the optimism of rulings such as Brown vs. the Board of Education, eighteen year old Carl ray was preparing to leave for his first semester at Tuskegee Institute. But a run-in with local Bill Carlisle, and the innocuous words “yes” and “no”, changed his life irrevocably. Furious the Ray had not responded to him--a white man-- with “yes, sir” and “no, sir”, Carlisle severely beat the youth, stopping just short of cutting his throat. An hour later Carlisle found Ray’s father and shot him eight times, murdering George Ray while his soon looked on. Although charged with murder, Carlisle was convicted of manslaughter, but served no time because his wife needed him to support her.
This drama will move you from anger & tears to laughter for after being an engineer for Lockheed he chose to go into stand-up comedy. As Aldo Billingslea, the University professor who brought Ray to Santa Clara said, “It reminds us first-hand about what our history was. It knocks the dust off the history books. This is not just something that happened then, that we’re so beyond now. This is about forgiveness.”