I asked because I knew the answer mattered to me personally.
William H. Gray III had been my congressman growing up in Philadelphia, a preacher who never gave up his pulpit at Bright Hope Baptist Church even as he rose through the halls of Congress to become the first African American to serve as House Majority Whip — only to walk away from that seat of power to lead the United Negro College Fund. In the world I came up in, Gray’s name was spoken with the same reverence reserved for the ministers and civil rights elders who shaped Philadelphia’s Black church tradition. So, when UNCF's board announced a few weeks ago that Lomax, too, will step down, in June 2027, after twenty-two years at the helm, my mind went immediately back to that conference room and to the shoes Lomax had to fill when he first sat in that chair in 2004.
Gray used his pulpit skills and his political capital to turn UNCF into a fundraising juggernaut, pulling in a $42 million grant from the Lilly Endowment and, in one of the great philanthropic coups in HBCU history, a billion-dollar gift from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
When Lomax took over in 2004, he wasn't just inheriting an organization. He was inheriting a legend. As he told me in that 2015 interview, “Bill was Mr. UNCF and he really drove this organization.” Those were not the words of false modesty. Anyone who has spent time around UNCF’s headquarters knows that Gray’s shadow loomed large over the operation for years after his departure, and that Lomax spent his early seasons in the job navigating a philanthropic landscape that was rapidly shifting its attention—and its dollars—toward K-12 reform and charter schools, sometimes at the expense of Black colleges.
What strikes me now, reading UNCF’s announcement of Lomax’s coming departure, is how completely he made those shoes his own. The numbers tell part of the story: more than $4 billion raised from private and philanthropic sources; more than 300,000 students helped into and through college; an endowment that grew nearly tenfold, from $60 million to roughly $500 million, with UNCF’s leadership projecting it will approach $600 million by the time he departs. But numbers alone don’t fully capture what Lomax did for the standing of HBCUs in the national conversation. He took an organization built on Gray’s charisma and political relationships and turned it into an institution with its own durable infrastructure—one built to outlast any single leader, including himself.
That, I think, is the real marker of Lomax’s tenure. Bill Gray was, by every account including Lomax’s own, a singular personality—a man who “only hit home runs,” as Lomax put it to me back in 2015. Institutions built entirely around singular personalities are fragile things; they tend to falter when that personality exits the stage. Lomax’s task, whether he framed it this way to himself or not, was to build something sturdier. Judging by the succession plan UNCF’s board recently unveiled—a national search already underway; Lomax staying on through 2027 to shepherd the launch of UNCF's 2030 Strategic Plan and a billion-dollar capital campaign; and a full year afterward in a consultative role—it appears he has done exactly that.
There is a particular kind of grace in a leader who spends his final years in office not clinging to the chair but building the runway for whoever comes next. Gray gave Lomax an organization with a legendary name and a fundraising machine. Lomax is preparing to hand off an organization with a $1 billion campaign in motion, a strategic plan already drafted, and a governance culture built for continuity.
I think back on that afternoon in the conference room, and on how carefully Lomax chose his words when he talked about Gray—respectful, unhurried, never once trying to make himself the bigger man in the story. I understand that instinct better now than I did at the time. Gray died suddenly in 2013, before he ever got the chance to watch Lomax finish the job. Somewhere in that fact is a lesson about legacy that UNCF’s next president would do well to learn early: the shoes you’re asked to fill are never really about the shoes. They’re about whether you leave a stronger pair behind for the next person who has to wear them. Twenty-two years later, that is the standard Lomax will be measured against, and by every account, including his own hard-earned humility, it is the standard he has met.
Dr. Jamal Watson is a higher education consultant, professor and associate dean of Graduate Studies at Trinity Washington University and the author of this bi-weekly column. Watson is the former executive editor of Diverse: Issues In Higher Education (now The EDU Ledger) and is the author of The Student Debt Crisis: America’s Moral Urgency (Broadleaf Books, 2025).
