Individual Details

One month ago today, Jerry Furr died in Palm Desert, California—he was 86. The Born of Conviction statement had four creators—Furr, Maxie Dunnam, Jerry Trigg, and Jim Waits—but it was Jerry Furr’s idea. Here’s a passage from the Born of Conviction book’s Chapter 4: “Though all four creators of the Born of Conviction statement share the credit for its inception, the idea came from Jerry Furr, W. B. Selah’s associate pastor at Jackson’s Galloway Memorial. The Ole Miss riot pushed Furr to a crucial insight: ‘Everything I learned at Millsaps and Emory was that the church said there’s something wrong when people treat folks of other races badly. That stuck, and then Selah put meat and bones on that idea. …I thought we ought to try to do something…make a declaration. We had freedom riders from other places, but they were always dismissed because “they didn’t know anything about Mississippi. They’re not from here; they don’t understand us.”’ So he concluded, ‘Some of us who are Mississippians ought to say something—people who were born in Mississippi and couldn’t be dismissed as outsiders.’ Furr visited the Coast and met Maxie Dunnam, Jerry Trigg, and Jim Waits for lunch; they agreed it was time for action.”Many words could describe Jerry Furr; one is “decisive” and another is “strong-willed.” So it was no small irony that although he fully intended to stay in Mississippi after the publication of Born of Conviction and in spite of the difficulties it created for him (including a cross burned on the lawn of his Jackson parsonage and some vicious anonymous phone calls), it turned out in his words that “the best decision I ever made was forced on me.” On Sunday, June 9, 1963, ushers at Galloway Church in downtown Jackson refused admittance to five African American students from Tougaloo College who attempted to worship at the church that morning. W. B. Selah, the senior pastor, had told the church that if they ever enforced their closed door policy (first approved by the Official Board in 1961), he would resign. So that morning during the 10:55 service, when Selah learned the students had been turned away, he cut his sermon short and announced his resignation. Furr, the associate pastor, resigned as well (the first photo with this post is Selah and Furr standing in the chancel area at Galloway in the early 60s). Here’s the passage from the book’s chapter 7 which picks up the story: “After the service and in the next day or so, Furr tried to dissuade Selah from resigning, and this plea echoed repeatedly in the many letters Selah received in the days after June 9. However, Selah remained convinced that he must honor his promise to resign. Furr and Selah met with Bishop Franklin, who also implored Selah to stay. Franklin claimed there was no church in the Conference to which he could appoint Furr; Selah insisted Franklin had to appoint Furr somewhere. Furr told the Bishop he would serve anywhere but Galloway. This impasse led Furr reluctantly to seek a transfer, and Bishop Gerald Kennedy soon offered him an opportunity to start a new church in Las Vegas, then a part of the Southern California-Arizona Conference. Furr accepted, and less than a week after he and Selah resigned from Galloway, he transferred. Jerry and Marlene Furr arrived later that month in Nevada with their two young children. ”Furr was the founding pastor of Trinity Methodist Church in Las Vegas, which is still going strong as Trinity UMC. The second photo below shows Furr (on the far left) at the ground breaking for their first building in 1965. During his time in Nevada, Jerry became known as a powerful advocate for racial justice in housing, voting rights, employment, and public accommodations. Here’s the conclusion to Jerry’s story at the end of the book's Chapter 7: “In 1967 Nevada Governor Grant Sawyer appointed Furr to chair the Nevada Equal Rights Commission, and for over four years he played a key role in convincing the casinos and the Nevada Test Site to comply fully with federal equal employment opportunity laws. In 1971, Furr decided he ‘had given the church as much as they’d given [him],’ and he left the ministry and the church. He believed his Sunday morning sermons were ‘no longer needed. …The things I did in Las Vegas outside the church were more important than what happened in the church.’ For the next thirty years, he and his wife managed a federally-funded free obstetrics and gynecology clinic in San Francisco; it eventually became a private clinic for low income women. Though he believed creating and signing Born of Conviction was the right thing to do, he saw his work with the poor and minorities as more meaningful: ‘If I could ever have done anything like that in Mississippi, it would have been a lot better than Born of Conviction.’”In June 2004, I spent a wonderful evening and the next morning with Jerry and Marlene Furr in Palm Desert (I took the last photo below just before I departed). I communicated with Jerry by email a few years later and spoke with him on the phone in 2010. So I was surprised and saddened to learn from Jerry’s sister that Marlene died about four years ago, and their son died in 2011.You can find more about Jerry’s remarkable life in the book’s Chapter 2. He is the second of the statement's four creators to pass from this life, along with Jerry Trigg, who died in 2015. With the deaths of Furr and Keith Tonkel this year, sixteen of the twenty-eight signers have now died. Rest in peace, Jerry.

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Birth	17 Oct 1930	Waltham, Webster County, MS
Occupation	1950	pastor - Marion County, MS
Marriage	19 Jun 1950	Jackson County, MS - Living
Death	7 Jun 2017	Palm Desert, Riverside County, CA
Alt name		Jerry K. FURR

Spouse	Living
Child	Randall Kent FURR (1958 - 1958)
Child	Steven Allen FURR (1958 - 1958)
Child	Living
Child	Kerry Blake FURR (1960 - 2011)

Father	John Henry Edgar FURR (1904 - 1981)
Mother	Alyeen PEARSON (1908 - 1994)
Sibling	Royce Cecil FURR (1928 - 2012)
Sibling	Living

Notes