Ann Gray Byrd, Santa Rosa civil rights leader, dies at 86

Ann Gray Byrd, who as a teenager watched her parents rise up as pioneer Santa Rosa civil-rights and equality advocates and then forged herself into a formidable, lifelong activist and minister, died July 7. She was 86.

Byrd was a high school student when her family settled in Santa Rosa in 1952. She came to perceive that she and the very few other Black people living there were largely free to go about their lives so long as they knew their place and did not venture where they weren’t welcome.

The teen and her parents, Gilbert and Alice Gray, decided that would not do.

When Byrd died at her Santa Rosa home from chronic illness exacerbated by long COVID, she had committed most of her life to the struggle for equal rights, access and opportunity for people of color and others who are marginalized.

“All of us need to do the work of change,” she said in 2014. “I've decided part of my life purpose is to keep saying that.”

Byrd was for decades a force in the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP branch her late father co-founded in 1953. Though, inspired to action by civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., she declared she was not an “MLK pacifist” and made clear that should push come to shove, she would push back.

“Everyone knows that my mother was a powerhouse,” her daughter Pamela Grandy said. “Everyone knows that she would go to the nth degree to do what’s right, what’s just.”

“I called her Donna Quixote,” added Grandy, who lives in Vallejo. “She was always out there fighting something.”

One of Byrd’s favorite pleas to others: “You don’t have to stand tall, but you have to stand up.”

She also repeated often one of her father’s primary exhortations: “Each one, teach one.” She would explain, “It means each of us has a responsibility to bring someone else along, to give to others the same opportunities we seek for ourselves.”

Byrd was active in early efforts to monitor the behavior toward minorities of law enforcement officers in Sonoma County, and in the creation of the county Commission on the Status of Women and the anti-poverty nonprofit Sonoma County People for Economic Opportunity, now Community Action Partnership.

An ordained minister, Byrd encouraged and advocated for members of the LGBTQ+ community and others who were vulnerable. Her pro-justice work included leadership roles in the Sonoma County chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

For decades, Byrd ran the charitable Gray Foundation, founded by her parents in 1992 to help low-income Sonoma County students attend college. Over the course of about a quarter century, the Gray Foundation awarded scholarships totaling more than $180,000.

Byrd “was very proud of her blackness,” said longtime friend Sheri Graves, of Santa Rosa. “She was a brave and courageous woman at a time when women, and particularly Black women, had a difficult time.”

Graves, a retired Press Democrat reporter, co-authored with Byrd a 2011 book, “Glimpses: A Story of African Americans in Santa Rosa.”

Byrd, she said, “had a profound impact on this community, and certainly on me.”

Byrd was born March 30, 1936, in Tatum, Texas. She was the first of nine children of Alice and Gilbert Gray.

The couple moved in 1945 to a predominantly Black community in Marin City, and in 1952 to Santa Rosa. The Grays’ eldest daughter would recount that in those days, African Americans desiring to live in Santa Rosa learned that their options were the South Park neighborhood near the county fairgrounds, or in rural areas outside city limits.

The Grays settled in the countryside off Petaluma Hill Road. Ann Gray Byrd would recall that when she studied at Santa Rosa High in the early 1950s, the only other two Black students enrolled there were a brother of hers, William, and a sister, Dorothy.

She once said of her experience at what was then Santa Rosa’s only high school, “Through the grace of God, it wasn’t too bad. We didn’t have too many problems.”

It was her perception that African Americans living in Santa Rosa 70 years ago would get by OK if they observed the racist rules, far subtler than those imposed by Jim Crow laws in the South, that dictated where they could live and conduct business.

“Everybody seemed to know their place,” Byrd told an interviewer several years ago, “until the sit-ins.”

One of Santa Rosa’s best-known acts of defiance of segregation occurred on a Sunday afternoon in May 1962 at the Silver Dollar Saloon in what is now Railroad Square.

Gilbert Gray and Platt Williams, who had nearly a decade earlier founded the Santa Rosa chapter of the NAACP, walked into the Silver Dollar with four other Black men after church, and sat at the bar. They’d been told the saloon would not serve people like them.

One of the six men ordered a beer, a second a shot of whiskey. The tavern owner told them, “I’m sorry, boys. You’ve had too much already.”

“Too much!” Gilbert Gray would say years later to Press Democrat columnist Gaye LeBaron, “We’d just left church.”

Clearly denied service because of their race, Gray and the other local NAACP members sued the Silver Dollar. The bar owner made a payment to the NAACP branch as part of an out-of-court settlement.

“We made our point,” Gray told LeBaron. “We dropped in at the Silver Dollar for a drink pretty regular after that. We kept him honest.”

Through to the end of their lives, Gilbert and Alice Gray did much more for the cause of civil rights and equality. Gilbert died in Santa Rosa in 1997, Alice in 2006. Platt Williams died in 2015.

The Grays’ eldest daughter, who’d served as the NAACP chapter’s first secretary while she was still at Santa Rosa High, adopted their mission as her own. She served as branch president through three terms between the late 1970s and just a few years ago.

Current chapter president Kirstyne Lange wrote in a tribute that Byrd was “a civil rights and social justice powerhouse” who for 70 years “helped shape the political and social landscape in Santa Rosa.”

The Rev. Curtis Byrd, her son, of Santa Rosa, added, “She was always at a meeting, or going to a meeting.”

Ann Byrd’s marriage to career firefighter William Byrd ended in divorce.

Professionally, Ann Byrd worked in positions that included secretary of the Carpenters Union and an assistant operations chief at the nonprofit California Human Development Corp. She also was a human resources consultant and a motivational speaker. For a time, she and friend Graves operated a public relations and printing company they called Black and White.

Byrd’s many awards and honors include the ACLU’s 2016 Jack Green Award, the Graton Rancheria’s 2015 “I Made a Difference” award, recognition as one of the California Legislature’s 2005 Women of the Year and numerous NAACP awards.

Late in her life, Byrd spoke of being heartened to see young people, including a great-granddaughter of hers, take the streets to protest discriminatory policing and other injustices, while at the same time being deeply pained that racial hatred endures.

Before her death, Byrd donated her body to science. Daughter Grandy recalled her saying, “I’ve been a public servant all of my life. Why should my death be any different? There are cures to be discovered that may be in me.”

In addition to her son in Santa Rosa and her daughter in Vallejo, Byrd is survived by siblings William Gray, of San Francisco; James Gray, of Santa Rosa; Aubrey Gray, of Santa Rosa; Ida Johnson, of Sacramento; and Robert Gray, of Santa Rosa; along with two grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

A public celebration of her life is set for Aug. 27 in South Park. The time has yet to be determined.