Early Life and Career
Gray is a native of Washington, DC, and graduated from Dunbar High School. He earned a B.A. in psychology at George Washington University, where he also took graduate courses. Gray was one of the first African Americans to join the Jewish fraternity, Tau Epsilon Phi. While in the fraternity, he was the first to serve two consecutive terms as President. Other school activities included the Newman Catholic Center, as well as football and basketball intramurals. Gray is also an avid participant in hand dancing, a D.C.-area derivative of Lindy hop.
Gray began his political career with the D.C. Association for Retarded Citizens, where he successfully advocated for innovative public policy initiatives on behalf of people with mental retardation. In 1991, then Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly appointed Gray to the post of Director of the DC Department of Human Services.
Gray became the founding executive director of Covenant House Washington in December 1994. Over a decade, Gray grew the agency from a van outreach program to a multisite agency serving homeless youth in the city's Southeast and Northeast communities.
Read more about this topic: Vincent C. Gray
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“Everyone in our culture wants to win a prize. Perhaps that is the grand lesson we have taken with us from kindergarten in the age of perversions of Dewey-style education: everyone gets a ribbon, and praise becomes a meaningless narcotic to soothe egoistic distemper.”
—Gerald Early (b. 1952)
“The civilizing process has increased the distance between behavior and the impulse life of the animal body.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)