The Rev. Willie E. Ray, who spent decades bringing a message of peace to Baltimore’s streets at his Stop the Violence vigils and rallies, died of cancer complications Sunday at Sinai Hospital. He was 76.

“A regular church was too confining for Willie. He took his church to the streets,” said the Rev. Arnold Howard, a friend and Enon Baptist Church’s pastor.

Friends said Rev. Ray operated mainly without a car, a church or desk job. He often asked to borrow a cell phone.

“Back in the 1970s he had an old woodie station wagon for a while. I guess he had a driver’s license,” said Rev. Ray’s close friend Victor Clark Jr. “Willie was determined and was also a trail blazer. “

Rev. Ray would be known for his work with Save Another Youth, Inc. and Baltimore Coalition to Stop the Killing.

He had a powerful voice and often used a bullhorn, saying, “We need to take back our neighborhoods! Stop the killing! I’m going to preach this until I’m dead.”

Born in Baltimore and raised on Gorman Avenue in Southwest Baltimore, he was the son of George Ray, a brick mason and contractor and his wife, Corren. He attended Frederick Douglass High School. He was one of eight children.

In a 1997 Baltimore Sun article, Rev. Ray said the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was “my wake-up call.

“I had been running from my calling,” he said in the article.

He told of leaving a Smokey Robinson concert and finding himself in the thick of a riot.

“On this crazed night, 19-year-old Willie Ray was arrested and charged with looting. Downtown Baltimore was on fire,”a Sun story on the night said.

“I was a victim of circumstance,” Rev. Ray said. “I didn’t loot anything, but the police needed to grab somebody and they grabbed me.”

He served 13 months in jail for burglary. He said the experience provided time to chart a spiritual course.

“To me, it was God getting my attention, telling me to set an example for younger people in the inner city,” he said in 1997.

When Rev. Ray was released, he took courses at Antioch University, the Young Life Institute Seminary in New York, and later at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts. He was also mentored by prominent Black clergy — the Rev. Vernon Dobson, Harold Carter Sr. and Winfield Showell.

While he never had a church of his own, he secured a $250,000 grant to convert an old police station, the former women’s criminal unit at Pine and West Lexington streets. He called it Redeemer’s Palace and described it as a spot where “a man can visualize his future” — and where a drug addict could get help. The center operated for several years.

He held his first vigil in 1985 when Calvert Hall College High School basketball player Craig Cromwell was murdered on West Franklin Street while walking home from his girlfriend’s home.

He also staged a Love Hands Across Baltimore, an assembly of people along North Avenue, to unify the city.

He found that preaching with politics did not mix. When he ran for a City Council seat in 1987, he received two percent of the vote.

“I learned much from Willie about street ministry and addressing the needs of youth. He gave back so much for so many years. It is as if he took a vow of poverty,” said the Rev. Alvin Hathaway Sr., former Union Baptist Church pastor.

Most recently he worked at Harlem Ave. and Franklintown Road in what he called a “safe house’ for neighborhood children.

Rev. Howard, of Enon Baptist Church, said, “Willie was intense, singular-minded and very focused. He was not about having a personal life for himself. He was not about personal gain. He did not pursue material things.”

Services will be held at 11 a.m. May 9 at New Shiloh Baptist Church, 2100 N. Monroe St.

Survivors include a niece, Sherrie Neverdon-Christmas of Baltimore, and other nieces and nephews.

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