When Gregory Williams was 10, the life he had known changed forever. It was not just because his father’s tavern, which had supported the family, had failed. Or because his mother had left with two of his younger siblings, Rita and Anthony, when she could no longer take the beatings from her alcoholic husband.
What most shifted his course was the thunderclap of a revelation that his father, James, delivered on a bus trip to Muncie, Ind., from their home near Alexandria, Va., in 1954. James Williams confessed to Gregory and his younger brother Lehman, known as Mike, that he was “colored” and had been able to pass for white because of his olive skin, letting others believe he was Italian American. And not only that: The Black woman named Sallie, whom his sons had known as a 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.
“Life is going to be different from now on,” his father told them, 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 white boys. In Indiana, you’re going to be colored boys. I want you to remember that you’re the same today that you were yesterday. But people in Indiana will treat you differently.”
His father was right. In segregated Muncie, the family was poor. Gregory and Mike were shunned by their white schoolmates and lived in a shack with their Aunt Bess and then their grandmother. They eventually found a home with a widowed family friend, Dora Terry, who offered them a place in the modest house she could afford on a domestic’s pay after she saw Mr. Williams, known as Buster, and Sallie passed out drunk in an alley.
“She saved our lives,” Dr. Williams told Terry Gross on NPR’s “Fresh Air” in 1995. “I would not have survived Muncie without her.”
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 from a cerebral hemorrhage on Aug. 12, 2025, in Valhalla, N.Y., at a hospital near his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, in Westchester County, his daughter, Natalia Williams, said. He was 82. News of his death was not widely reported at the time.
Being a man who identified as Black but looked white gave him an uncommon 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 the dean. This is fantastic. You’ve reached the apex of your career.’ Then she found out I was Black and her first response — not to me, but to someone else — was ‘Did he get the job because he was Black?’”
Mr. Williams added: “When she looked at me and assumed I was white, she assumed I was qualified for the job. When she discovered I was Black, she assumed that I was unqualified for the job.”
Gregory Howard Williams was born on Nov. 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 a whites-only 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 (at the back).
Gregory earned a bachelor’s degree in social science 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.
The same year, he married Sara Whitney, who was disowned by her parents and ostracized by her friends because of her relationship with him. “Sometimes she confided their taunts and insults to me in tears,” he wrote in his memoir. “I knew only too well how painful it was, but I was powerless to protect her.” (She later reconciled with her family.)
At the George Washington University, he received a law degree in 1971, and then a master’s degree in 1977 and a Ph.D. in 1982, both in political science. He taught law there before moving to the University of Iowa, where he was a law professor and eventually rose to become associate vice president of 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 Prize for current interest in 1995. In the newspaper’s review, Erika Taylor described the book as a “painful depiction of how it feels to have everything, even your race, 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 donations of $25 million from the Bernard and Anne Spitzer Charitable Trust for the school of architecture and $26 million from Andrew S. Grove, a founder and chairman of Intel, for the engineering school.
Matthew Goldstein, a former chancellor of the City University of New York, said Dr. Williams enthusiastically supported his push for higher academic standards.
“I didn’t have to nudge him — while other presidents didn’t buy into it — and he found a way to increase standards at City College,” Dr. Goldstein said in an interview. “He was engaging, without pretensions. He put aside the demons in his life and went to the light.”
Dr. Williams left City College for the University of Cincinnati in 2009. Three years later he resigned, citing personal reasons, which his daughter said included caring for his wife, who has 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’s mother reappeared in his life 10 years after she left him and his brother. By then, he was in college and was working as a deputy sheriff in Muncie. Her new husband, who was white, offered to adopt the brothers. There was no apology for her disappearance, and no gratitude to Ms. Terry for taking care of her sons.
“The conditions for becoming 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 lived for the past 10 years. She knew little about our life in Muncie, nor did she want to know. Gaining acceptance to her world required that we deny our Black heritage and pretend that the people and circumstances of our life in Muncie did not exist.”
He added: “We were to forget we were ‘colored’ boys. She expected us to move back into her life without a past, without roots, without feeling for the people who had sheltered and cared for us when our need was greatest. I knew that was something we could never do.”
