Fred Gray — the civil rights lawyer who helped change the course of history
National Post, 17 July 2022
He was neither the movement’s principal preacher nor its most famous lawyer. Yet Gray was there at the beginning and is still there
It’s possible that U.S. President Joe Biden and I are reading the same book this summer. Last month, I was given a copy of “Alabama v. King: Martin Luther King and the Criminal Trial that Launched the Civil Rights Movement.”
It’s a very fine memoir of Fred D. Gray, whom Martin Luther King called the “chief counsel to the civil rights movement.” The book was released in late May; in early July, Biden announced that Gray would be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honour. It was awarded last week.
Gray, 91, was a young man with great aspirations growing up in the segregated south. Preaching and teaching were the two professions open to a Black man in Alabama in the 1940s. He became a preacher in his early 20s.
“After graduating from Alabama State, I considered becoming a teacher,” Gray writes. “But when I interviewed for a job in Lowndes County, the superintendent referred to me as ‘boy’; that was the end of that for me. If teachers are called ‘boy’ I wanted no part of that.”
Gray wanted no part of the Jim Crow south. Growing up in Montgomery, he had ridden segregated buses back and forth to Alabama State. It was on those buses that he decided to become a lawyer in order to challenge segregation. So he went north to law school in Cleveland and returned as one of a handful of Black attorneys in Alabama.
The Montgomery buses would chart the course of Gray’s entire life.
In December 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger. That sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, which in turn brought litigation that resulted in the Supreme Court ruling that segregated busing was unconstitutional.
The Montgomery bus boycott brought a new generation of civil rights leaders to the fore. The boycott was led by a 26-year-old preacher from the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Martin Luther King Jr. And when King was charged with violating Alabama’s anti-boycott laws, he turned to Gray, also 26, to defend him.
The case against King was quite straightforward. Alabama had a law against boycotting businesses. King was leading a boycott. But Gray innovated with a masterful defence: he put segregation on trial, calling dozens of witnesses to testify about the dehumanizing treatment they had received.
King lost at trial, but the nation admired the courageous young pastor and had to acknowledge the reality of segregation. King emerged a hero in the Black community and a national civil rights leader with credibility amongst all races. And Fred Gray, though losing that case, pioneered a legal strategy that would launch his own career and a thousand other civil rights cases — many of the most prominent of which Gray would handle himself.
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