The problem with this picture can’t be fixed with photoshop. It has nothing to do with the focus, brightness or contrast, nor with how the image is cropped or framed. The problem isn’t with the image itself but with public awareness of the individuals recorded in it. It’s the same problem with the following four photos. See if you can identify and name the people in these photos.
The problem with all these photos is that there is a good chance that a significant number of otherwise well informed, politically active and progressive minded Democrats who read and contribute to this forum cannot identify or name Fred D. Gray, the one person that appears in all of them. There is no shame in that. John Lewis, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King Jr, are civil rights icons, while Fred Gray has remained relatively obscure. Gray never sought the limelight, but the lack of public awareness and recognition for his vast contributions to the civil rights movement, that needs to change.
There is little doubt that readers of this forum know about key figures and moments in the modern civil rights moment. You know about Emmett Till, Claudette Colvin, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis. You know about the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Nashville Lunch Counter sit ins, the Freedom Riders and about Bloody Sunday and the Selma to Montgomery voting rights marches. What you may not know is that a great many of the key moments in the modern civil rights struggle would not have happened as they did and when they did were it not for the legal actions taken by Fred Gray.
Today, Tues. January 26, the Biden administration has signaled that it will turn its focus on Equity, and take steps to redress and reverse Trump era policies and longer standing racial inequities. In keeping with the theme of the day, now would be an ideal time for President Biden to announce his intention to recognize the life’s work of civil rights attorney Fred David Gray.
It is time now, for a new generation of Americans to learn the name and face of Fred Gray, to consider and recognize his life’s work in the ongoing struggle for equity, inclusion, racial equality and social justice; and to add Gray’s face and name to the list of civil rights icons. I call on the Biden administration to recognize Fred Gray and to validate Gray’s contribution to the civil rights struggle by awarding him the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Fred Gray
Fred David Gray was born on the 14th of December 1930, in Montgomery, Alabama, the former capitol of the Confederacy. Gray’s family lived on Jefferson Davis street.
Gray was ordained a Christian minister as a teenager and, following high school, he received a BS from Alabama State College for Negroes (1951) and an LLB from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio (1954). Gray then returned to Montgomery to open his private law practice while also serving as minister to the Holt Street Church of Christ. In 1950 Fred Gray was on a mission to “Destroy everything segregated I could find.” Gray believed that his best chance of achieving that goal was through the constitution, the law, and the courts, so he set about becoming a lawyer and using the law to achieve justice.
Claudette Colvin, Rosa Parks and Fred Gray
At a time when no law school in his home state of Alabama would accept Black students, Fred Gray applied to and was accepted by Western Reserve University Law School in Cleveland Ohio. Gray struggled financially but studied hard and in 1954 after completing his law degree at WRU and then passing both the Ohio and Alabama Bar exams, 23 year old Gray returned to his home town of Montgomery Alabama, where he began attending meetings of the local NAACP chapter and started his career as a civil rights attorney.
Gray’s first civil rights client was Claudette Colvin, a sassy 15-year old student at Booker T. Washington High School, and a member of Rosa Park’s NAACP Youth Council. On March 2 1955, nine months before Park’s arrest for a similar offence, Colvin was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery City bus for a white rider. Fred Gray became her attorney.
Fred Gray and Rosa Parks
Rosa Parks married barber and social activist Raymond Parks in 1932, and the couple joined the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). By the time that Parks became the public face of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in December of 1955, she had been the secretary of the local NAACP for twelve years. In the 1940s Parks founded the Montgomery NAACP Youth Council and when Fred Gray returned to Montgomery in 1954, he became her assistant or deputy at the Youth Council.
Fred Gray’s law office was located about a block and a half away from the Montgomery department store where Parks worked as a seamstress/tailor’s assistant. At lunch time, nearly every day since his return to Montgomery, Fred Gray and Rosa Parks met for lunch, where they ate and discussed politics, current events, civil rights and the activities of the NAACP Youth Council that they led. kinginstitute.stanford.edu/...
On Dec. 1, 1955, the day of her arrest, Rosa Parks had as usual eaten lunch with Fred Gray, as she did most days. Neither Gray or Parks have reported what they talked about over lunch that day, but Parks would later tell Emmett Till’s mother that Till’s recent lynching death was heavy on her mind nmaahc.si.edu/....
In his 1995 memoir, Bus Ride to Justice chronicling the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Gray noted that by December of 1955, “For almost a year, we met, shared our lunches and discussed the problems in Montgomery.” During those weekday lunches Gray and Parks had discussed how Parks might respond if like Gray’s client Claudette Colvin, Parks were ever confronted with another demand to give up her bus seat for a white rider, a problem she had experienced before.
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 determined 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; and whose murderers had been acquitted by an all white jury in an all too brief trial www.loc.gov/....
Although Rosa Parks arrest was not planned, she had long prepared for the eventuality and necessity of taking a personal stand to make changes in the demeaning way that Black patrons were treated by the white drivers and patrons on Montgomery’s city buses. On Dec 1, 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat, she never imagined the broader consequences that her personal act of defiance would take.
While Rosa Park’s became the public face of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which grew to become the most effective mass protest in American history, she was not among the plaintiffs in Fred Gray’s lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of racial segregation on city buses. Gray did represented Parks in a suit against the city of Montgomery but it was Claudette Colvin and four other women whose mistreatment on Montgomery buses were the subject of Fred Gray’s Browder v Gayle lawsuit in federal court. An action that Gray eventually won, leading to an end to segregation on Montgomery city buses (but sadly not in the bus stops where patrons waited) and the rise to national prominence of Martin Luther King Jr who had become the leader of that boycott. kinginstitute.stanford.edu/...
John Lewis and Fred Gray
John Lewis and Fred Gray first met in the summer of 1958. Lewis had written to Martin Luther King about his desire to attend the all white Troy State college near his SE Alabama home www.npr.org/....
King sent Lewis a bus ticket so that he could come to Montgomery to discuss the prospects of desegregating Alabama’s state colleges and it was Fred Gray who met Lewis at the bus station and took him to meet King at Ralph Abernathy's First Baptist Church to discuss his interest in applying for admission to segregated Troy State. King, Abernathy, and Fred Gray encouraged Lewis to apply, but King reportedly warned Lewis that while he was prepared to help fund his effort to break the color barrier at Troy State and to fight for it in court, there would be a price for Lewis and his family. King told Lewis that “If you really want to do it, we will see you through.” Although Gray prepared a lawsuit to pursue John Lewis’s desire to attend Troy State, Lewis eventually decided to follow another path. Lewis was ultimately unable to overcome his parents’ concerns about the certain blowback they would suffer from his efforts toward desegregation and so like Gray, Lewis decided to attend college out of state.
John Lewis accepted admission to the historically black Fisk University in Nashville, where he began his campaign of ‘Good Trouble’ as one of the organizers of the Nashville lunch counter sit in and then the Freedom Riders www.tennessean.com/.… www.lipscomb.edu/...
Lewis helped form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He joined the Freedom Rides of 1961, and in 1962 was elected to the board of SCLC. Lewis served as chairman of SNCC from 1963 until 1966, and in that role was a member of the “Big Six” black leaders who meet with President Kennedy in 1963 and was the keynote speaker at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Throughout that period, Fred Gray remained one of Lewis’ friends, advisors and attorneys.
The Nashville Lunch Counter Sit In
On at 12:40 on the afternoon of Feb. 13, 1960, John Lewis and other students from Fisk University, American Baptist Theological University and Tennessee State University entered the Kress, Woolworth and McClellan stores in Nashville. After making purchases, the students sat at the lunch counters where they were ignored and refused service.
Two hours later, the owners closed the counters without serving any of the students. According to media accounts at the time, store owners claimed that it was their “moral right” to decide whom they would or would not serve. During the next three months the sit-ins continued, not only at the three stores initially targeted but also at the Greyhound and Trailways bus terminals, a Grant’s retail store, a Walgreens drugstore and at two major Nashville department stores Cain-Sloan and Harveys.
The Selma to Montgomery Marches 1965
In that first photo in this diary, you almost certainly recognized John Lewis, the man on the right, the late congressman and civil rights icon, but not the one on the left, a man who was Lewis’ s mentor, friend and attorney. Gray did not stand shoulder to shoulder with John Lewis during the first Selma to Montgomery voting rights march on March 7, 1965. Fred Gray was not on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday when Lewis was beaten, but the next day, it was Gray who filed the lawsuit Williams v. Wallace www.clearinghouse.net/… on behalf of Lewis and the other march organizers, and that made all the difference.
Gray was not with Martin Luther King Jr. when the second march was turned back on March 9th. Ultimately it was the success of Gray’s lawsuit Williams v. Wallace www.clearinghouse.net/… that compelled Gov. George Wallace and President Johnson to protect the Selma to Montgomery marchers when they resumed their voting rights march for the third time two weeks later, resumed once again under the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr.
On March 21, 1965, thousands of protesters assembled in Selma to resume the march to Montgomery, which concluded on March 25. Along the way, thanks to Gray’s intervention, they were protected by the United States Army and Alabama National Guard. When the march reached the state capitol in Montgomery, Wallace refused to meet with King,
King made a speech from the steps of the capitol, saying in part:
"I know some of you are asking today, ‘How long will it take?’ I come to say to you this afternoon however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because truth pressed to the earth will rise again.
How long? Not long, because no lie can live forever.
How long? Not long, because you will reap what you sow.
How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice."
The Voting Rights Act of 1965
Six months later, in a nation moved by the injustice suffered by the Selma to Montgomery marchers and their cause, the Voting Rights Act was passed. It is unlikely that would have happened when it did, were it not for the focus that Lewis, King and Gray brought to voting rights in Alabama in March of 1965. In 1960, there were a total of 53,336 black voters registered in the state of Alabama; three decades later, there were 537,285.
Those of you who recognize Fred Gray might do so from his portrayal in the 2014 Oscar-nominated film movie 'Selma.' in that movie Fred Gray, the attorney who represented Claudette Colvin, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King during the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955-56 and Lewis and King during the Selma to Montgomery marches was portrayed by Cuba Gooding, Jr.
When ‘Selma’ was screened in Montgomery back in 2015, Gray attended and said after a screening that although he enjoyed the film, there is more to the story than what the film portrayed.
Gray hoped that one day the work of the lawyers behind the scenes might be recognized.
"I hope one day, not in the too distant future, some movie house will make a film depicting the role of the law, the plaintiffs the lawyers and the judges who played parts in the civil rights movement because without them, there would have been no civil rights movement,"
Fred Gray’s remembrance of John Lewis
I met John when he was a teenager living with his parents. He had read about the Montgomery Bus Boycott, led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1955-56.
In 1958, he wanted to attend Troy State College when only white persons attended that college. At that time all the public educational institutions in Alabama were segregated. He wrote to Dr. King asking him to help.
Dr. King sent John a round-trip Greyhound Bus ticket from Troy to Montgomery. Dr. King contacted me, advised me of his desires and asked me to meet John at the bus station in Montgomery and bring him to a meeting at the Rev. Ralph Abernathy’s First Baptist Church in Montgomery. I did.
Shortly before his death, Lewis and Gray met and Gray asked his friend if there was anything he still needed to have done — and Lewis responded
“Keep pushing. Keep going. Set the record straight.”
Feb. 1, 2021 will mark the 65th anniversary of attorney Fred Gray’s filing of Browder v Gayle, kinginstitute.stanford.edu/... the legal action challenging segregation of Montgomery City buses, which along with the arrest of Rosa Parks prompted the 1955-56 Montgomery Bus Boycott.
In that suit, Fred Gray and his clients sought and won a declaratory judgment that Alabama state statutes and ordinances of the city of Montgomery providing for and enforcing racial segregation on "privately” operated buses were in violation of the constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment protections for equal treatment. Gray used the law and won.
The list of civil rights cases that Fred Gray brought and won can be found in most constitutional law textbooks. Among them are included:
- Browder v. Gayle, which integrated the buses in the City of Montgomery in 1956.
- Gomillion v. Lightfoot decided in 1960, returned African-Americans to the city limits of the City of Tuskegee. A landmark case, it 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 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.
- Dixon v. Alabama State Board of Education, decided in 1961, reinstated students who were expelled from Alabama State College and held that the students were unconstitutionally expelled, and students attending a state supported institution are entitled to a hearing before expulsion. The legal principle announced in this case has been extended to many other areas.
- Williams v. Wallace, decided in 1965, was a class action suit brought by African Americans against Governor Wallace and the State of Alabama and resulted in the court ordering Governor Wallace and the State of Alabama to protect marchers as they walked from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama to present grievances as a result of being unable to vote. The publicity of these actions led 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.
- Gray also represented the victims of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, winning them a settlement, a public apology from President Clinton and the establishment of a museum to ensure that their story is not forgotten.
Fred Gray passed his 90th birthday in December, and is now among the last of the legendary heroes of the modern civil rights movement. If not for the legal prowess of Fred Gray and the attorneys whose assistance he sought out and accepted, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis might have remained obscure and unnoticed, and their struggle would certainly have been prolonged.
History may view Fred Gray as a product of his circumstances — having been the right person in the right place at the right time with the right set of skills needed to achieve what he did, but Gray’s accomplishments are profound and prodigious and will not be overlooked by history.
Although Rosa Parks became the public face of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and Martin Luther King Jr. its leader and spokesman, neither were plaintiffs in the case brought by Fred Gray that changed the law www.nps.gov/
Fred D. Gray has been a tireless champion for civil rights. His vision of an America free from segregation with equal opportunity helped reimagine the social and the legal landscape of American. “While Lewis and others affected change with public marches in the streets, attorney Fred Gray marched to the courthouse to secure civil rights through the court system,” Case by case Gray helped change the law, and in the process helped to reshape the American landscape and redraw the map, allowing leaders like MLK and John Lewis to make progress in their effort to help bend the moral arc of the universe towards justice and to achieve a more perfect and inclusive union.
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
Sixty-five years ago, on February 1, 1956, Fred D. Gray filed suit in U.S. District Court in the Montgomery Bus Boycott case. The anniversary of that case Browder v. Gayle, on Monday Feb 1, 2021 would be an ideal time for President Biden (himself a recipient of the Medal of Freedom) to recognize Gray for his life-long contributions to the Civil Rights movement by awarding him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, with Distinction.
For young people, particularly BLM activists, who may have moments of discouragement and doubt about whether it is possible to make a difference and effect meaningful change through non-violence, let Fred Gray and John Lewis be examples. Gray was only 24 when he began his career as a civil rights attorney in 1955 and accomplished an amazing list of legal successes over the next 12 years. John Lewis was 19 when he began work on the Nashville Lunch Counter sit in, 21 when he became a Freedom Rider, 23 during the March on Washington and 25 during the Selma to Montgomery voting marches.
*(Western Reserve University in Cleveland Ohio, where Fred Gray studied law (at a time when no school in Alabama would accept African American students) sustained my family for nearly a century. CWRU is my alma mater and that of my father (1944, 1946) and his father (1912), who also both served on the faculty, my grandfather from 1919-1949, and my father from (1951-2000).
Thursday, Jan 28, 2021 · 8:48:23 AM +00:00 · ARodinFan
Thanks to all who made the effort to read and comment on this diary. One of Fred Gray’s enduring messages will be affirmation of the idea that young and seemingly powerless individuals like Claudette Colvin can make a difference when they identify a problem and then stand up and find a way to address it. www.lipscomb.edu/… That message speaks to me.
I feel the need for Fred Gray to be publicly acknowledged, now and at the very highest level, for his remarkable lifetime achievement in exposing the scourge of segregation and finding non violent ways to stop it. Shining a light on a problem doesn't solve it. I need help in bringing this issue of recognition for Fred D. Gray to those in the new Biden administration who can do something about it.
The Browder v Gayle case was filed Feb 1 1956 and the decision was handed down by the circuit court June 5, 1956 and affirmed by the Supreme Court Nov 13 1956 — the 65th anniversary of either of those decisions would be a fitting time for Joe Biden to recognize Fred Gray It would be a blessing to all if we could help make that a happen.