Ray Raphael - Personal Life

Personal Life

A native of New York City, Raphael moved west after graduating high school. He holds BA and MAT degrees from Reed College and an MA from the University of California at Berkeley. He spent the summer of 1962 in North Carolina registering black voters and integrating public facilities and the summer of 1964 with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s “Freedom Summer” in Mississippi. His work in the “Movement” of the sixties influenced his grassroots journalistic style and his bottom-up telling of history.

Raphael settled in rural Northern California, where he raised two sons with his wife, Marie. (One of Marie’s brothers, Robert Guillemin, is Boston’s well-known street artist, Sidewalk Sam, whose bottom-up approach to art resembles Raphael’s treatment of history.) Since age 50, Raphael has been a recreational whitewater kayaker.

For fifteen years Raphael taught all subjects except foreign language at a one-room public high school in his remote neighborhood. He also taught at Humboldt State University and College of the Redwoods. Known for his lucid style, Raphael blends teaching skills with strict academic discipline, writing works of scholarly importance in language accessible to lay readers.