Amanda V. Gray

Amanda V. Gray (1869-1957) was an activist, educator and pharmacist. Gray, who received her pharmaceutical graduate degree from Howard University in 1903, operated a pharmacy in the black community in Washington D.C. She was heavily active in the community’s ongoing social, political and cultural issues.

Amanda Victoria Brown was born in Linneus, Missouri, on March 24, 1870 to Rice and Maria Brown. She attended the local schools of Atchison, Kansas, and worked there as a school teacher for several years before relocating to Washington, D.C. around 1893 when she married Arthur Smith Gray.

Dr. Amanda Gray was a pharmacist for the Woman’s Clinic in the District before partnering with her husband and opening the Fountain Pharmacy in 1905. According to an article in the Afro-American, Amanda Gray was the first black woman to own and operate a pharmacy in Washington, D.C. Their drug store was at 12th and U Streets, NW in the True Reformer Building. In addition to managing their business, Amanda and Arthur were members of the African American elite of Washington, and were active in several professional, civic, and social organizations, including the National Medical Association, the NAACP, the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Choral Society, and the Mu-So-Lit Club.

After her husband passed away at the age of 48 on March 1, 1917, Amanda closed the pharmacy and joined the WWW I effort, becoming a director of YWCA camp hostess for African American soldiers at Camps Upton, Dix, and Taylor. The War Work Council sent her to Camp Sherman in Ohio as her last assignment. As one of the organizers and board members of the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA in Washington, after the war Amanda went to St. Louis and was president of the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA there for 3 years.

Amanda returned to DC., and in 1922 married Andrew Franklin Hilyer, a lawyer, author, and civil rights leader. Arthur and Amanda Gray moved in the same social and civic circles as Andrew and his wife Mamie, before Mamie’s death on December 14, 1916. Andrew, born a slave in Monroe, Georgia, Aug. 14, 1858 or 1859, later moved to Omaha, Nebraska and Minneapolis, Minnesota, attending the local schools. He graduated from the University of Minnesota as the first African American graduate in 1882, moved to Washington, D.C., and obtained an LL.B. in 1884 and LL.M. in 1885 from Howard University. Mamie Elizabeth Nichols, from a long established family in the Washington area, married Andrew in 1886, and the couple had two or three children. Like Arthur Gray, Andrew Hilyer was a civil servant, working first as a clerk at the Treasury Department, then at the Interior Department, Division of the General Accounting Office. Andrew was also an inventor, patenting a water-vapor attachment for hot air registers and an evaporator for hot air registers in 1890.

Andrew passed away on January 13, 1925, and Amanda continued her civic and social activities, as a member of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, president and member of the board of the Ionia R. Whipper Home (a shelter for unwed mothers and abused women ranging from age 12-21), and serving on the advisory council of National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses. She died at the age of 87 on June 29, 1957 at her home in D.C.

Source: The Pharmaceutical Era (Oct. 1912)