James Francis Gregory

James Francis Gregory was born to James Monroe Gregory and Fannie Emma Whiting Hagan in Washington, D.C., in 1876. The elder Gregory was active in the struggle for Black rights during and after the Civil War, serving as secretary of the National Convention of Colored Americans. After a long career at Howard University, including as dean, he later became the principal of Bordentown Industrial Manual Training School. His mother, Fannie, received an A.B. degree (1872) and an A.M. degree (1875) from Howard University. His maternal grandmother grew up in the household of Roger Brooke Taney, chief justice of the United States Supreme Court who authored the court’s notorious majority decision in the Dred Scott case. A brother, Thomas Montgomery Gregory, graduated from Harvard College in 1910 and became a noted scholar, dramatist, and civil rights activist.¹

In 1894, James Francis Gregory matriculated to Amherst College as the only Black student. He excelled as a student. He won the Kellogg Oratorical Prize and the Ladd and Hogan prizes in oration, participated in the Hardy Prize for debate, and became his class orator. He was also a remarkable athlete. He played shortstop for the Amherst baseball team and was selected as the captain of the team in 1897, becoming the first known Black athlete to captain a college team in the East.²

After graduating from Amherst in 1898, Gregory began attending Yale Divinity the same year. A Yale Daily News article indicates that he was a candidate for the university’s baseball team as an outfielder in 1900 and 1901 but was never selected.³ However, he found success in the Divinity School’s baseball team and was elected as captain of the team in 1901.⁴ During his time at Yale, he won first prize at Yale Divinity’s Downes Prize contest and graduated with a bachelor of divinity degree in 1901.⁵

After graduation, Gregory served as a minister at the Central Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia before he became an English and public speaking teacher at his father’s school, the Bordentown Industrial Manual Training School. In 1903, he married Ednah Julia, a teacher in Cleveland.⁶ He left his teaching post to minister at Capitol Street Presbyterian Church in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 1907. He returned to Bordentown Industrial Manual Training School in 1911 and was selected by Governor Woodrow Wilson as a delegate to the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation Jubilee in 1912.⁷ In 1915, he began ministering at People’s Congregational Church in Washington until 1918, when he became a YMCA secretary at Camp Washington and Fort Terry during World War I. He later taught English at Miner Teachers College from 1919 to 1944 and at the Manassas Institute during the summer.⁸

Gregory was inducted as a member of the Sigma Pi Phi fraternity and the Pig Skin Club. From 1943 to 1944, he served as vice president of the Teachers Council of Washington, D.C. Gregory’s speech to the Epworth League, “The Social Bearings of the Fifth Commandment,” is included in Alice Dunbar Nelson’s Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence: The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the Days of Slavery to the Present Time, published in 1914.⁹

Gregory died in 1944 and was survived by his wife, one daughter, two sons, and five grandchildren. A grandson, Frederick Drew Gregory, became a NASA astronaut and an administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.