By Dennis Edwards

The last time I talked to Raymond Harold Boone Sr., he was in a hospital bed battling pancreatic cancer. While doctors did their thing, he was editing the next edition of the Richmond Free Press, the weekly paper he started as a voice of Richmond’s black community in 1992.

Ray refused to give in to illness, kept living, kept editing and sounding a clarion call for justice and equality until the Lord took him home.

What kind of life experiences created this confrontational and provocative soul whose peculiar and paradoxical personality propelled him into the ranks of the black press’ greatest publishers? Why did I often find myself putting down the phone and wondering what happened in the conversation I just had with him?

The answer eased into focus at his funeral, when I heard the story behind his story. Ray grew up in Suffolk’s Saratoga community, the same neighborhood where my dad was born and raised. He, too, was shaped by early experiences with racism in the reality of life, but his was complicated by one of the great atrocities of the last century.

Ray’s father was Japanese adventurer Tsujiro Miyazaki. The black woman he fell in love with after immigrating from Nagasaki was Leathia Boone.

Miyazaki found a welcoming home in Suffolk’s black community, where he started the Horseshoe Cafe on the old Fairgrounds near Planters. Asian soul food was his thing. But a rice stir-fry dish called “yak” was his specialty.

Ray was born in 1938, just before World War II, but his young life would take a drastic change when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

Speculating that Japanese families living here could be spies, the U.S. government began interring them in camps. Ray was told someone in Suffolk had reported his father. Government agents swept in, took Miyazaki into custody and shipped him off to the Rohwer camp in Arkansas.

The family says he made several attempts to keep in contact through letters marked “Detainee” and “scrutinized by censors.” But according to a family history published in last week’s Free Press, camp life apparently took its toll. The letters stopped and Ray’s family never heard from him again.

Ray never found out what happened to the father snatched away from him at the age of 5. There was no way to tell whether Miyazaki died in the camp or was sent back to Japan.

Now we know why Ray had sort of a chip on his shoulder, why he became a secular prophet with a message tailor-made for the printed page. Now we know why, like Isaiah in the temple, Ray was more than willing to answer that divine question, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”

Like Isaiah, he said, “Here am I; send me,” to challenge the status quo and demand justice for African-Americans, others of color and those not of color.

Yet deep passions of any kind take a particular toll on us. The prophet pays a price. Ray was wounded, soul deep, by an injustice that affected every facet of his life. Racism was personal to him. It tore at the heart of his childhood. So this prophet took to the printed page — and what words he wrote!

Some might argue Ray doesn’t deserve a comparison to the prophets of old. But such judgments are short sighted. They tend to ignore the reality that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob can use whom he wants, when he wants and where he wants.

In our lifetime, I believe God chose to use Ray Boone — wounded, worried, warts and all — to amplify Amos’ legendary call to “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.”

Dennis Edwards is an Emmy Award-winning television news reporter and anchor, He is a 1974 graduate of Suffolk High School. Email him at dennisredwards@verizon.net.