Gene Mitchell Gray was the first African American student who enrolled at UT as a result of a suit filed in 1951 in federal district court. Judge Robert L. Taylor ruled on the suit (in favor of the applicants for admission), but Judge Taylor did not put down an order to allow the plaintiffs to appeal the decision of the Eastern District Court that a single judge should preside. By the time the United States Supreme Court heard the appeal in January 1952, admissions policies had changed, and UT stated at argument that the students would be admitted as they had requested. The Supreme Court ruled the case moot.
The case had sought admission by four African American students for graduate study (Lincoln Blakeney and Joseph Hutch Patterson to the Law School; Gene Gray and Jack Alexander to the
Graduate School). Gray enrolled in January 1952 for winter quarter and Blakeney in April for spring quarter. Gray took undergraduate courses for a year and a half (January 1952 to March 1953) and then transferred to Lehigh University. He left Lehigh without obtaining a degree.
A graduate of Knoxville College, Gray lived with his wife and two children in Austin Homes at the time of his attendance. He had lost two jobs—one at the Knoxville Iron Works and the other at the Arnold Hotel—while pursuing the lawsuit. At the time he enrolled, he was unemployed.
Jet magazine reported (February 14, 1952) that Gray had disclosed to the magazine that he “lost his job at a Knoxville hotel the next day after he became the first Negro student at The University of Tennessee.” According to Jet, Gray said he was “frozen out of his job and given the ‘cold shoulder’ when he applied at other establishments for another job.” Jet also reported that his mother, Mrs. Bernice Taylor, said she had been aiding him financially but that she soon lost her job also, and that a “group of Knoxville Negroes moved to underwrite his current expenses as a bio-chemistry student.”
Some years later Gray claimed to have a medical degree and changed his name to Ghen Raj, organizing a number of companies to develop and sell high-tech biological and medical instruments. He persuaded numerous people to invest in his companies. In 1987, while he was living in Amherst, Massachusetts, he was charged with a variety of crimes, among them defrauding investors of some $90,000. The case had not come to trial when on April 18, 1989, Gray was found dead in his Amherst apartment following an accidental fall.