Willie Gary, esquire: Skyrocketing attorney is still down-to-Earth

Black Collegian, Oct 1994 by Chappelle, Tony

Watermelons. After high school football practice, Willie Gary used to rush home and help his dad sell watermelons from the back of a truck. Those watermelons meant money that helped feed Gary and his brothers and sisters, a family of 13 in all.

As a youngster, Gary missed a lot of school, usually two-and-a-half months each year. His people had to follow the crops up and down the Southeastern seaboard. They were the poorest kind of working poor--migrant farmers.

Now Willie Gary is so famous, the huge financial settlements he pulls down for legal clients are so awesome, that when White lawyers down in Florida find out he's going to try a case, they cram into the courtroom to take notes.

Yet he's still a man of the earth. Yes, the cream-colored Rolls Royce that he rides in is impressive. That's why he got it. But multimillionaire attorney or not, Willie Gary has stayed close to his roots.

"It's almost scary at how things just seem to turn to gold for me. Sometimes I'm amazed myself. I say, "Just believe in yourself. Just believe you can."

In 1991, Shaw University, the historically Black school in Raleigh, North Carolina, faced bankruptcy. Gary graduated from Shaw, and so a school official asked him for a contribution. It wouldn't have been his first; three years before, he and his wife Gloria, another Shaw graduate, gave $1 million.

This time, however, Gary not only immediately ripped off a check for $100,000, but in the days and weeks ahead, he also pledged to pump $10 million into Shaw's coffers over five years. Since then, he's extended the deadline to ten years.

That $10 million is the largest donation that any alumnus of a Black college has ever made to an alma mater. The only other contribution that compares is the $20 million that Bill Cosby and his wife Camille (neither of them alumni) gave to Spelman College in 1988 for a new academic center and an endowment.

Gary's megaton bomb of a donation shook loose an avalanche of other contributions. What began as a five-year fundraising campaign wound up reeling in promises for $28.51 million after just four months.

"Mr. Gary's pledge set the tone for the corporate community to say that if this is what you're going to do for yourself, then we'll do something for you, too," said Shaw University spokesperson, Crystal Swain. "That kind of gift shows you care about yourself as well as the causes that made you who you are."

No one could be any more grateful for his education than Willie Gary. "I think we're all indebted to Black colleges," he said in a phone interview from his home in exclusive Sewall's Point, Florida. "But for one of our historically Black colleges, I would not be where I am. They were considerate enough to take a chance on a farm boy who'd been turned down and told he wasn't college material."

The legend of how Willie Gary got to Shaw sounds like some parallel to Booker T. Washington's 800-mile odyssey from West Virginia to Hampton Institute.

The dark-brown fireplug of a teenager had been a standout football player in high school. He had hoped the gridiron would be his vehicle out of the hopeless migrant camps. It's miraculous that Gary even lived to play football. His mother had complications at his birth. His twin didn't make it, and Willie's face came out a little flat and temporarily paralyzed. To pay the doctor's bills, Willie's daddy lost his 200-acre farm. From the time Willie learned about what a burden he'd been, he worked like a Trojan to make up for it.

So at age 20, Gary left home in the summer of 1967 thinking he'd be the first Black person from Indiantown to go to college. He had a "conditional" scholarship to attend all-Black Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach, Florida. But he had to make the team first.

On the fifth week of tryouts, the coach cut him. "I begged him, with tears in my eyes. I didn't want to let Indiantown down," Gary recalls. "I'm sorry. You gotta go," the coach told him.

Gary had to take the bus back home and explain his failure to everyone who'd earlier read the local paper headline, "Farm Boy Gets A Scholarship." Then his high school coach told him that he'd try to pull strings to get him on the team at Shaw University in North Carolina.

Shaw, founded in 1865, was a small liberal arts college with about 2500 students. When Willie Gary arrived, practice had already begun. "We got too many players already," the coach explained.

"I wanted to go to college so bad I could taste it," Gary says today. He had no money. He couldn't even register for classes. He slept on a couch in a dormitory. A few players sneaked out food from the cafeteria to give him.

Soon he decided to try to work his way onto the team. He cleaned the men's locker room without pay, roamed the sidelines during practices to learn the plays, anything to win favor with the coach and get a shot. It came. One day, a lineman was injured. The coach told Willie to get on some pads if he really wanted his chance. From all accounts, the coaches and his teammates were blown away at how the country boy could tackle. Willie got the scholarship.