When Gregory Williams was 10 years old, his life changed forever. This was not just because his father’s tavern, which had supported the family, had failed. Or because her mother moved in with her two younger siblings, Rita and Anthony, when she could no longer tolerate the beatings of her alcoholic husband.
The greatest change in his course was sparked by the revelation his father James gave him in 1954 on a bus trip from their home near Alexandria, Washington, to Muncie, India. James Williams confessed to Gregory and his younger brother Lehman, known as Mike, that he was “colored” and was able to pass as white because of his olive skin, leading others to believe he was Italian American. And that’s not all: The black woman named Sally, whom his sons knew as their maid and cook, was, in fact, their grandmother.
At first, Gregory refused to believe that he and his brother, who had pale skin and straight hair, could be black.
“From now on, life is going to be different,” his father told him, as Gregory Williams later recounted in his memoir, “Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black” (1995). “In Virginia, you were the white boy. In Indiana, you’re going to be the colored boy. I want you to remember that you are the same today as you were yesterday. But in Indiana people will treat you differently.”
His father was right. Unlike in Muncie, the family was poor. Gregory and Mike were shunned by their white classmates and lived in a cottage with their Aunt Bess and then their grandmother. Eventually they found a home with a widowed family friend, Dora Terry, who had seen Mr. Williams, known as Buster, and Sally getting drunk in an alley, after which she offered them a place in a modest house, which she could afford on a household salary.
“He saved our lives,” Dr. Williams told Terry Gross on NPR’s “Fresh Air” in 1995. “I wouldn’t have survived without Muncy.”
Despite the challenges of racism, he identified as Black for the rest of his life, eventually becoming dean of the law school at The Ohio State University and president of the City College of New York and the University of Cincinnati.
Dr. Williams died of a cerebral hemorrhage on August 12, 2025, at a hospital in Valhalla, New York, near his home in Hastings-on-Hudson in Westchester County, his daughter Natalia Williams said. He was 81 years old. News of his death was not widely known at the time.
Being a person who identified as black but was white in appearance gave him an unusual perspective on racial prejudice. And as someone who grew up in the South and Midwest during the Civil Rights Movement, he was well positioned to observe the racial divide in the United States.
“When I became dean,” he told The Miami Herald in 1995, referring to his job at Ohio State, “there was a white woman who met me and said, ‘Oh, you’re dean. It’s fantastic. You’ve reached the top of your career.’ Then he found out I was black and his first reaction – not to me, but to someone else – was ‘Did he get the job because he was black?'”
Mr Williams said: “When he saw me and assumed I was white, he assumed I was qualified for the job. When he saw I was black, he assumed I was black ineligible For work.”
Gregory Howard Williams was born on November 12, 1943 in Muncie. When he was a young child, his parents, James Anthony and Mary Emma (Johnson) Williams, moved the family to Virginia, near Alexandria – where he attended an all-white school, but had both black and white friends.
His father was also friendly with people of both races, but many of his customers at the tavern served in the army at nearby Fort Belvoir, and segregation dictated that he serve white customers in one area (at the front end of the bar) and black patrons in another (the back).
Gregory earned a bachelor’s degree in social sciences and education from Ball State University in Muncie in 1966 and a master’s degree in government and politics from the University of Maryland in 1969.
That same year, he married Sarah Whitney, who was disapproved of by her parents and ostracized by her friends because of his relationship with her. “Sometimes she would cry and tell me of her taunts and insults,” he wrote in his memoir. “I knew very well how painful it was, but I was unable to protect her.” (He later reconciled with his family.)
From George Washington University, he received a law degree in 1971, and then a master’s degree in 1977 and a Ph.D. Received. in 1982, both in political science. He taught law there before moving to the University of Iowa, where he was professor of law and eventually became associate vice president for Academic Affairs. His legal scholarship focused on criminal procedure, including police discretion and brutality.
In Iowa, he completed “Life on the Color Line”, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Current Interest in 1995. In newspaper review, Erica Taylor It has been told The book “painfully portrays what it feels like when everything, even your race, is taken away at a moment’s notice.”
As a college official, Dr. Williams was known as a strong fund-raiser. At City College, where he served as president from 2001 to 2009, he led a capital campaign that resulted in a $25 million donation from the Bernard and Anne Spitzer Charitable Trust for the architecture school and a $26 million donation from Intel founder and chairman Andrew S. Grove for the engineering school.
Matthew Goldstein, former Chancellor of the City University of New York, said that Dr. Williams enthusiastically supported his pursuit of high academic standards.
“I didn’t have to bother him—whereas other presidents didn’t—and he found a way to raise the standards at City College,” Dr. Goldstein said in an interview. “He was charming without any pretense. He cast aside the demons in his life and walked toward the light.”
Dr. Williams left City College for the University of Cincinnati in 2009. After three years he resigned, citing personal reasons, which his daughter said included caring for his wife, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease.
In addition to his wife and daughter, Dr. Williams is survived by three sons, Zachary, Carlos, and Anthony; three grandchildren; his brother Mike; his sister, Rita Chiles; and his half-brother, Ken Creasy.
Dr. Williams’ mother reappears in his life 10 years after abandoning him and his brother. By then, he was in college and working as a deputy sheriff in Muncie. Her new husband, who was white, offered to adopt the brothers. There was no apology for his disappearance, and no gratitude to Ms. Terry for taking care of her sons.
“The conditions for being a part of her life became very clear to me,” he wrote. “We would enter her world if we rejected the one in which we had been living for the past 10 years. She knew very little about our lives in Muncie, nor did she want to know. Gaining acceptance into her world required that we deny our black heritage and pretend that the people and circumstances of our lives in Muncie did not exist.”
He added: “We were supposed to forget that we were ‘coloured’ boys. She expected us to come back into her life with no past, without roots, without any feelings for the people who had sheltered and cared for us when we were in greatest need. I knew that was something we could never do.”
