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Civil Rights Attorney Fred D. Gray to be recognized with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on July 7

Civil Rights Attorney Fred D. Gray to be recognized with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on July 7
Fred D. Gray – chief counsel to the civil rights movement

On July 7th at the White House, President Joseph R Biden will honor a group of 17 Americans with the nations highest civilian honor — the Presidential Medal of Freedom.   www.whitehouse.gov/…   

Presidential Medal of Freedom is not just our nation’s highest civilian honor—it’s a tribute to the idea that all of us, no matter where we come from, have the opportunity to change this country for the better.  President Obama

You will be familiar with many of the current group of honorees, which includes  Denzel Washington, Megan Rapinoe, Gabrielle Giffords, Simone Biles, Steve Jobs (posthumously) and John McCain (posthumously). 

Many Americans may be less familiar with some of the other honorees, including 91-year-old Alabama civil rights attorney Fred D. Gray. 

From his home state of Alabama, Gray has devoted his life and legal career to the ongoing struggle to eliminate racial segregation in American life. The important legal struggles that Gray helped fight and win include the right to equal treatment on public transportation, the right to vote, the right to protect the membership of an organization, equal access to public education, equal access to farm subsidies, health care and the right to serve on civil juries.  Gray also successfully sued the U.S. government on behalf of the victims of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment.

Civil Rights Attorney Fred D. Gray to be recognized with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on July 7
The Rosa Parks Bus, Montgomery City Bus #2857 restored and on display at the Henry Ford Museum 

Fred D. Gray Sr. — Chief Counsel of the modern Civil Rights movement

As I’ve written here previously www.dailykos.com/… www.dailykos.com there is a strong chance that many progressives who frequent this space are unfamiliar with Fred Gray and may not be aware of his accomplishments, while at the same time readily recognizing Gray’s work and his clients — Rosa Parks, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis and the Selma to Montgomery voting rights marchers,  and the victims of the notorious Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment.  

Gray is a humble man and has shunned the spotlight for most of his life, but he has now passed his 91th birthday and time has come for him to step into the light of history and be recognized for the vast swath of good that he has done during a long and remarkable career in the struggle for civil rights.


Fred David Gray 

Fred D. Gray Sn. was born December 14, 1930, in Montgomery Alabama, the historic Capital of the Confederacy.  Fred was youngest of five children. From the age of 2 he and his siblings were raised by a single mother in a shotgun house lacking plumbing, which was located on an unpaved section of W. Jefferson Davis Ave., in a segregated section of the city (a street recently renamed in Gray’s honor    www.nytimes.com/… ).

Gray was a gifted child who entered his aunt’s first-grade class at Loveless School at the age of five.  Nancy Gray and her children were active members the Holt Street Church of Christ in Montgomery, and Gray’s mother had always hoped that her youngest son would grow up to become a preacher.  After Fred Gray completed the seventh grade, his mother made arrangements for him to attend the Nashville Christian Institute (NCI), a segregated boarding school operated by Churches of Christ in Nashville Tennessee en.wikipedia.org/.… 

In 1943, Gray fulfilled his mother’s ambitions for him and enrolled at NCI.  Gray was a stand out student at NCI and by 1947 had completed his coursework on an accelerated schedule.  Gray was chosen to accompany the school’s president and most popular preacher, Marshall Keeble, on fundraising tours to churches within that predominantly white denomination.  It was in the context of those fundraising tours, preaching with Marshall Keeble, that Fred Gray began to develop the skills as an orator that would later serve him so well in the courtroom.

After completing seminary at NCI, Gray returned to his hometown of Montgomery and shortly before his 17th birthday, enrolled at Alabama State College (for Negroes) where he planned to train to become a teacher.  To reach school from his home Gray road the city buses across town and was thus all to familiar with the treatment that Black riders faced.  Gray helped to pay for his college education by working as a district manager of the Alabama Journal newspaper.  At that stage in his life, Fred Gray aspired to become a history teacher and preacher, but during his studies at Alabama State, a faculty mentor encouraged Fred Gray to consider law school.  

Gray took that advice to heart, but in 1951, none of the law schools in Alabama would accept black students, so after completing his undergraduate degree at Alabama State, Gray looked to the north, where he gained admission to Western Reserve University Law School (now Case Western Reserve University or CWRU) in Cleveland, Ohio.

Civil Rights Attorney Fred D. Gray to be recognized with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on July 7
Fred Gray and his mother Nancy Jones Gray in the entrance to her store, c. 1950

Fred Gray completed his law degree at WRU Law in 1954, and after passing both the Ohio and Alabama bar exams at age 23, he returned to his home town of Montgomery, joined the local chapter of the NAACP, and opened a law office.

Gray had privately pledged to himself that he would fight the city’s segregation laws and so in 1955 he began what would be his life long mission,

‘to destroy all things segregated.’

In 1955, the young attorney Fred D. Gray became the Deputy Youth Director at Montgomery NAACP chapter’s Youth Council.  The Youth Council Director was also the local chapter’s secretary, Rosa Parks.  

Fred Gray’s law office was just a block and half from the Montgomery department store where Rosa Parks worked as a tailor’s assistant and seamstress. During the course of the year 1955, Fred Gray and Rosa Parks met almost every day for lunch, during which they discussed the problems faced by their city.  

When 15-year-old Claudette Colvin, one of Park’s and Gray’s Youth Council members was arrested in March of 1955 for failing to give up her seat on a Montgomery City Bus for the benefit of a white male patron, Colvin became Fred Gray’s first civil rights client en.wikipedia.org/….  During the course of that year, Gray added four more African American women to his client list, each of whom had been mistreated on Montgomery City buses.

Emmett Till

Those lunchtime conversations between Fred Gray and Rosa Parks must have included discussion of the murder of Emmett Till.  On Nov 27, 1955, four days before her arrest, Parks had attended a crowded meeting at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church to hear Dr. T. R. M. Howard speak about Emmett Till. Howard was the lead organizer in a growing effort to find justice for Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Chicago lad who had been kidnapped, brutally tortured, murdered and then dumped into the Tallahatchie River near Money, Mississippi three months earlier.  Two men who later admitted to Till’s murder had been summarily acquitted by an all white jury in an all too brief trial  www.loc.gov/.…  The third person indicted for Till’s murder was never even tried  www.chicagotribune.com/…  Years after Rosa Park’s Dec 1, 1955 arrest, she would tell Jesse Jackson that she had often been thinking about Emmett Till that fall and that he was on her mind again during her bus ride home the day she refused to give up her seat.

Rosa Parks became the public face of the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56, when she too refused to give up her seat on Dec 1, 1955.  While Gray also served as Rosa Park’s attorney, it was Gray’s representation of his 5 other clients in a suit known as Browder v Gayle, that actually won the day and forever changed the segregated boarding and seating laws on Montgomery city buses and ended the 381 day Montgomery Bus Boycott.  The Bus Boycott led to Gray’s representation of another client, one of the Boycott’s leaders and its spokesman, the relatively unknown Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Civil Rights Attorney Fred D. Gray to be recognized with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on July 7
Rosa Parks, NAACP organizer E. D. Nixon, and their 25 year old attorney Fred D. Gray, at Rosa Parks Montgomery bail hearing in December, 1955.

The end of the Bus Boycott created considerable fallout in Montgomery. While buses were integrated, bus stops were not, and bus riders following the boycott continued to face harassment and some were even shot at.  

Alabama state attorney general John Patterson took steps in 1956 to punish the NAACP for instigating the Bus Boycott by attempting to outlaw the operation of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Alabama, and Gray was one of several attorneys who provided legal counsel to the organization until it was once again permitted to operate in the state eight years later.

Civil Rights Attorney Fred D. Gray to be recognized with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on July 7
Rosa Parks and her lifelong friend and attorney Fred D. Gray

Gray would go on to represent MLK Jr. on trumped up tax evasion charges in 1960.  A case he won before an all white jury.  Had Gray and King not prevailed in that case, King’s reputation would certainly have been tarnished and he may never have achieved the prominence that he did. 

 “There were times when Dr. King said, ‘Fred, I understand what you say the law is, but our conscience says that the law is unjust and we cannot obey it. So, if we are arrested we will be calling on you to defend us’” 

Gray would later represent John Lewis and Martin Luther King during the Selma to Montgomery Voting Rights Marches in 1965,  winning the Williams v Wallace suit that would eventually prompt passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.   obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/.

Fred Gray’s Resume

Civil Rights Attorney Fred D. Gray to be recognized with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on July 7
Fred Gray holds the microphone while his client Martin Luther King Jr. describes the Selma to Montgomery Voting Rights March and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The list of major civil rights cases that Fred Gray won can be found in most constitutional law textbooks,  they include :

  • Browder v. Gayle 1956 which ended segregation of city buses in Montgomery. Building on Brown v Board of Education,  Gray demonstrated that ‘separate but equal’ is and can never be equal and showed that concept to be flawed both legally and sociologically, ending the long standing legal precedent set in 1896 in Plessy v Ferguson.
  • Gomillion v. Lightfoot 1960,  prevented the City of Tuskegee from extreme gerrymandering that had excluded black voters from the city limits. That landmark case opened the door for redistricting and reapportioning various legislative bodies across the nation laying the foundation for the concept, “one man one vote”.
  • National Association for the Advancement of Colored People v. State of Alabama, (ex rel. John Patterson, Attorney General,) was brought by the State of Alabama in which it outlawed the NAACP from doing business in the State of Alabama.  This case was taken to the US Supreme Court, three times through the state court system, and twice through the federal court system. The ultimate result was the NAACP was able to resume its business operations in the State of Alabama.www.pad.org/…
  • Dixon v. Alabama State Board of Education, 1961, reinstated students who had been unconstitutionally expelled from Alabama State College for participation in the Lunch Counter Sit In and held that all students attending state supported institutions are entitled to a hearing before expulsion.  The legal principle announced in that case was subsequently applied to many other areas of the law.
  • Williams v. Wallace, 1965, was a class action suit brought by African Americans participating in the Selma to Montgomery Voting Rights March against Governor Wallace and the State of Alabama and resulted in the court ordering Governor Wallace and the State of Alabama (and Lyndon Johnson) to protect  the Selma to Montgomery Voting Rights marchers who had been beaten and turned back at the Edmund Pettus bridge and the turned back again.  This suit allowed Alabama residents to present grievances as a result of their being unable to vote.  Those actions led directly to the enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
  • Mitchell v. Johnson, decided in 1966, was one of the first civil actions brought to remedy systematic exclusion of blacks from jury service, making it more likely that defendants would be judged by a jury of their peers.
  •  Lee v. Macon County Board of Education  resulted in the racial integration of all state institutions of higher learning under the Alabama State Board of Education, and 104 of the then 121 elementary and secondary school systems in the state.
Civil Rights Attorney Fred D. Gray to be recognized with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on July 7
Fred Gray and Martin Luther King Jr. enjoying a moment at a political rally in Tuskegee Alabama, April 29, 1966.  Gray was then a candidate for a seat in the State Legislature, which he would eventually win four years later in 1970.

In 1970, Fred Gray was elected to serve in the Alabama Legislature, making him one of the first African Americans to serve in the state legislature since reconstruction.  He held a seat representing Tuskegee from 1970-1974.

In 1979 President Carter nominated Gray for a seat on the Federal Court in Alabama, but behind the scenes that nomination was blocked by forces antithetical to Gray’s civil rights work and he was compelled to withdraw from consideration. vettingroom.org/…

Justice for victims of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment

In 1932, the United States Public Health Service launched an experiment in Macon County, Alabama, to observe untreated syphilis. They enlisted 600 black men, 399 of whom had syphilis, by concealing the experiment’s purpose and the infected men’s diagnosis. Farmer Herman Shaw lived in poverty and, like many others, joined the study for promised hot meals, free medical exams, and burial insurance.

Researchers told participants they were receiving treatment for “bad blood,” while administering only iron tonic and aspirin. For decades after penicillin was established as a cure for syphilis in 1947, researchers not only continued to experiment on the men but also barred them from treatment.

The experimentation ended in 1972 after a whistleblower exposed it. Attorney Fred Gray filed suit on behalf of the victims and won a multi-million dollar settlement.

The money funded medical care for survivors and their families, but could not undo the harm: 128 participants died of syphilis or related complications, 40 wives were infected, and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis. Many families also suffered under the stigma. “People think it’s the scourge of the earth to have [syphilis] in your family,” explained Albert Julkes, whose father was a victim of the experiment.

After the study was exposed, Congress passed the National Research Act to prevent human exploitation in research. The federal government did not issue a formal apology to participants and their families until 1997, and no one was prosecuted for the deaths and injuries the experiment caused. Today, an undisclosed portion of the settlement money remains in court-controlled accounts with an uncertain fate.   eji.org/…

Gray won a multi-million dollar monetary settlement for the victims of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study,  a formal apology from President Bill Clinton and a permanent place to tell the victims story, so that their mistreatment cannot be forgotten.

Mr. Gray is the principal founder of the Tuskegee History Center  www.tuskegeecenter.org, which serves as a memorial to the participants of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, it serves to educates the public on the contributions made in the fields of human and civil rights by Native Americans, Americans of African descent, as well as Americans of European descent.  With a special focus on the extraordinary human and civil rights history of Macon County, Alabama, the museum is considered one of the best small museums in the nation.

Recognition for Fred Gray

Case Western Reserve University named Gray the Fletcher Reed Andrews Graduate of the Year in 1985, elected him to the Society of Benchers in 1986, and presented him the highest honor the law school bestows on one of its graduates, the Law School Centennial Medal, in September, 1993.

In 1996, the American Bar Association bestowed upon Mr. Gray its “Spirit of Excellence Award”, which celebrates the achievements of lawyers of color and their contributions to the legal profession.  It also recognizes their commitment to pave the way to success for other lawyers of color and commemorates the rich diversity that lawyers of color bring to the legal profession and to society.

In 2003, Gray was awarded the Soaring Eagles Award from the Minority Caucus of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, which symbolizes the struggle of lawyers of color as they pursue personal and professional excellence and success.  

In 2004, Fred Gray was the recipient of Harvard University Law School’s highest award, the Charles Hamilton Houston Medallion

In 2004 Gary was the recipient of the American Bar Association’s Thurgood Marshall Award, and in October the Sarah T. Hughes Civil Rights Award given by the Federal Bar Association.  

In 2005 he was inducted into the Alabama Academy of Honor.  

He is the 2009 recipient of the American Association for Justice, Leonard E. Weinglass in Defense of Civil Liberties Award; and the National Bar Association, Vince Monroe Townsend, Jr. Legends Award.  

From the City of Montgomery in 2013, he was awarded the “Gifts of Giants Award”, in Celebration of Montgomery Bus Boycott Civil Rights Legends; Commendation by Alabama Governor Robert Bentley (2014); NBA Resolution naming the annual “Fred D. Gray Hall of Fame Award Luncheon”.

In 2015 a historic marker noting his contributions was erected in front of Supreme Court of Alabama building;

Civil Rights Attorney Fred D. Gray to be recognized with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on July 7
Fred Gray speaking at the dedication of the historic marker in his name on the steps of the Alabama Supreme Court, 2016

Gray has also received the Pillar of Justice Award by The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law; Lifetime Achievement Award by Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc.; Lifetime Achievement Award by Hyundai Motor America; NBA Board of Governors’ Resolution to President Barack Obama to confer the Presidential Medal of Freedom Award; Honorabilis by Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill in recognition of lifetime achievements; Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Annual Legislative Conference Co-Chairs’ Phoenix Award.
 
Gray is the first person of color elected as President of the Alabama State Bar Association and served as its 126th President for the year 2002-2003. As president he was instrumental in the Board of Bar Commissioners initiating the Alabama Lawyers Hall of Fame. www.pad.org/…

Gray has not been completely ignored in popular culture in depictions of the Civil Rights struggle.

Gray is portrayed by Cuba Gooding, Jr. in the 2014 film Selma, which dramatizes the Selma to Montgomery marches and Gray’s argument before Judge Frank Johnson 

Shawn Michael Howard portrays Gray in the 2001 film Boycott, in which Gray, himself, plays a cameo role as a supporter of Martin Luther King Jr.

Gray was depicted in the 2016 stage play The Integration of Tuskegee High School. The production premiered at Auburn University, was written and directed by Tessa Carr, and dramatizes Gray’s involvement in the case of Lee v. Macon County Board of Education.

Gray is portrayed by Aki Omoshaybi in a 2018 episode of Doctor Who, “Rosa“.  en.wikipedia.org/…

Civil Rights Attorney Fred D. Gray to be recognized with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on July 7
Fred Gray’s mug shot following his arrest for helping to organize the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56

The Presidential Medal of Freedom

Civil Rights Attorney Fred D. Gray to be recognized with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on July 7
The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the nation’s highest civilian honor

The Presidential Medal of Freedom is an award established by John F Kennedy, that is bestowed by the president of the United States to recognize people who have made

“an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.”

All of Fred Gray’s more famous clients have received this honor.

Civil Rights leaders who have been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom include:

  • Martin Luther King Jr. 1977
  • Andrew Young 1981
  • Rosa Parks 1996
  • Jesse Jackson 2000
  • Mildred Jeffery 2000
  • John Lewis 2011
  • Cicely Tyson 2016

Sixty-six years ago, on February 1, 1956, Fred D. Gray filed suit in U.S. District Court in the Montgomery Bus Boycott case.  The 66th anniversary of the District Court’s decision in that case, Browder v. Gayle,  was on June 5, 2022, and not long afterward  President Biden (himself a recipient of the Medal of Freedom) announced that Gray would be honored for his life-long contributions to the Civil Rights movement with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Civil Rights Attorney Fred D. Gray to be recognized with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on July 7
Fred Gray and a crowd of supporters cheering for his client Martin Luther King Jr. on March 22, 1956,  King had just been found guilty of leading the Montgomery bus boycott but Circuit Judge Eugene Carter suspended the $500 fine pending an appeal.

Hope you will find time on July 7th to watch President Biden present the Medal of Freedom awards to Fred Gray and his fellow honorees.




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