Emit Gray, Sr.
(1894–1971)

Born on June 20, 1894, in Mount Olive, a small farming community in Covington County, Mississippi, Emit Gray, Sr. began life just south of Meridian, not within it as his obituary later stated. He was the son of Robert “Bob” and Patsy Gray, farmers who raised a large family in the challenging realities of the Jim Crow South. By age 6, Emit was living in Williamsburg, Mississippi, and by 16, he was already working as a laborer on his family’s farm, a path shaped by necessity and resilience.

In 1915, at 21, Emit married Lucille Williams in Brewton, Alabama. Within a few years, the couple joined the early wave of the Great Migration, relocating north to Cleveland, Ohio, in search of economic opportunity and freedom from the racial terror of the Jim Crow South. According to his 1917 World War I draft registration, Emit was married, but he gave Mount Olive, Mississippi, as his permanent home address, evidence of his lingering ties to family and land in the South. At the time, he was employed as a laborer in a machine shop for Peter Gerlach & Co., a nationally respected saw manufacturing firm located at 1708 Columbus Road in Cleveland.

Peter Gerlach & Co., established in the 1850s and headquartered at 51 Center Street, was among the leading manufacturers of industrial saws in the country. Their sprawling facility at the junction of Columbus and Winter Street produced high-grade circular saws, mill saws, and their specialty, the Improved Champion Stave Sawing Machine, used to produce barrel staves for oil, pork, and spirit barrels with unmatched precision and efficiency. Emit was part of a skilled workforce of twenty to thirty men, working under a rigorous system that demanded discipline, strength, and technical precision. While he was not yet a trained craftsman, his labor helped support a company whose products competed nationally with those manufactured in the East. By 1920, Emit transitioned to a new trade, working as a baker in Cleveland while renting a home with Lucille. The exact details of their separation are unclear, but by the mid-1920s, Emit had moved to Prichard, Alabama, and embarked on a new chapter of life that would define his legacy in the Deep South.

What is known is that by the 1930 Census, Emit was living once again as a single man and working as a laborer at the local saw mill. In 1926, he married Bessie Hendricks, but heartbreak struck just two years later when Bessie died giving birth to their only son, Emit Gray, Jr., in April 1928. Following her death, young Emit was sent to live with his maternal grandmother, Saphronia Hendricks, in East St. Louis, Illinois, where he appears in the 1930 U.S. Census.

By 1931, Emit Sr. remarried. His new wife, Lena Brooks Stokes, brought with her a daughter, Mildred, and together the couple expanded the family with the birth of their daughter, Lena Frances Gray, in 1932. A few years later, Emit Jr. returned to Alabama and rejoined his father and stepmother. The family made a modest home at 305 Garrison Avenue in Prichard, where Emit Sr. would reside for the rest of his life.

Beginning in the 1930s and continuing until his retirement before 1950, Emit worked for the M.P. Lindsey Lumber Company in Africatown, located along Telegraph Road. A fixture in the local timber industry, the company was one of the few major employers of African American men in the region. Emit made the 40-minute walk on foot from Prichard to Africatown each day, a quiet but powerful symbol of his enduring work ethic. The lumber yard was not just a job site; it was part of the labor infrastructure built by and sustained through African American hands and sweat. The site’s proximity to Lewis Quarters, the ancestral home of Clotilda descendants, places Emit within the broader context of Mobile’s African American industrial legacy.

By the 1940 Census, Emit was listed as the head of a five-member household, working full-time as a laborer and earning $624 annually. He continued to provide for his family through honest, demanding labor, even after the death of his second wife, Lena, in 1942. He never remarried, and by 1950, now widowed and aging, Emit was living alone in the same home he had sustained for decades. Though he was no longer able to work, his legacy was firmly established in the lives of his children and grandchildren. To them, he was a man of few words, steady presence, and unwavering resolve, a model of perseverance during an era when options for African American men in the South were sharply limited, yet his spirit remained unbroken.

Emit Gray, Sr. passed away on September 30, 1971, at the age of 77. He was survived by his daughters Mildred S. Graham of Detroit and Lena F. Hives of Prichard, a brother Willie Gray of Waynesboro, Mississippi, and fourteen grandchildren, including Emit Gray III, McKinley Jones, Jr., and Grant Graham Jr. He died as he had lived: humbly, quietly, and deeply rooted in a community and a family that would carry his story forward.

“The righteous man walks in his integrity; his children are blessed after him.” — Proverbs 20:7