Guide to the Frances Mecca Gray Papers

Frances Mecca Gray of San Francisco, California was a Presbyterian educator and missionary to Iran and Lebanon. Gray was born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1910 and graduated from Southwestern, The College of the Mississippi Valley (now Rhodes College), in Memphis, Tennessee in 1930. She received master's degrees from The Biblical Seminary in New York (now New York Theological Seminary), the University of Chicago Divinity School, and the New York School of Social Work at Columbia University. She left an early career in social work for two years of service in the American Red Cross in Europe at the end of the Second World War (WWII). She was appointed as the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (PCUSA) Western Area Secretary for Women's Work in 1946 and worked as Board of Foreign Missions (BFM) portfolio secretary for Africa and the Middle East from 1950 to 1956. In 1956, she was assigned by the BFM to Beirut College for Women (BCW) in Lebanon as a professor of biblical literature. She became president of the college in 1959 and held the role until BCW's transfer to Lebanese national leadership. In 1965, she transferred to Iran Bethel School in Tehran, at that time a Presbyterian girls' finishing school. She presided over the school's transition to the B.A.-granting Iran Bethel College, which later became Damavand College. Gray worked as Damavand College president from 1968 until she retired in 1975. She hired Mary C. Thompson as dean of Damavand. Frances returned to the United States after retirement, settling in the San Francisco Bay Area, California. She taught in the humanities at New College Berkeley from 1978 to 1984 and in Art History at the Fromm Institute of the University of San Francisco from 1985 to 1997. She died of cancer on December 15, 2001.