Say what you may about the late Raymond Jordan, love him or hate him, like him or fear him, he was the quintessential, charismatic Springfield Black man of his time. And he was a visionary which is why I often reflect on the difference between him and the current bench of Black (especially male) politicians who appear to be squandering the Ray Jordan legacy.
Only by understanding certain things about the history of Black politics in Springfield could one understand my deep frustration over watching almost every Black (mostly male) politician grovel for peanuts and the approval of the leaders of the White status quo that Ray Jordan bucked in a big way, even as he mellowed in his later years and sometimes appeared to have lost his way.
My first introduction to politics was when my mother backed Adlai Stevenson for president against Dwight Eisenhower and “Rod” Johnson and other similar Black political aspirants for the Springfield city council. This was even pre-Paul Mason when Black people in Springfield could hope for only one (possibly two) Black elected members on a city council so dominated by an unwieldly crowd of White folks that our Black elected city councilor(s) could never have any real power. But they were our only hope!
And then, the voters of Springfield (my mother included) changed the makeup of the city council to a nine-member body, which still restricted us to only one Black councilor among mostly unsympathetic White councilors while our one Black councilor had a little more real power, although not much. The change ushered in the Paul Mason era and we clung to the miniscule power that it represented because it was a little bit more than hope.
Paul Mason was a part of Springfield history through a relative (Primus Mason), who actually traveled to California for the gold rush. He didn’t make a lot of money there but when he came back to Springfield, he managed to prosper in real estate including buying up a large chunk of Mason Square which he donated in his will to the city of Springfield, which the then White powers named “Winchester Square” after one of their White heroes.
Paul Mason, with his reputable family, was mostly liked by everyone, Black, White and otherwise. And most White folks voted for him most of the time and sometimes they didn’t, especially when he leaned “too far” in favor of Black folks. And although most Black folks generally voted for him, sometimes they didn’t, especially when he leaned “too far” in favor of White folks.
Even during those times, the reality was that the Black vote carried very little weight. And White folks would periodically vote Paul Mason out and every once and a while, a Black person would run against him because we, as a people, had grown accustomed to the frustrating idea that Paul’s seat was all we were allowed to have in a White-dominated political environment where we were regularly referred to as “Colored” or “Negro.” Ray Jordan shattered that historical mis-notion and changed Black politics in Springfield forever (I thought!).
Ray and I go way back. I could tell many stories that space in this article won’t allow. But suffice it to say that we have always been friends. I have always liked Ray, in spite of myself. And he has always liked me, in spite of himself. As adults, we became fierce competitors for the narrative of where Black Springfield should go and how it should get there but we both always had the best interests of the Black community in mind. And, I must admit, I mildly resent the small-minded people who have pimped off of our legitimate competition (and continue to do so) for their own self-serving needs.
Ray Jordan came out of high school into a working man’s job in a factory following in his father’s working man’s footsteps. Before the factory, he (along with others of us) worked in Connecticut tobacco fields and mopping floors at Providence Hospital, where he gained the confidence of the supervisor of maintenance who put him in charge of the night shift overseeing the rest of us—including me —and the late local “consummate girl chaser,” Robert Burgess, and another guy, whose name I can’t recall, who liked telling stories about his love of racing cars on local highways against complete strangers.
Ray, in his own words, was not a man who lusted for fame and glory but one who embraced the daily monotony of the “common” man’s life. One of his early ambitions was to be free of the rigid restrictions imposed by a good, hardworking mother and father who were determined to inculcate him with the work ethic and protect him from the perils of the “hood,” which eventually led to him leaving home right after high school and renting an apartment across State Street in Mason Square with friend Curtis Shaird who later became Reverend Curtis Shaird while serving as the head clerk of the housing court, a position that Ray Jordan helped him secure.
And it was while living there that Ray married Donna Harris and established himself as a loving husband and father of two daughters in a modest home they eventually purchased in Ward 4 on Goldenrod Street, not far from where he had been raised on Cedar Street in a simple home owned by his mother and father that had a one-basket court that we often played basketball on after school and a living room where we often gathered to challenge each other in the popular card game of Bid Whist.
I tell all of this to help our current political leaders and aspiring ones understand that as a young man, Ray Jordan never lusted for glory and power. He was satisfied with where he stood on the totem pole of life and had no inclination to be the leader that he became. Glory and power found him through a most unlikely set of circumstances that he related to me in a series of interviews for an article that I wrote in “Point of View” that I hope our editor sees fit to reprint for the second time someday because I don’t have the room herein to rewrite the details.
I already knew most of what Ray related to me in the interviews because I was a part of much of it while living in “Six Corners” (probably now better referred to as “Six Corners Roundabout”) within a short walking distance of Ray’s Cedar Street home and Brookings School playground where we competed in informal sports almost daily after school and on weekends.
Ray and I had two things in common. We were both very awkward at sports and with the girls. I liked scuffling against Ray under the basket for rebounds and he with me and fouls didn’t count. But when it came to the girls, it was a different story.
Ray was good friends with the late Robert Burgess who relished stealing away every girl that Ray coveted and everybody knew it. I was simply shy. So, it has always amazed me how we both ended up marrying two of the most popular girls in town, who were actually almost related to each other at the father level (Jimmy Jordan and Bootsie Jackson—Donna Jordan’s stepfather and Marjorie Hurst’s father, who was a close friend who worked for Jimmy Jordan as a trusted clerk and “numbers” assistant at his variety store near the corner of King and Hancock Streets).
Ray’s introduction to politics was unexpected, dramatic and, as it turned out, amazingly calculated by Ray himself. He had always demonstrated leadership potential at the street level in sports and entertainment and everybody liked him and waited with bated breath for the many dance events that he periodically promoted as a sideline while working at his full-time factory job.
Ray was a well-known workhorse, which is why he was recruited out of his factory job by a prominent community leader into a government program called CEP (Concentrated Employment Program) from where he blossomed as the director of recruitment and ended up working for American International College (AIC) in charge of its African American Cultural Center.
Many of our older current community “leaders” got their start at CEP and some actually worked for Ray (Cee Jackson, Rich Griffin and many others). Ray would eventually use CEP, AIC and his position as the chairman of the Black Harambee Holiday Festival (which he and I and Mo Jones, Bruce King and Jay Griffin started at an impromptu meeting at a booth in the late Windsor Court lounge) to project himself into politics in a manner that most thought unimaginable and impossible.
Without going into detail, suffice it to say that after Ray was recruited by AIC to a formal community leadership position by AIC Professor Dr. Andy Griffin and his aide, Henry Thomas, he transitioned to the politician that altered the stagnant trajectory of Black politics in Springfield and almost immediately changed the “one Black seat” paradigm by doing something that none of us could even conceive of at the time.
Tony Scibelli was the powerful Italian chairman of the Massachusetts House Ways and Means Committee. He was arguably the most powerful White politician in the state because he controlled all the money. And he lived in Springfield in a state representative district that included Ward 4 where Ray and most of us lived.
One of Scibelli’s greatest accomplishments, using state money, was to convert the former army weapons production facility on State Street into Springfield Technical Community College (STCC) and he was powerful enough to eventually get his nephew, Andy Scibelli, appointed STCC President. And Tony reigned supreme among the powerful members of Springfield’s business community. He was considered untouchable until Ray Jordan, who had no prior electoral political experience, decided to challenge him for his seat.
We all scoffed at the idea that Ray Jordan – whose well-developed verbal skills were still underdeveloped and who was still just a “simple Black man from the hood” in our minds – could tackle an icon like Tony Scibelli and survive the subsequent political and economic fall-out that would follow his inevitable defeat.
Tony beat Ray. But by a much smaller margin than anyone would have expected. So small that Tony Scibelli panicked and used his considerable power in the legislature to divide the district into two districts, one a safe district for himself and the other the first Black state representative district in Western Massachusetts.
(It’s worth mentioning that when we were young, Black folks in Mason Square lived among a White, uncontestable majority (in population and in votes) until some White “genius” decided to run a highway through the North End where most Black folks lived destroying most Black homes in the process. And Black folks had nowhere else to go but to what we then called “The Hill” and now call Mason Square, the heart of Tony Scibelli’s district. The political implications were imperceptible to most folks, Black and White alike, for many years until Ray Jordan grasped the political significance of it and made his famous move.)
And Ray suffered no adverse consequences because he taught the powers-that-be to respect him as he went on (after a fierce political fight with then Republican Ben Swan for the new district seat) to become the first Black state representative from Western Massachusetts and later to become the most powerful Black politician in the state among all of the Black elected state officials and most of the White ones and eventually landed under the privileged protection of the powerful White, Irish Speaker of the House, Thomas McGee.
And Ray didn’t stop there. While at AIC, he formed a development corporation and its most outstanding mission was to develop the Indian Motocycle (and the spelling is correct) building into an apartment complex for the Mason Square community. The local opposition to it among the White status quo was enormous. Western New England College, AIC, Springfield College, the Chamber of Commerce and, most of all, MassMutual were all opposed to Ray’s plan as was The Republican newspaper under the leadership of the late and powerful David Starr, who led the battle to stymie the development.
Although his development corporation eventually faltered and he gained no significant financial benefit other than salaries for the corporation’s staff, against all odds and with the solid support of Governor Michael Dukakis, Ray won the battle and today the Indian Motorcycle Apartments are fully occupied by primarily Mason Square residents because Ray Jordan stayed in the fight, which he did for many other often unpopular causes until the end of his life. Like him or not, disagree with him or not, Ray was the people’s warrior and he absolutely deserved to have his name emblazoned on the Blunt Park community center for the elderly that he also helped to build!
And nothing was more magnificent than Ray’s exit from elective politics, after decades at the top, when McGee was fighting to save his speakership from a popular White state representative named George Keverian. I witnessed part of the drama because I had just been appointed by Governor Dukakis as the Commissioner of the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination for the western part of the state and I visited McGee to solicit his support for my new job.
I walked unannounced into McGees’ office where he graciously received me and we talked. I could tell he was nervous but I didn’t know why because I didn’t really understand statehouse politics. But the man’s job was on the line at that very moment and he told me so. I gracefully assured him of a victory as I exited his office and the next day, I learned that he had lost the election by a slim margin, which meant, among other things, that an important pillar of Ray’s power was gone which eventually led to him leaving elected politics, although he remained an important nonelected player in state, local and national politics for many years thereafter.
Many, including me, puzzled over why Ray didn’t simply switch his allegiance to the challenger Keverian. After all, politics tends to be a dog-eat-dog business of opportunity and Ray had grown into quite the powerful political “opportunist.” Keverian would have welcomed Ray’s support with open arms and with abundant rewards. So, when I interviewed Ray, I asked him why he didn’t switch and he quoted the phrase that made me understand him even better than I had for decades. He said simply, “You leave the dance with the one who brought you.”

When he said it, I was pleased that my old friend was still lurking somewhere in that sometimes unrecognizable person he had become as a long-term political operative. He had some ethical lapses that he had no reason to know I was aware of and it wasn’t my business to inquire because I understood something about the difficulty of politics that can be roughly summed up in something a television commentator said that I wrote down about “the crossroads between integrity and ambition,” which he suggested posed the tough test for all of us but especially for politicians, few of whom seem able to rise to the challenge (witness the current Trump era Republicans).
As his political career was nearing an end over which he had little control, Ray Jordan met the challenge just as he did when he made the bold decision, against all odds, to challenge the most powerful White politician in the state and eventually prevailed. Without a blink of an eye, when the end drew near and he approached the vital intersection where he had to choose between McGee and the loss of his elective political career and Keverian, he chose integrity over ambition and stuck with McGee to the end.
The paramount lesson from Ray Jordan is that sycophancy is not the virtue that so many of our current Black (mostly male) politicians seem to think and embrace as a political strategy. It’s the old way which, back in the day, seemed to be the only way until we came to understand (partially through the example Ray set) what Frederick Douglass meant when he was confronting President Abraham Lincoln about slavery: “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” (I couldn’t help telling the rest of his comment although the point is already made. Douglass went on to say, “It never did and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”)
And I will willingly take the heat for speaking out about those who claim to be our Black elected representatives who have taken us back to the hapless past while Hispanics, to their credit, have boldly surged forward and covered the political gap between the height of the Ray Jordan years and the sycophancy that defines our current Black political leadership. “Ambition,” as Ray demonstrated, is not everything. To repeat what I wrote in my June article, “You “gotta” stand for something.” You “gotta” have a vision for the future of the community that you can articulate and fight for with a genuine level of integrity and without fear of speaking truth to power!
Raymond Jordan raised the bar and shocked us all. We need new Black leaders who, rather than spending their political capital groveling for pennies and kissing the mayor’s rear end, instead build on the best elements of Ray’s legacy. We need leaders who project his spirit of “Moving on up!” and “Moving forward!” and fighting for something greater than themselves.
Raymond Jordan’s accomplishments go much further than I’ve discussed herein. Just ask the many people whose careers he jump-started in jobs we never thought could be ours. The man was a bold visionary and no one can convince me to expect any less of our current political representatives, which is no less than the people are demanding and deserve and are willing to turn out and vote for in much greater numbers if only… ■