One of the themes of the new Biden administration is Equity. On January 26, Biden intends to sign Executive Orders overturning Trump policies related to Equity. This diary is a plea to Joe Biden and his staff to act now to use that moment to recognize Fred D. Gray, the legal lion of the Civil Rights movement, for his lifetime achievements in helping to destroy segregation.
The Presidential Medal of Freedom is an award 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.
Attorney Gray is clearly such a person. Having reached the age of 90, his lifetime achievements should not wait a week longer for the recognition they deserve. I urge Joe Biden to award Fred D. Gray the Presidential Medal of Freedom, with distinction.
Since you’re reading this here on DKOS, regardless of your age, race, or gender there is a pretty good chance that you are at least passingly familiar with the stories and mileposts of the modern Civil Rights Movement. You know about integration of the US Military during the Truman administration, about Jackie Robinson en.wikipedia.org/... and Larry Doby breaking the color barrier in baseball blogs.fangraphs.com/.... You know about the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education striking down “separate but equal” and the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till. You know about Rosa Parks and the 1955-56 Montgomery Bus Boycott.
You’ll certainly know about the Freedom Riders and their efforts in 1961 to desegregate interstate travel on Buses en.wikipedia.org/..... You recognize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, during which the reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr gave his famous ‘I have a dream speech’ www.npr.org/.... You will know about the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, that resulted in the senseless deaths four young girls en.wikipedia.org/.... You’ll recognize Norman Rockwell’s 1964 painting of 6 year old Ruby Bridge’s being escorted to school in New Orleans en.wikipedia.org/.... Bloody Sunday and the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights marches led by the late John Lewis, the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committeeen.wikipedia.org/.... You will have seen the photos of the brutal beatings of marchers on the Edmund Pettis Bridge. You’ll be aware of the the horror of Tuskegee Experiment which came to light in 1972, in which hundreds of black men who unknowingly had syphilis were allowed to go untreated and uninformed for 25 years, as a means of tracking long term health effects of the diseaseswww.history.com/.... You’ll know about all that.
But there is a good chance that you have never heard of Fred David Gray Sr. and his roll in fighting and winning some of the most important legal battles of the modern Civil Rights Movement. Some might say that Gray was the right person in the right place at the right time, but it took enormous courage fortitude determination and focus as well as an awesome strength of will to live Gray’s life. It’s past time that Fred Gray receive the highest possible recognition for his life’s work in dismantling and destroying segregation, by demonstrating that segregation is unconstitutional and proving that case by case before the highest courts. I’m urging Joe Biden to award Fred D. Gray Sn. the Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction. That honor is past due.
Follow along if you will and I’ll try to outline some of the reasons why.
On December 1, 1955, just hours before her arrest, Fred Gray joined his friend and frequent lunch companion Rosa Parks for lunch. I’ve little doubt that Gray still remembers what they discussed over lunch that day 65 years ago, but we know from later comments made by Rosa Parks to Emmett Till’s mother what was on her mind, the brutal lynching of Emmett Till and the acquittal of his murderers lay heavily upon Rosa Parks as she rode the bus home later that evening.
Emmett Till
Rosa Parks was the secretary of the Montgomery chapter of NAACP and worked as a seamstress in a Montgomery Alabama department store. After she began attending NAACP meetings with her husband Raymond Parks, whom she described as “the first real activist I ever met,” Rosa was roped into the job as the group’s secretary, because no one else wanted to do it, and it was a job that clearly needed to be done.
On Nov. 27, four days before her arrest, Parks attended a standing room only meeting at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church to hear Dr. T. R. M. Howard speak about Emmett Till. Howard was the lead organizer in the growing effort to find justice for Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Chicago lad who had been tortured and murdered near Money, Mississippi three months earlier.
While visiting his relatives in Mississippi, Till went to the Bryant store with his two cousins Wheeler Parker and Simeon Wright to buy some penny candy. Till was the last of the three to leave the store, where he had purchased two cents' worth of bubble gum. During that transaction Till had some sort of brief interaction alone inside the store with Carolyn Bryant, the store’s cashier. Bryant would later claim that Emmett had touched her and grabbed her around the waist in a way that was both menacing and sexually aggressive, allegations that Bryant many years later confessed were simply “not true.” It is however true that after leaving the store Till directed a loud wolf whistle, a big city 'whee wheeeee!'" towards Bryant.
Carolyn Bryant’s husband, Roy Bryant, and his half brother, J.W. Milam heard about the incident, and then tracked down, kidnapped beat and brutally murdered Till, savaged his dead body, weighted it down and dumped it in the Tallahatchie River.
The newspaper coverage of the lynching, Till’s funeral and the brief murder trial and acquittal of Roy Bryant and J. M. Milam by an all white jury propelled many young African Americans and progressive whites to join the Civil Rights Movement. Six months after their acquittal in a paid interview published by Look Magazine, Bryant and Milam admitted that they had killed Till.
Before Rosa Parks there was Claudette Colvin
That hole in my education about Fred Gray began to be filled in 1995, in an unexpected and surprisingly personal way, after I’d taken a new job in Tuscaloosa Alabama. I was moving to Tuscaloosa from New Orleans and needed to a place to live. I found what was for me a perfect apartment. After filling out a lease application for that fabulous one bedroom apartment in an isolated stand alone building, my prospective landlord, a white attorney not much older than me while reviewing my application commented on a portion of my background. On the line marked ‘education’ I’d indicated that I was a graduate of Case Western Reserve University. In passing, my prospective landlord commented that he was familiar with Western Reserve University because that was where Fred Gray had studied law. To which I responded — who is Fred Gray? And so a hole in my education began to fill.
My soon to be new landlord glibly replied that Fred Gray had been Rosa Parks attorney and had also been the Reverend Martin Luther King’s first attorney. After swallowing my ignorance, that fact prompted one of those lightbulb switch moments and a mused though, because I had known a Fred Gray, a powerfully built young dark skinned lad from Montgomery whose mother was a teacher and who father was a Cleveland attorney. That Fred Gray and I were little league teammates during the summer of 1967 and later classmates in Jr High and High School after. As 12 year-olds in 1967 Freddie and I played on a little league baseball team (the Bears), he was the catcher and I was a pitcher. Freddie and I were never close but we were friends all the same.
I somehow knew Fred’s dad was a lawyer and I had a vivid memory of briefly meeting him once, on the evening of my little league pitching debut. It was a particularly memorable day for me because my Dad had also come out to watch the game and that wasn’t something he often did. Our father’s had struck up a conversation along the first base line as they watched Freddie and I toss warm up pitches back and forth before the first inning. That was a particularly memorable day in my life because it marked the end of my pitching career and my youthful asperations to be a ball player.
It was a not too hot summer day and I’d spent a good part of the late morning and early afternoon playing tennis with my best friend on the neighborhood clay courts. In the era before the tie breaker, our one set match had gone on an on an on as neither of us could reach the necessary 2 game lead. I think we played 28 or 29 games before it was decided. I oddly cannot recall who eventually won that epic match, but I’m certain that by the time of my little league pitching debut a few hours later, I was arm tired and dehydrated. While my warmups seemed promising, I hurt my arm throwing too hard in the first inning. In the second I lost all velocity and got shelled. By the third inning we were way behind and I was playing second base. I never pitched again.
Martin Luther King Jr. made several trips to Cleveland in 1967 in support of the mayoral campaign of Carl Stokes, who would be elected as Cleveland’s first black mayor. Its likely that during those visits King visited Freddie’s family case.edu/...
I told my new landlord in Tuscaloosa that I thought Fred Gray’s son had been my catcher in little league. Turns out I was wrong about that, the Fred Gray I knew wasn’t Fred D. Gray’s son, he was his nephew and namesake, the son of Fred Gray’s older brother Thomas Gray who had also moved to Cleveland from Montgomery to study law and begin a new career, following in his younger brothers footsteps. Thomas Gray had been co-owner of an radio repair and appliance store in Montgomery, where his customers included the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King. Thomas Gray was among the many organizers of the 1955-1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott. He was on the board of directors of the Montgomery Improvement Association, the organization that organize and sponsored the Bus Boycott, and was among the eighty-nine persons arrested and charged with violating the Alabama anti-boycott law. The Freddie I knew as a young man knew Rosa Parks and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and E. D. Nixon, and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy.
Bearing Witness to History
Most of us won’t make history, but we can and should all play a role in bearing witness to the historical events that touch our lives. Ask your parents and grandparents sometime about their lives and you might be surprised if you ask the right questions the surprising things you might learn.
I was born in Cleveland Ohio in the Spring of 1955 and lived through most of the modern Civil Rights Movement. As a child and young adult I was largely oblivious, though I would later learn that my community was the scene of some significant events and that my father and his father had been witness to some of the early events.
On December 1, 1955 Fred Gray Sr., a young attorney fresh out of Western Reserve Law School, having passed both the Ohio and Alabama Bar Exams and returned to Montgomery Alabama, ate lunch with his friend Rosa Parks. At that time Gray was already representing 15 year-old Claudette Colvin who had been arrested on March 2, 1955 for refusing to give up her seat to a white woman on a crowded, segregated Montgomery Alabama city bus. Colvin’s arrest occurred nine months before a similar incident in which Rosa Parks arrest helped spark the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott.
Organizers of the protest met the next day, Friday Dec 2, in the basement of the Dexter Avenue King Memorial church to plan what became the most successful public protest in American history. www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/...
Colvin was one of five plaintiffs in the first federal court case known as Browder v. Gayle, filed by Fred Gray on February 1, 1956, to challenge segregation on Montgomery city buses. In a United States district court, she testified before the three-judge panel that heard the case.
On June 13, 1956, the judges determined that the state and local laws requiring bus segregation in Alabama were unconstitutional. The case went to the United States Supreme Court on appeal by the state of Alabama, and the high court refused to hear the case, and in so doing upheld the district court's ruling on November 13, 1956. One month later, the Supreme Court affirmed the order to Montgomery and the state of Alabama to end bus segregation. The Montgomery bus boycott was then called off, it had lasted 382 days. newsouthbooks.com/…
For many years, Montgomery's black leaders did not publicize Colvin's pioneering effort. She was an unmarried teenager at the time, and was reportedly impregnated by a married man. Colvin has said, "Young people think Rosa Parks just sat down on a bus and ended segregation, but that wasn't the case at all." It is generally accepted that Colvin’s case was downplayed by the civil rights campaigners because she was young and sassy and promiscuous. An out of wedlock pregnancy shortly after the incident sealed her fate. As Rosa Park’s later said "If the white press got ahold of that information, they would have [had] a field day. They'd call her a bad girl, and her case wouldn't have a chance."
www.c-span.org/…
newsouthbooks.com/…
Fred Gray
Born on 14 December 1930, in Montgomery, Alabama, Gray was ordained a Christian minister as a teenager and, following high school, he received a BS from Alabama State College (for Negroes) in 1951.
At a time when no law school in Alabama would accept African American students, Gray moved to Cleveland Ohio and in 1954 earned a juris doctor degree from Case Western Reserve University School of Law. After graduation Gray returned to Montgomery and assumed the mantle of chief legal counsel for the anti segregation protest movement and took up a life long personal quest to destroy segregation. www.jurist.org/...
Gray rose to prominence in the mid 1950s working with Martin Luther King Jr. and E.D. Nixon. In 1955 Gray defended Cludette Colvin and later Rosa Parks, who were charged with disorderly conduct for refusing to seat themselves in the rear of segregated city buses at the outset of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. www.history.com/.. King was later charged with organizing the Bus Boycott in contravention with Alabama state law. kinginstitute.stanford.edu/...
In 1956 after Alabama Attorney General John Malcolm Patterson effectively prohibited the NAACP from operating in Alabama , Gray provided legal counsel for the next eight years (including three trips through the state court system and two through federal courts) until the organization was permitted to operate in the state.
Gray also successfully defended Martin Luther King Jr. from charges of tax evasion in 1960, winning an acquittal from an all-white jury. kinginstitute.stanford.edu/…
Other notable civil rights cases brought and argued by Gray included :
Dixon v. Alabama (1961, which established due process rights for students at public universities),
Gomillion v. Lightfoot (1962, which overturned state redistricting of Tuskegee that excluded most of the majority-black residents; this contributed to laying a foundation for "one man, one vote")
Williams v. Wallace (1963, which protected the Selma to Montgomery marchers). In another Supreme Court case, Gray was driven in his efforts to have the NAACP organize in Alabama after the group was forbidden in the state.
Alabama resisted integration of public schools following the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that ruled segregation of public schools was unconstitutional. Gray successfully represented Vivian Malone and James Hood, who had been denied admission to the University of Alabama, and they entered the university despite Governor George Wallace's Stand in the Schoolhouse Door incident.
In 1963 Gray successfully sued Florence State University (now University of North Alabama) on behalf of Wendell Wilkie Gunn, who had been denied admission based on race.
Gray also led the successful effort to desegregate Auburn University. In 1963 Gray filed the Lee v. Macon County Board of Education case, which in 1967 led a three-judge panel of U.S. District Judges to order all Alabama public schools not already subject to court orders to desegregate.
Lawsuits filed by Gray helped desegregate more than 100 local school systems, as well as all public colleges and universities in his home state.
Mitchell v. Johnson, decided in 1966, was another of Gray’s landmark cases, one of the first civil actions brought to remedy systematic exclusion of blacks from jury service.
Gray represented victims of the notorious Tuskegee Syphilis experiment and in 1997 helped convince President William Jefferson Clinton to make an official apology to the families and surviving participants of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. www.tolerance.org/…
In 1970, Gray, along with Thomas J. Reed, became the first African Americans elected as legislators in Alabama since Reconstruction. Gray's district included Tuskegee and parts of Barbour, Bullock, and Macon counties. en.wikipedia.org/.
In 1985 Fred David Gray was elected as the 43rd president of the National Bar Association.
Gray has received various awards and recognition for his accomplishments
In 1979, President Jimmy Carter nominated Gray to the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama, but Gray withdrew his name in August 1980, after opposition from conservative opponents.
Gray received the American Bar Association’s Equal Justice Award (1977),
the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Drum Major Award (1980),
the World Conference of Mayors’ Legal Award (1985).
He was elected president of the Alabama State Bar Association in 2001.
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, he was the recipient of Harvard University Law School’s highest award, the Charles Hamilton Houston Medallion as well as 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; 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/...
Montgomery Mayor Steven Reed has recently unveiled a plan to rename West Jeff Davis Avenue in Montgomery to Fred D. Gray Avenue in honor of the legendary civil rights attorney
Gray has not been completely ignored in popular culture 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
d be allowed to go forward.
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/…
On January 26, 2021 when the Biden administration turns its attention toward racial Equity, the new President should take a moment to recognize Fred David Gray’s 65-year struggle to destroy segregation by awarding him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, with Distinction.