Fred Gray, Sr. 1930–

Attorney

Elected President of Alabama Bar Association

One of the most significant figures of the modern civil rights movement, attorney Fred Gray, Sr. was a decisive factor in the efforts to end racial segregation in the American South. As one of only two African–American lawyers in Montgomery in 1955, he represented Rosa Parks during the famous Montgomery bus boycott that eventually led to the integration of public transportation in the city. He later fought to gain full voting rights for African Americans and to desegregate Alabama’s public schools and housing projects. In the 1970s Gray also helped to expose decades of racial discrimination that allowed dozens of African–American men to go untreated for syphilis in a government–sponsored project known as the Tuskegee Experiment. After serving in the Alabama State Legislature from 1970 to 1974, Gray was denied confirmation as a federal judge in 1980, when his conservative opponents rallied to crush his nomination by the Carter administration. Gray continued to work as one of the nation’s best–known civil rights lawyers and in 2002 was elected president of the Alabama Bar Association. It was the first time in the law association’s history that an African American had held its top post.

Fred David Gray, the youngest of five children, was born on December 14, 1930, in Montgomery, the capital of Alabama. Gray’s father, Abraham Gray, worked as a carpenter while his mother, Nancy (Jones) Gray Arms, went to work as a domestic and cook for families in Montgomery. When he was two years old, Gray’s father died. The family’s dire economic circumstances, compounded by the Great Depression and lack of economic opportunity for African Americans in the South, meant that Nancy Gray had to work full–time. For this reason, she sent her youngest son off to start school a year early. Gray later joked in his memoir, Bus Ride to Justice, that the arrangement was “a ’head start’ program for me. This was my first head start.”

Became Ordained Minister

An excellent student, Gray was able to attend the Nashville Christian Institute beginning in 1943. The school was operated by the Church of Christ, to which Gray’s family belonged. Gray became an ordained minister while in Nashville, and served as assistant minister in several Church of God congregations in later years. Finishing high school ahead of schedule in December of 1947, Gray returned to Montgomery to

At a Glance…

Born Fred David Gray on December 14, 1930, in Montgomery, AL; son of Nancy (Jones) Gray Arms and Abraham Gray; married Bernice Hill Gray (died, 1997); children: Deborah, Vanessa, Fred, Jr. and Stanley. Education: Alabama State University, B.S., 1951; Case Western Reserve University, J.D., 1954.

Career: Gray, Langford, Sapp, McGowan, Gray and Nathanson, partner, 1954–; Alabama state representative, 1970–74.

Memberships: President, Alabama State Bar Association, 2002–.

Awards: National Bar Association Equal Justice Award, 1977; Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Southern Christian Leadership Conference Drum Major’s Award, 1982; President’s Award, National Bar Association, 1982; World Conference of Mayors Legal Award, 1985.

Address: Office —Gray, Langford, Sapp, McGowan, Gray, and Nathanson, P.O. Box 830239, Tuskegee, AL 36083–0239.

enroll in the Alabama State College for Negroes (later renamed Alabama State University). He finished his degree in 1951. Though intent on pursuing a law career, Gray realized that Alabama’s law schools were closed to African Americans. He therefore applied to several Northern law schools and accepted an offer to study at Western Reserve University (later Case Western Reserve University) in Cleveland, Ohio. In order to keep its professional graduate programs racially segregated, the State of Alabama provided tuition, travel, and housing assistance for African Americans to study outside the state. Gray took advantage of the program and completed law school in Ohio with a delicious sense of irony. “Privately,” he later wrote in his memoir, “I pledged to return to Montgomery and use the law to ’destroy everything segregated that I could find.’”

Gray completed law school in 1954 and was admitted to practice in Ohio and Alabama that same year. In September of 1954 he opened a private law practice in Montgomery. In 1956 he married Bernice Hill, and the couple raised four children: Deborah, Vanessa, Fred, Jr., and Stanley. In the meantime, the young lawyer was drawn into one of the crucial civil rights protests of the 1950s: the Montgomery bus boycott. On December 1, 1955, a friend of Gray’s, Rosa Parks, refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white passenger. The bus driver called the police, who arrested her. Although Parks was not the first African American to be arrested for violating the city’s laws that mandated segregation, her case became the rallying point of a 381–day protest in Montgomery to end the practice of segregation on the city’s buses.

As one of two African–American attorneys then practicing in Montgomery, Gray had already represented 15–year–old Claudette Colvin in a case early in 1955 involving the same charges of violating the city’s segregation laws. Colvin was charged with disorderly conduct, convicted of the charges and put on probation. Although bus company officials offered an apology for the way they had treated Colvin, they refused to desegregate their buses. During her trial in a segregated courtroom in Montgomery on December 5, 1955, Parks was also convicted of disorderly conduct. This time, however, the case sparked a mass protest against the discriminatory practices of the bus line. The resulting boycott cleared Montgomery buses of African–American passengers and lasted for more than a year. During that period, Gray was regularly harassed by segregationists and was even subjected to a frivolous lawsuit that attempted to take away his license to practice law. In June of 1956 a federal court ruled that the statutes requiring racial segregation on public transportation were unconstitutional. Local officials initially refused to comply with the court’s decision, even after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the ruling in November of 1956. But, bowing to the inevitable, Montgomery’s officials finally allowed desegregation to take place the following month, and the boycott was called off on December 20, 1956.

Fought For Voting Rights

In addition to his fight to end segregation, Gray was also a leader in helping African Americans secure their voting rights. In 1957 he filed a suit to stop the redistricting of the city limits of Tuskegee, Alabama, a plan that would have placed many African–American voters outside the city limits. Gray eventually argued the case before the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled against the redistricting plan in a unanimous decision on November 14, 1960. The decision, which Gray considered his greatest legal victory, became a landmark case in future efforts to achieve full voting rights for U.S. citizens regardless of race.

Throughout the 1960s Gray remained at the center of legal efforts to end segregation in Alabama. His own participation ranged from helping African–American students gain the legal right to enroll in the University of Alabama in 1963 and Auburn University in 1964, to representing civil rights protesters against charges of disorderly conduct for staging freedom walks across the state. In another highly publicized case, Gray gained a legal order of protection for participants in the Selma March after they were violently beaten by police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965.

In 1970 Gray was elected to the Alabama State Legislature as a representative from Tuskegee, where he had opened up another law office. He became one of the first two African–American officials to serve in the body since the beginning of the Reconstruction Era a century before. While serving in the legislature until 1974, Gray took on one of the most complex cases of his career, a civil suit against the U.S. government brought by participants in a Public Health Service study of syphilis. The program, which began in 1932 and lasted until it was exposed in 1972, selected African Americans with syphilis exposure in Macon County, Alabama, to be enrolled in a study that observed the progress of the disease. The men were not told that they had syphilis, and even after medical treatment was widely available for the sexually transmitted disease, were not given treatment. Public outrage over the study helped Gray secure a nine–million–dollar settlement for the victims of the study and their families and survivors.

Elected President of Alabama Bar Association

In 1979 Gray was put forward by President Jimmy Carter as a nominee for the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama. Although he was initially approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee, his nomination came under fire by his longtime conservative opponents in Alabama, and he withdrew his name from consideration for the post in August of 1980. As Gray later described the experience in an interview with reporter Phillip Rawls in the Detroit Free Press, some senators did not want to approve his nomination “Because he’s handled more civil rights cases than anybody else and it will look like he’s being rewarded.”

The withdrawal of his nomination for the judgeship was a reminder that Gray had earned some powerful enemies through his civil rights work. By 2002, however, Gray’s accomplishments were viewed in a much more positive light. In July of 2002 he was elected president of the Alabama State Bar Association, the most important professional organization for lawyers in the state. Prior to winning the post, Gray had also received the National Bar Association’s Equal Justice Award, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Drum Major’s Award, and the World Conference of Mayors’ Legal Award.