Former Congressman William H. Gray III has to look no further than his battles on the floor of the U.S., House of Representatives over race-specific scholarships in justifying how key the College Fund/United Negro College Fund’s newly created Frederick D. Patterson Research Institute can be to Black America.
In 1990, when then Assistant Education Secretary Michael Williams created a stir by trying to eliminate the scholarships, Gray and other Black legislators convinced the George Bush administration that the furor Williams created was groundless by showing, statistically, how few race-based scholarships existed compared to those given based on sex, religion, geography and other factors.
“Here I was as majority whip, with the White House and Justice Department making major policy — and we didn’t have the facts. it became clear to me that there was no place in the United States where you could pick up a phone and quickly get data,” explains the UNCF president and CEO, who touts his brainchild as “the first research institute of its kind” controlled by the Black community. “The real point here is that people were making policy based on perception, not reality,” says Gray, who recently unveiled the new institute, which will focus research exclusively on the status of Black students, preschool to postgraduate.
“We are real excited about this,” he says. “You know, we spend billions of dollars on education in this country, billions trying to deal with the problems of minorities — particularly African Americans. But what do we base that expenditure on? Often it’s a partial study, an isolated study. It is not based on fact.” Gray says he expects his data to be “very much up to date, within a year to two years.” He adds, “There will be a broad range of original research going on, as well as data collection. We will use the best scientific methodologies.”
