The Rt. Rev. Duncan Montgomery Gray Jr., 89, retired bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Mississippi, died on Friday at his home in Jackson following a brief illness.
Known as a moral leader in the civil rights movement in Mississippi, Gray was the son of an Episcopal bishop and the grandfather of Greenwood Church of the Nativity’s current pastor, the Rev. Peter Gray.
Visitation will be held from 5 to 7 p.m. Monday at St. Andrew’s Cathedral in Jackson, and another visitation will be held from noon to 2 p.m. Tuesday. The funeral will follow at 2 p.m., also at St. Andrew’s, and burial will be in Canton.
Duncan Montgomery Gray Jr. was born in Canton on Sept. 21, 1926 and attended Greenwood High School for three years before graduating in 1944 from Jackson’s Central High School. He served in the Navy and afterward studied at Tulane. He married Ruth Spivey of Canton in 1948, the same year he received his bachelor’s degree.
He received a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Sewanee: The University of the South in 1953, followed by a long career in the church in Mississippi. In 1972 he was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Divinity from Sewanee.
Gray was the seventh bishop of Mississippi, serving from 1974 to 1993. His father, the Rt. Rev. Duncan Gray Sr., had been the fifth bishop, and one of his sons, the Rt. Rev. Duncan Gray III, was the ninth.
“My grandfather would have said, and it’s true, that he just continually found himself in flash points of the civil rights movement,” said Peter Gray.
Gray said his grandfather had been away in Cuba for most of the summer following his senior year in seminary and “came home to discover the entire faculty of the seminary had threatened resignation over the school’s policy of segregation. He suddenly got thrust into that crisis at Sewanee.”
After leaving Sewanee, Gray worked in Cleveland and Rosedale and was asked to help write the Episcopal church’s response to Brown v Board of Education, the landmark civil rights case.
“When he went to Oxford a few years later, the integration crisis was happening there,” Peter Gray said.
As rector of St. Peter’s Church in Oxford in the autumn of 1962, Gray called for calm as violence broke out in response to the court-ordered integration of the University of Mississippi in that city. Gray had been a chaplain on campus until 1961 and was known to students. According to Episcopal archives , Gray held onto the statue of a Confederate soldier near the main administrative building on campus and implored people not to riot.
In the pulpit of St. Peter’s, Gray denounced racism.
“The seeds of anger and hatred, bitterness and prejudice, are already widely sown, and as Christians, we need to do our utmost to uproot and cast them out,” Gray said in a sermon on Sept. 30, 1962, the day before James Meredith enrolled as the first black student, escorted by federal marshals.
“The seeds of anger and hatred, bitterness and prejudice, are already widely sown,” he said, “and as Christians, we need to do our utmost to uproot and cast them out.”
Gray moved to Meridian next, just as “violence began to explode” in that community, Peter Gray said.
“His life is remarkable not only because he generally got things right,” Peter Gray said, “but also in the way he found himself accidentally, or providentially, in places where a moral voice was needed.”
Peter Gray said his grandfather remembered Greenwood fondly throughout his life and, as part of a clergy family that moved around a lot, found it as close to a hometown as any other place he lived.
“I didn’t really know that about him until I moved here about three-and-a-half years ago,” Gray said. “His father came to Nativity to serve as rector in 1939 and was only there for about four years. That was eighth to 11th grades for my grandfather, a pretty important time in a child’s life, he would have said.”
Jess Pinkston of Greenwood was a buddy of Gray.’s during those years, Peter Gray said.
“I’m not sure what position he played (in football), but (Jess) said my grandfather hit about as hard as anybody on the field,” Peter Gray said. “He was never any taller that 5-foot-8 in his life, but I guess that matched his toughness in other arenas.”
A week after the riots at Ole Miss in response to Meredith’s enrollment, Gray delivered a memorable sermon urging Mississippians to face up to their complicity in the violence that killed two people that week.
“You and I didn’t go out there and throw the bricks and the bottles. You and I didn’t go out there and fire the guns,” he said. “Yet you and I, along with every other Mississippian, are responsible in one degree or another for what happened. We are responsible for the moral and political climate in our state which made such a tragedy possible…. The decent, respectable and responsible people of Mississippi have failed when events like those of last Sunday night can take place within our state.”
From 1991 to 1997, Gray was chancellor of Sewanee. He was the subject of a 1997 book, “And Also With You: Duncan Gray and the American Dilemma,” written by the Rev. Will Campbell.
Lloyd Gray, a former editor of the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, said his father was a humble man who didn’t seek attention for his work on civil rights.
“He just did what he thought a priest of the church ought to be doing,” Lloyd Gray said.
Gray’s wife, Ruth, died in 2011. Survivors include four children: the Rt. Rev. Duncan Gray III of New Orleans; Anne Finley of Adams, Tennessee; Catherine Clark of Nashville, Tennessee; and Lloyd Gray of Meridian; 11 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.
• Contact Kathryn Eastburn at 581-7235 or keastburn@gwcommonwealth.com. The Associated Press contributed to this report.
