The Community House of Moorestown invites you to join in an engaging conversation with Richard Gray, a native Moorestownian, about how the history of Silent Segregation links the histories on the Community House and the West End Community Center, which served as the social and cultural hub for Moorestown’s once segregated West End neighborhood from 1944-1968.

During this event, attendees will:

• Learn about the West End Community Center History Project, a collaborative project by the Historical Society of Moorestown funded by the NJ Inclusive History Grant Program aimed at preserving the history and legacy of the West End Community Center through recordings of Black elder interviews and digitized original records of the Center;
• Hear and be encouraged to share stories and learn about our historical experiences of the Center and the Community House;
• Explore and imagine together the possibility of current and future collaborative and collective efforts to uncover, document, and share important histories of the Community House, the West End Center, and other Mooretown and regional institutions.

Richard Gray serves as CCE’s Director of Community and School Development, providing support and strategic assistance to all CCE programs with a focus on building equitable and supportive relationships between communities and the schools that serve them.

Before joining CCE, Richard served as the Deputy Executive Director of NYU’s Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools and directed the Center for Education Organizing at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University. He was also the Co-Executive Director of the National Coalition of Advocates for Students (NCAS), a nationwide network of child advocacy organizations that work to improve access to quality public education for student populations who have traditionally been underserved by public schools.

Richard is also a Lecturer of Law at Columbia Law School, helping students apply their legal training to advance authentic collaboration between educational institutions and communities. Richard is the former President of Brown University’s Inman Page Black Alumni Council, the current Board Chair for the Tony Award-winning Broadway Advocacy Coalition, and serves on the Board of the Sweet Blackberry Foundation and the Pearl Fryar Topiary Garden.

Richard has a B.A. in History from Brown University (Class of ’85) and a J.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.