States), supporting the candidacy of Deval Patrick, who was that year elected the first African-American governor of Massachusetts. (Gomes and Patrick had become friends during Patrick's undergraduate days at Harvard.) According to a book on Martin Luther King Jr., Gomes "was never easy to label. Conservative evangelicals, for instance, were quick to criticize the liberalism he sometimes displayed during his long tenure as the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and the Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church at Harvard University—and yet a photograph of Reverend Billy Graham, hero to evangelicals across the world, towered above all others on the shelf behind Gomes’s stately office desk." Honors and tributes 1998: The Benjamin Elijah Mays Medal, Bates College 1998: Clergy of the Year by the organization Religion in American Life 2000: W. E. B. Du Bois Medal from Harvard University 2008: Gomes and his family were featured by Henry Louis Gates on the PBS documentary African American Lives 2. 2010: Gomes gave the Princeton Lectures on Youth, Church, and Culture; Harvard University elected him Honorary President of the Alpha-Iota Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. Gomes served as a trustee of the National Cathedral School, Washington, D.C.; as Harvard University trustee of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and a trustee of the Roxbury Latin School and of Bates College He was a member of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, and a sometime Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He was a former acting director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University; he was past president of Harvard's Signet Society; and a former trustee of Bates College, Wellesley College and the Public Broadcasting Service. He was past president and trustee of the Pilgrim Society in Plymouth, Massachusetts. In 2007 he was appointed by Queen Elizabeth to membership in The Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem. Gomes received at least forty honorary degrees at various times, including degrees from: New England College; Waynesburg College; Gordon College; Knox College; University of the South; Duke University; The University of Nebraska; Wooster College; Bates College; Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion; Trinity College, Bowdoin College; Berkeley Divinity School at Yale; Colby College; Olivet College; Mount Holyoke College; Furman University; Baker University; Mount Ida College; Willamette University; SUNY-Geneseo; Westminster Choir College of Rider University; Ursinus College; Wagner College; Lesley University;