The Rev. Manney Murphy, has been many things in his life.

A star athlete at Vicksburg High School, executive with General Motors, business owner and for 3 1/2 years the pastor of St. Mark Baptist Church, the church in which he grew up, and chaplain  for the Alcorn State University Braves football team during Jay Hopson’s tenure as head coach. But his biggest role has been working with Central Mississippi Prevention Services helping young people

make it to a better life through the program’s summer camps and tutoring programs.

And at the center of it all has been football, which he said has been his platform to serve the community.

“I often in my talks refer to myself being the original Gator, because as it applies to sports, I put the first athletic points on the scoreboard for the Vicksburg Gators,” he said. “I have the one record in Gator football that can never be broken. I scored the first touchdown in the history of Gator football, and it happened on the night we were playing defending state champ South Natchez and we only beat them 7-0.”

His community service, he said, began while he was in high school.

“A local storeowner brought it to my attention. He told me that because I played football, smaller kids looked up to me because I was being written up in the paper and it was important in terms of how I understood that role.

“It goes back-to-back, and being a Sunday school teacher in the youth ministry in high school. I started there, having grown up in church.”

One mentor he credited with having a big impact on his life at St. Mark Baptist Church was Pat Williams, a mother of the church who was also his summer vacation Bible school teacher.

“Mother Pat touched my life in a special way, and even as I run camps now, one of the things I honor from that experience, is you can always find red Kool-Aid and cookies in the camp somewhere,” he said. “For whatever reason, what I remember most is that was the best red Kool-Aid and cookies, they just tasted so good, and that just stuck with me.”

When he was a student at Ole Miss, he said, he was asked to go to high schools and other programs to speak to students. When he attended United Theological Seminary, he wrote two covenants: one for youth ministry and another for jail and prison ministry.

“So I have a spiritual commitment to serve young folks and individuals who unfortunately find themselves incarcerated,” he said.

After being away from home for several years, Murphy returned to Vicksburg in 2001 and began working with Central Mississippi Prevention director Joe Johnson.

“We did a summer camp at Warner-Tully together, and we have been involved in summer camps and after school tutorial programs together in one way or another in programs since,” he said.

During this time, Murphy has also served as director of the Vicksburg Housing Authority’s community center, helping develop a jobs program, a GED program partnered with Hinds Community College and the Vicksburg Warren School District, and an after school tutorial program.

“One of the things we’ve done over the years on and off was our Saturday Kids Program and our Sunday Leadership Program, because we looked at it from a seven-day week kind of situation to involve youth in our community.

The Saturday program, he said, created one of his more memorable moments.

“Those kids would show up Saturday morning and I’d be running late because I had a couple of support sponsors, Burger King, and Shipley’s Donuts,” he said. “Burger King would give me breakfast sandwiches and Shipley’s would give me donuts and I would have to pickup those things.

“The kids would be lined up in an orderly fashion, and inevitably one of them would say ‘Rev. Murphy, you’re late.’ It was my testimony to ‘if you build it, they will come.’ If we continue to structure the organized programs and processes for our kids, they will show up.”

Another memory came from a young man’s response to a Facebook post made by his daughter, “that really kind of motivated me at that time.”

His daughter’s post involved Rev. Murphy preaching for the first time in several months.

“The young man responded that he did not know I was her father and that he attributed the man he had become in life to involvement in summer camp programs and me.

“That’s Biblical in a sense. That it is our role to plant or scatter the seeds and his role (God) as the higher power to give the increase. Whatever seed was planted in that young man’s life, it germinated and took hold that he remembered some moment, some act of kindness that occurred during our summer programs. And I believe that’s what it’s all about.”

He became the Alcorn State football team’s chaplain after meeting Hopson, the first white coach in the Southwestern Athletic Conference and the first white coach at any Historic Black College or University, who asked him to fill the position as chaplain and spiritual coach.

“I went on what I have written about as the four-year Moses journey. He was the Moses coach; he was to lead that program to another level,” Murphy said. “That first year was very trying times for the program. One I remember most is the 18-hour bus ride to James Madison that was very challenging, but we were able to be part of that experience for the last four years and watch those kids grow.

“We got our teeth kicked in by a better program; James Madison was at a different level that we were,” he said. “We left the locker room after showering, we were handed a pizza box and a Powerade, and we headed back to Alcorn. I remember hearing the boys cry in pain from cramping.

“We saw coach Hopson take that program and transform it to a point that in 2014, when we played Grambling in Indianapolis in the Circle City Classic, we took the bus from Alcorn to Jackson, got on the tarmac and into a chartered flight and flew to Indianapolis. The buses were waiting for us there, we got on the buses, and they wisked us across town to the hotel at the Hilton.

“We saw the whole improvement and growth of that program over those four years. We saw the highs and lows, we worked with those athletes in counseling through the loss of loved ones and parents, and counseling them through breakups in relationships involving girlfriends. We got close to them over the course of those four years — coaches and players.”

Murphy said at this point in his life he would like to return to the classroom to teach and work on a summer camp program called “Camp Wow,” and find other ways to serve Vicksburg.

“We’re home for good, and I’m going to continue to serve as long my mind and body will let me.”