PHILADELPHIA — Many knew him as a powerful Black legislator who roamed the halls of Capitol Hill, but for thousands of Black students, he was their saving grace, barnstorming the country raising money to provide needed scholarships for students to attend college during his reign as president of the United Negro College Fund.
Reverend William “Bill” Herbert Gray III — the son of a prominent preacher and college president — died on Monday while in London with one of his sons attending the Wimbledon tennis championships. He was 71.
“This was a gifted man who used his gift to help a lot of other people, and he will be missed,” says Dr. W. Wilson Goode, who was elected Philadelphia’s first Black mayor in 1984. “He was a big man doing a big job, but he knew how to get stuff done.”
A native of Baton Rouge, La., Gray’s father was president of the school that would become Florida A&M University (1944-’49). The family later relocated to Philadelphia, where the younger Gray attended Simon Gratz High School.
In 1963, Gray received a bachelor’s degree from Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., where a merit-based scholarship for minority students currently bears his name.
He later attended Drew Theological Seminary in Madison, N.J., and succeeded his father as pastor of Philadelphia’s influential Bright Hope Baptist Church. In 1978, he was elected to Congress, but continued as senior pastor of Bright Hope, commuting between Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., on the weekends to deliver his weekly sermons.
“So many, many others — Black, White, Latino — across Philadelphia owe their political start, their communities’ start, to Bill Gray,” says Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter. “He created a political organization that, for decades, has continued to be one of the most powerful, productive and progressive forces in the social and political life of our city’s history.”
