William H. Gray III

William Herbert Gray III was born on the twentieth of August 1941 at Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the son of the Reverend William H. Gray Jr. — president of Florida Normal and Industrial College and subsequently of Florida A&M University — and Hazel Yates Gray, a public-school principal. The family moved to Philadelphia in 1949 when his father took the pastorate of Bright Hope Baptist Church. He was educated at the Simon Gratz High School and at Franklin & Marshall College, where he took the bachelor's in 1963.

He completed the Master of Divinity at Drew Theological Seminary in 1966 and the Master of Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1970. He was ordained at Bright Hope Baptist Church in 1964 and succeeded his father as senior pastor of Bright Hope in 1972 — the position he would hold simultaneously with his subsequent congressional career.

He stood for the United States House of Representatives in 1976 against the incumbent Robert N. C. Nix Sr. — the senior African American congressman from Pennsylvania — and lost in the Democratic primary. He stood again in 1978 and defeated Nix in the primary by under five hundred votes. He took office on the third of January 1979.

He served six consecutive terms across twelve years from 1979 to 1991. He chaired the House Budget Committee from 1985 to 1989 — the first African American to chair the principal fiscal-policy committee of the United States Congress. He chaired the House Democratic Caucus from 1989 to 1991. He was elected House Majority Whip in June 1989 — the third-highest leadership office in the United States House of Representatives and the highest leadership office ever held by an African American in either chamber of Congress to that date.

He was the principal House sponsor of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 in collaboration with Ron Dellums (placed in this archive) and was a senior author of the federal student-loan reforms of the 1980s.

He resigned from the House in September 1991 to become president of the United Negro College Fund. He directed the UNCF for thirteen years to 2004 — across which period the Fund raised an estimated 2.3 billion dollars for the historically Black colleges.

He died of complications of cardiac issues at White Marsh, Maryland, on the first of July 2013, at seventy-one.

He is honored here as the highest-ranking African American congressional leader of his generation.