Black Lawyer Calls Gift to College a Partial Pay-Back

It was a scene as unlikely as Willie Gary’s own rags-to-riches, laborer-turned-philanthropist story.

There he was in his law office, as opulent as a Cabinet member’s, with a desk the size of a helicopter pad and tall windows overlooking a yacht basin on the sparkling St. Lucie River.

The 44-year-old trial lawyer was crouching on the plush carpeting, straining the seams of his expensive suit and working up a sweat. He was plucking imaginary beans under an imaginary Everglades sun. He was a migrant family’s child again.

“A 110-degree heat, no breeze, and you’ve got two rows of beans just high enough to almost cover you. And you’ve got insects biting you,” Gary huffed as he conjured up a past that his climate-controlled present won’t let him forget.

These days, he is remembering in another way too.

As a pay-back for giving him a chance to escape the dead-end poverty of his youth, Gary recently made a remarkable pledge to his alma mater, the small, historically black Shaw University in Raleigh, N.C.:

He promised $10 million.

“But for Shaw,” he explained a day after returning from a dinner at the White House, “I’d never have gotten the chance to do what I’m doing now.”

Gary’s gift is one of the largest pledges ever made by a black alumnus, and, according to William Gray III, president of the United Negro College Fund, it signals a new era of college giving from graduates who are finally overcoming racial barriers to becoming wealthy.

“It’s a statement not only about his life and values, but it’s an extraordinary historical statement about the progress of African-American alumni,” Gray said. “Willie Gary is a breakthrough.”

Only one other individual gift to the college fund’s current campaign exceed Gary’s: Billionaire Walter H. Annenberg pledged $50 million. General Motors and IBM Corp. promised $10 million each.

“Super donors” among black alumni in the past tended to come from two groups, Gray said. They were entertainers or professional athletes. They were the Oprah Winfreys and Bill Cosbys, the Michael Jordans and Magic Johnsons.

“Now, what we have in Willie Gary is a donor who comes from the economic mainstream, the traditional areas of creating wealth,” Gray said. He noted that other black philanthropists are emerging from industry, medicine and other fields.

“Willie Gary’s gift is really an invitation to all those who are interested in black education . . . to give these people who have been consistently shut out of the mainstream in America an opportunity,” said Talbert Shaw, president of Gary’s alma mater. The money will help support scholarships, building projects and other improvements at the 127-year-old school, which narrowly avoided bankruptcy just five years ago.

Gary made his money practicing law, often by handling medical malpractice cases. He and his wife, Gloria, also have invested in real estate. They have endowed a minority scholarship program and a rural clinic near the fields where they grew up.

Gary’s earliest memories are of the fields, of moving with his mother, father and 10 siblings as they followed the crops as migrant workers, sometimes sleeping in tents. In those days, migrants’ children were pulled from school at lunchtime to go to work.

“You didn’t think about things like graduating from high school,” he said. “I used to question it to my dad. . . . I used to question the odds, and he’d say: ‘Beat the odds.’ ”

Having done so with a vengeance, Gary’s not shy about crediting his own wits, hard work and personality with making him a millionaire.

He always had “a burning desire” to learn, he said. In the truck on the way to the fields he would read billboards, and when he didn’t know a word, he said, “I’d ask the white field boss what the word was, what it meant.” As a child, he made change when his father sold sandwiches and drinks to workers from the field-to-field “rolling store.”

Eventually, Gary said, he persuaded his father to give up the migrant life and put down roots in Indiantown, in the farming country half an hour inland from this coastal town.

Young Willie had dropped out of school once as the family moved, but now, as a high school freshman playing football, he said, “It dawned on me: ‘I’m going to finish high school.’ ” His mother had finished eighth grade; his father second grade.

He did graduate, of course, and a small Florida college announced it was offering him a football scholarship. “Indiantown Boy Receives $6400 Scholarship,” was the local newspaper headline.

“I’d become sort of a town hero,” Gary recalled. “First black male child to go off to college from the whole town, in the history of the town. Can you imagine how proud my parents were, my sisters and brothers . . . the local people?”

When he arrived at the school in August, 1967, the scholarship turned out to be conditioned upon his making the football team--and 125 others had received the same offer, to fill 40 team positions. He survived many cuts in the following weeks of practice, and he cried when the coach said he hadn’t made it.

“I said what am I going to do? I let ‘em down. My sisters and brothers bragged on me. Even the winos on the streets. They said, ‘This is little Gary. He’s going off to college.’ ”

In that lowest moment, Gary said, he vowed not to quit. “I wiped those tears away and I said to myself, ‘I’m going to college; I’m going somewhere.’ ”

In desperation, he called his high school coach for advice. The coach mentioned that an acquaintance had just taken the coaching job at a place called Shaw University in North Carolina.

“I’ll take a chance,” Gary said. He caught a bus to Raleigh. He arrived with $7.50 in his pocket and, as the university president said later, “a vision in his eyes.”

What followed Gary has retold many times to student groups:

How he learned that Shaw’s football roster was full and the coach advised him to go home; how he pestered admissions director John Fleming every day (“He was determined to get in school,” Fleming recalled); how he cleaned up the locker room without being asked to and slept on a sofa in the athletes’ dorm--until an injury caused an opening on the team.

Gary became a Shaw linebacker and a business major. “It was that day I won a spot on the team, but I also won in life,” Gary said.

His $10-million donation, he said, will only partially repay the school. He speaks emotionally of the coach who gave him a free meal ticket before he made the team, and about Fleming, the admissions officer who waived a $10 application fee that Gary couldn’t pay. “I’ll never forget it,” he said in a whisper.

Then, his courtroom voice back, he returned to his main theme.

“I keep telling kids: Don’t tell me you can’t make it,” Gary said. “But you’ve got to want it. If we can instill in the kids to really want it bad enough, then the rest of it’ll take care of itself. Color of your skin won’t matter; nothing will matter. No obstacles.”