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FRED GRAY
It’s no exaggeration to say that Fred Gray was present at the very birth of the modern civil rights movement. As a young attorney in Montgomery, Alabama, he represented Rosa Parks after she had been jailed for not giving up her seat to a white person on a city bus—the December 1955 event that sparked the Montgomery bus boycott and brought recognition to a young preacher named Martin Luther King Jr. In the decades that followed, Mr. Gray, a 1954 graduate of the Western Reserve University law school, went on to represent Dr. King and other key figures in the battle for civil rights. He also gained recognition for being one of the first African Americans elected to the Alabama Legislature since Reconstruction, and for representing the defendants in the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study case, in which African American men became unwitting subjects in a study of the effects of untreated syphilis. Now a senior partner in the Alabama law firm Gray, Langford, Sapp, McGowan, Gray and Nathanson, and a Case trustee, Mr. Gray received the prestigious 2004 Thurgood Marshall Award for civil rights. He is the author of two books: his autobiography, Bus Ride to Justice (1995), and The Tuskegee Syphilis Study (1998).
I was born in Montgomery, so we knew that everything was separated based on race. There were two worlds. I lived in one, and the white community lived in the other.
My first real integrated society was when I came to law school in Cleveland.
[Thelma Glass, one of Mr. Gray’s professors at Alabama State] told us that one thing we really needed to do as we were entering college and preparing for our work was to try and learn as much as we could about the instructor or professor who was teaching the course. Learn how they liked for the work to be presented, and to try and present it to them the way they wanted. And I found it to be pretty good advice over life. I’ve done that not only in college but with judges. Instead of arguing with them about whether they’re right or wrong, I try to find out what they want and how they want it, in order to obtain what I’m trying to obtain.
I try always to conduct myself in such a fashion that what I’m doing is not personal.
After Mrs. Parks had been arrested that Thursday, we made all the preparations between Thursday and Monday. After her trial, when I saw all the people staying off the buses early that morning, I knew this was something much larger than I happened to be.
I always knew that there was the possibility of being hurt, but I never let it bother me to the extent of me being afraid of doing what I thought I needed to do.
Mrs. Parks and Dr. King were just like any of the other people in Montgomery. They were no special people, and they were no famous people then. They simply were persons who were doing what they thought was right.
When I started out, I was not married. I got married right in the middle
of the bus boycott, and it was a bus boycott wedding.
I had gone to Nashville [the Nashville Christian Institute, an African American boarding school] with the purpose of becoming a minister. And my plan when I came back to Montgomery was to be a teacher and a preacher.
Religion plays a very major role not only in my career but in my life, because I think it is my sense of justice and my sense of religion that pointed up to me the inequality in our system—and helped instill within me a desire to want to try and change it, and to try and change it within the framework of our legal system. I’ve tried to teach my children the same way.
During my junior year at Alabama State, I made a secret commitment that I kept for about thirty-five years. And that was that I was going to go to law school—I couldn’t attend the University of Alabama law school then, because it was segregated—and I would finish law school, come back, become a lawyer, and destroy everything segregated I could find.
The case that I have had more personal feelings involved is probably Pollard v. United States of America, frequently known as the people involved in the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study.
I’ve probably handled as many school desegregation cases as any lawyer who’s engaged in private practice.
I still preach, when called upon to do so. 
As told to Jeffrey Bendix
Photograph, taken at Morehouse College, by Billy Howard. Behind Mr. Gray is a statue of Martin Luther King Jr.
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