BIOGRAPHY:  Ray Bass

Ray Bass was born in rural Wilmington, North Carolina in 1904.  It was a period of severe economic repression.  Wages in the rural south were less than a dollar a day.  In addition to starvation wages, minorities were victims of Jim Crow laws, lynching and disfranchisement.  Although 40 years had passed since the end of the Civil War, black peonage flourished, forcing countless thousands into hopeless debt and virtual bondage.

But World War I presented a great opportunity for industrial employment.  Hundreds of thousands of black citizens migrated North to work in such industries as shipbuilding, meat packing, steelmaking and coal mining.  They developed a collective self-respect and independence.  Being paid a living wage that helped improve the quality of their lives engendered a new self-confidence.

On the strength of hearsay that major highway construction was taking place somewhere in Western New York; Ray Bass migrated with his family to Buffalo during the Depression.  He was 26 years old.  He possessed limited skills and little formal education, but was inherently quite intelligent.

He applied for work at a construction site where a building was being erected.  He had no experience in the field, yet when the foreman asked what he could do, he replied that he could lay bricks.  The foreman probably did not believe him, as he laughed when he told Ray to report to work in the morning.  All that day, Ray watched the professional bricklayers ply their trade.  The next morning, as he later related it, “I laid bricks with the best of them.”  Ray has the distinction of being one of the first African Americans admitted to the building trades union in Western New York at a time when they were being denied even the most menial jobs at construction sites.  Unknown to him, it marked the beginning of a future that would earn him singular recognition.

Ray was bright, affable and a hard worker. He spent his free time in the construction shack poring over blueprints.  This amazed the site foreman, who told him to purchase a set of drafting tools and taught him how to use them.  Ray proved an apt pupil.  Late at night, he studied to assimilate the information gained from on-the-job training.

When Ray died in 1985, he had founded one of the largest construction companies in metropolitan Buffalo.  During his professional career, he performed the masonry work for the Sturgeon Point Pumping Station on Route 5, and many of the homes in the Como Park area.  He performed the brick masonry for St. Augustine’s Center, Friendship Baptist Church, Weinheimer Plumbing Company, North Tonawanda Fire Station and Buffalo’s Town Gardens.  He was the first African American to become a member of the Building Trades Union in Western New York.  But most significantly, he is responsible for African-Americans being accepted as apprentices in the building trades, and accepted as union members locally.

His daughter, Captain Marian Bass states, “I realize how exceptional Ray Bass must have been to have achieved the degree of success he merited.  His was a quest for excellence.  I often wonder what he might have achieved if he had received an extensive, formal education.  He was intelligent, respected and contributive.”

Reprinted with permission of author, Marian Bass.

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