Over the past seven decades , longtime Alabama civil right lawyerFred Gray represented Rosa Parks , Martin Luther King Jr.and the victims of the infamousTuskegee syphilis experiment , in which the U.S. Public Health Service refuse for decade to cater promptly available discourse to sinister men who had the disease .
Gray run important roles in landmarkSupreme Court decisionsthat outlawed segregate public transportation andaffirmed the strategy of the Montgomery omnibus boycott organizers . He protect the freedom of association guaranteed by the First Amendment bypreventing Alabama functionary from find the NAACP ’s rank list . He contend in the Supreme Court a case on racial gerrymandering that redefined the metropolis boundaries to eject 400 shameful people — but no white people — from the city limit of Tuskegee , Alabama , which jell the microscope stage for the one - someone , one - vote rule thatgoverns redistricting after every census . And when state and local segregator leaders in Alabama process the national press and local civic rightfield leaders , Gray ’s legal effortsafforded strong constitutional protectionto critic of public functionary and government policy .
As a scholar of constitutional legal philosophy and civil rights , I understand that Fred Gray hashad an enormous impacton American jurisprudence and beau monde . His cases are taught in every jurisprudence school in the body politic , and his work has led to rudimentary reforms in legal school of thought and helped to cement important change in the life of ordinary multitude all over the res publica .
I ’m not the only individual to recognize Gray ’s enormous contributions : Martin Luther King Jr. called him " the brilliant immature Negro who later became the chief counsel for the protest motion . " And July 7 , Grayreceived the Presidential Medal of Freedom , the highest civilian honor in the country , from President Joe Biden .
‘Destroy Everything Segregated’
Remarkably , Fred Gray did not plan on becoming a lawyer .
But that ambition changed during his junior twelvemonth at what was then telephone Alabama State College for Negroes — now Alabama State University . Fed up with degrading handling on Montgomery ’s segregated autobus , Graywrote in a memoir :
He would go to law of nature schoolhouse , he write , " determined to destroy everything segregate that I could find . " And there were wad of segregated things to demolish : stiff sequestration of trapping , education and caper , and almost no mordant people were allowed to vote anywhere in Alabama .
But satisfy this ambition would be a actual challenge . No law school in Alabama admitted Black scholar . Although he almost certainly could have won a suit to force his admission to the University of Alabama , he realized that the regime would bump some excuse to prevent him from fine-tune or getting allow in to the taproom .
So Gray recruit at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland , principally because he could shape part time while going to school . " In September of 1951 , with scantily enough money to cover expenses , I drive a segregated wagon train to Cleveland to commence law studies,“he wrote in his memoir .
More importantly , he became active in the NAACP , where he got to knowRosa Parksand other leading civil rights activists . This made him the go - to lawyer for the apparent movement and set him on the path of execute his ambitiousness to destruct segregation .
After fuck off his law stage in 1954 , he moved back home to Montgomery , Alabama . Then he faced the intimidating job of find fibre references from five experienced local lawyers before he could sit for the Alabama measure test . The job was that there were fewer than five experienced Black attorney in the state of matter at the time . But several white lawyers — notablyClifford Durr , a lead New Deal attorney and brother - in - law of Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black — supported his software .
But no whitened lawyer would apply him , and there was only one other Black attorney in Montgomery . So he rented a belittled office staff from a Black minister who served as an adviser and helped refer guest to him .
Protesting Segregation in Schools, Buses and Lunch Counters
From his stand in Montgomery , Gray representedsit - in sales demonstrator arrested for resist segregated lunch counters andfreedom rider , the protester — white and Black — who sit buses throughout the South to protest separatism on buses and in terminals .
Gray ’s sound workdesegregated state universities and public schools throughout Alabama . He file the lawsuitthat allowed the Selma - to - Montgomery marchto continue after the police violence against footslogger on what became known as Bloody Sunday . That marching led to the passageway of the Voting Rights Act . Then , Gray wonsome of the most authoritative early casestesting the law ’s hope that bleak people could no longer be disenfranchised .
Gray knew that his efforts would obtain the wrath of the white baron structure . And that wrath was not long in coming .
For instance , state sureness in 1956 , at the height of the heap protest , indicted him for shake up up civil rights lawsuit , which could have lead in his jurisprudence license ’s being lift . The charges were dismissed almost at once because it was clean that the state had no case on the merits and miss jurisdiction to prosecute him . Later that year , the local gulp board tried to induct him into the Army . The internal director of selective service , Gen. Lewis Hershey , squashed that gambit .
At historic period 91 , Gray is still rehearse jurisprudence full time — while the U.S. still faces enormous challenge tackle systemic racism . That ’s a compass point not lost on Gray even after a lifetime of success in fighting separatism .
Inan consultation he throw to USA Today in 2005to mark the porta of a four - twelvemonth traveling showing on the Montgomery bus boycott arise by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service and the Rosa Parks Museum , Gray said , " My interest group and my concern is not so much to … commemorate what happened 50 year ago but to seem at where we are now . We have to realize racism is not going to go away by itself . "
Jonathan Entin is Professor Emeritus of law and adjunct professor of political scientific discipline at Case Western Reserve University . He has know Fred Gray for nearly 40 year and has written extensively about his oeuvre and career .
This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license . you may find the original article here .
