LOS ANGELES TIMES INTERVIEW : William Gray : Making Sure Black Minds Are Never Wasted

WASHINGTON — Higher education and the ministry were twin traditions in William H. Gray III’s family. His grandfather taught at a black college, as his sister does today. His mother was the dean of another, and his father the president of two. His father and grandfather were also both pastors at Bright Hope Baptist Church in Philadelphia, a post Bill Gray, now 50, has held for more than 20 years--including 12 he spent in Congress, from 1979 to 1991.

During his time in politics, Gray stood as something of an antithetical figure to Jesse Jackson. Where Jackson was a bomb thrower and an attention getter, Gray was a bespectacled number cruncher who developed a reputation for quiet consensus building and sober diligence. While Jackson refused to run for anything other than President, Gray worked his way up through the Democratic ranks, becoming chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, chairman of the Budget Committee and Majority Whip. He was the first African-American to hold a leadership position in the House.

Gray surprised a lot of people who thought he would one day be the first black Speaker of the House when he announced he would not seek reelection in 1990. Instead, he assumed the presidency of the United Negro College Fund, a consortium of 41 private, historically black colleges and universities, including Tuskegee and Morehouse. The UNCF is best known by its motto, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste,” or as Dan Quayle once put it, “What a waste it is to lose one’s mind or not to have a mind is very wasteful.” The vice president, Gray says, “will always have a special place in our minds.”

Since assuming the presidency, Gray has made strides toward meeting the ambitious goal of raising $250 million. In response to the Los Angeles riots, he is also working to establish a $5-million initiative called “Ladders of Hope,” to send black and other minority youth from the area to historically black colleges.

A talented orator, Gray has a tendency to speechify without ever getting quite to the point. But when interrupted, he yields the floor graciously. I met him in the building UNCF shares with the National Urban League, near the East River in New York. His office is comfortable but anonymous; since he commutes from Washington, where his wife and three sons live, he hasn’t had time to put anything on the walls yet.

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Question: Do you feel you can have a greater e ffect on the issues you care about here than in Congress?

Answer: I will have a greater impact on the issue of helping an entirely new generation of African-American kids to lead confident, productive lives. I can make a more pointed contribution as head of UNCF than in Congress, yes. Members of Congress look at broad, policy-making issues. Congress, when I came to it in 1978, was a place of change. Congress is no longer that. In fact, the federal government is no longer that. The policies of the 1980s have essentially taken away the option for a federal government playing an active, catalytic role in solving problems. We’ve got a deficit exceeding $300 billion. You have no consensus with regard to revenues or cuts in spending. So essentially, you’ve got a good case of gridlock.

Q: Tell me a little bit about what your frustrations were in Congress, and why you left. I know it’s a big subject.

A: People always feel that you’ve got to have a negative reason for doing something, especially when it’s leaving public life. I guess that’s because so many people have left, especially in the last year, and have gotten up and given negative reasons. I was offered an opportunity to offer myself in a role of significant leadership on an issue that I care deeply about--which is education, and education particularly of young men and women from my Jacob Weisberg is deputy editor of the New Republic.

community. Now were there some negative things that helped make this attractive? Sure. Not seeing my family, having kids that I hardly knew because I was gone seven days a week most of the time.

Q: Are black colleges in America in good shape?

A: Black colleges in America, on the one hand, are in good shape because of the increased demand of students who want a high-quality education at a low cost. Our 41 have had a 20% increase (in enrollment) in the last five years--twice the national average. So in that sense, they’re doing well. There’s great demand.

However, because of the deprivation that has been imposed by the economic and political system in America for over 100 years on these institutions--meaning alumni who never had a chance to participate fully in the economic mainstream--we haven’t produced the Rockefellers, Carnegies, the Mellons who are able to give huge grants back. We are just beginning to make those breakthroughs. . . . So these schools are in desperate need of financial support for endowments, for scholarships, for new classrooms, new buildings.

Q: How do you explain the continued need for predominantly black colleges and universities to people whose first reaction is that it’s a throwback to segregation?

A: The same way I explain the need for Loyola Marymount, for Brigham Young, for Southern Methodist University, for Brandeis and Yeshiva. Most of America’s higher educational institutions were born out of discrimination. . . . We accept those as national assets. They’re not just parochial institutions of an ethnicity, of a racial group or a credo group.

Our schools are American assets because what they are doing is equipping Americans for the task of responsible citizenship and prosperous, productive lives. They’re going through some of the same things that these other institutions went through 40 years ago. There used to be a day when Notre Dame was 99% Catholic. The sisters walked around in habits, the priests in robes. Today, you go to Notre Dame, you don’t see much of that. You see many non-Catholics going to Notre Dame, because they’ve recognized the quality of the education there.

We’re having the same thing happen at some of our black colleges. Out of 107 black colleges, four of them are predominantly white. My father went to Bluefield State University. It’s now predominantly white. Thirty-nine percent of our faculties are non-black; only 4.5% of white-college faculties are black. And 11% of our school bodies are white, compared with about 6% average black enrollment at white colleges. So we are more integrated, more pluralistic, more diverse than America’s major colleges.

Q: A lot of black high-school kids must look to you for advice about where to go to college. Who do you advise to go to a black college as opposed to a conventional one?

A: I say to them, “Choose the college that best fits your goals, your aspirations, and your needs.” There are some African-American young people who can go to a 30,000-plus university, sit in a lecture hall with 300 other kids, and it doesn’t matter that they never see a professor who looks like them or know the professor’s name. On the other hand, there are other students who need a small academic environment--1,000, 2,000 students. They need that hands-on education. They need for people to know their name and to be reinforced, because they’re the first in their family to go to college.

But there are some who say, “Look, I grew up in an integrated situation all my life, kindergarten through high school, I’d like a cultural experience. So I’m going to go to a historically black college.” . . . So our schools have the diamonds who want to touch base with their heritage and roots and have been accepted at some of the best schools. We also have something that nobody else has, and that is the lumps of coal that we can take and turn to diamonds, which other schools can’t do and won’t do because they’re not geared to do it.

Q: Has affirmative action hurt black colleges by siphoning off many of those who would be their best students?

A: Let’s face it. Up until the early 1960s, blacks, by law, could not go to probably half the colleges in America. The other half weren’t too interested, because they were predominantly white. In those days, our black colleges were the repository of diamonds as well as lumps of coal. With choice, all that happened is the major institutions and colleges are now competing for our diamonds. . . .

Q: Has there been an increase in intolerance and racism on college campuses in America in the last five years?

A: I think so, yeah.

Q: What forms does it take?

A: You talk to the students. It takes the form of open hostility toward minority students, all kinds of forms--kids dressing in white sheets attacking a black student, name calling, scrawling the word “nigger” in lavatories. Do I see evidence of it? Yes. But not just toward black kids. I think it’s increasingly common, period, toward people who are different. I see increased anti-Semitism, I see increased sexism. Ugly stuff.

Q: How do you explain it?

A: A victim of the 1980s--a variety of signals that it was all right to have “us” against “them.” You start saying certain people are lazy, certain people are shiftless, certain people are criminals, they’re a drain on society . . . A program is shown about welfare. Who’s shown in it? Blacks. Even though the majority of the people on welfare, both in real and percentage terms, are white. You talk about teen-age pregnancy, it’s always shown as a black kid; where the high incidence of teen-age pregnancy is with white teen-age girls, not black. When you show drug problems on television, it’s always at a minority high school, blacks or Hispanics, when, in fact, the nationwide statistics show that blacks are less likely as teen-agers to use drugs, alcohol and tobacco than their white counterparts. We create those images. It becomes a way for scapegoating.

Q: A lot of colleges and universities try to deal with intolerance by passing speech codes. Do you think that’s a good way to deal with it?

A: I don’t know. Limiting freedom of speech has its downside. One, who’s the judge of what’s intolerant speech? Some schools are now finding out: I just read of a university in Michigan that had passed a speech code and is now revoking it because what they’re beginning to understand that.

You’ve got to have a level of decency that’s set in society, that everybody accepts. Or else in a pluralistic society you’re going to pull apart. That’s why we’ve seen an increase of racism, sexism, anti-Semitism and intolerant behavior on America’s college campuses. It’s no different from what’s happening in society.

Q: Tell me about your Ladders of Hope program in L.A.

A: We’re looking for the marginal kids. We want to find some kids whose brains are not good enough to go out there and take the SATs, but whose principals, ministers, community leaders think: “That kid’s got something. If you just got him out of this environment, or got her out of this environment, put her on the campus of Spellman, put him on the campus of Wilberforce, they’ll blossom.”

When we launched this program out of L.A., we had one principal who told an amazing story of how one day he walked out of his office, and sitting on the grassy area of a high school, there was a kid reading Camus. He knew this kid had flunked five of six subjects last marking period. He walked over and said, “Why do you flunk all your classes?” He said, “I find them boring.” So this principal took that kid, who was in 11th grade, put some personal time in, got him tested, and found out he tested in the 170’s IQ.

We believe there are a lot of kids out there in our inner-city areas and in our communities who need help to empower themselves. They don’t fit the normal criteria and traditions. If we’re going to build our cities and make them prosperous, we’ve got to start looking for them.

Q: What do you think of Malcolm X as a role model?

A: . . . Malcolm’s message was a distinctly different message from Martin Luther King’s, but it was not a message that was as radical as people said it was then. Even today, if you listen to his statements, they become increasingly more moderate looking compared with the spectrum of today. I do find it interesting to see the rebirth of Malcolm and his philosophy, and everybody walking around with X caps. . . . I see more whites with X on caps, X on shirts, X on pants. I was in L.A., and I was amazed at the number of whites walking around with X. There were more X’s on them than the black folk. So what does X mean to them?

Q: Do you see the Malcolm craze relating to a rise of separatist sentiment on campus?

A: Malcolm is viewed as a separatist. He talked about blacks caring about blacks, about blacks taking care of each other, being strong, and he felt whites never would and never could accept blacks at all levels as equal human beings. That was what Malcolm came from.

With the growing intolerance that we have seen in our society, there are a significant number of black youngsters who are feeling that way. Where are they from? From white colleges and universities, not ours. I mean, you won’t find that when you walk around our campuses.