Wendell L. Wray
American librarian and educator
Wendell L. Wray (January 30, 1926 – August 24, 2003) was an American librarian and educator who was dedicated to preserving African-American history through oral history. He was a professor at the University of Pittsburgh from 1973 to 1988, with a break from 1981 to 1983 while he served as the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Early life and education
Wendell Leonard Wray was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on January 30, 1926. He grew up in the Beltzhoover neighborhood of Pittsburgh and attended South Hills High School. He served in the U.S. Army and received an honorable discharge in 1946. Receiving a scholarship under the G.I. Bill, he attended Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. At Bates he was the poet laureate of his class; he graduated with a Bachelor's degree in psychology in 1950.
He returned to Pittsburgh to attend the Carnegie Institute of Technology and became the first African-American man to graduate from that library school, earning his Master of Library Science in 1952.
Work in libraries and education
Wray was the first African-American man to be hired by the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, where he worked for seven years, first in Adult Circulation and later in Public Affairs.
In 1959 he moved to New York City.
“Wendell L. Wray” enters the record as american librarian and educator. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Wendell, Wray and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q60048977. VIAF identifies the subject as 160062946. The Library of Congress control number is no2010190722. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1926, 2003, 1973 and 1988.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wendell L. Wray” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.