NBL HOF Flipbook - Flipbook - Page 8
ABOUT
FRED D. GRAY
Fred David Gray is a pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement and a native of Montgomery, Alabama. He is one of the
few courageous Black lawyers who risked their lives to attack segregation in the court. He currently lives in
Tuskegee, Alabama with his lovely wife, Carol, and, at 92 years old, continues to practice law specializing in civil
rights litigation.
Mr. Gray was educated at the Nashville Christian Institute, Alabama State University,
and Case Western Reserve University. He is both a lawyer and an ordained minister
in the Church of Christ. In his first civil rights case, in March 1955, Mr. Gray
represented Claudette Colvin, a 15-year old African American high school student who
refused to give up her seat on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. In December 1955,
he represented Mrs. Rosa Parks, who ignited the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Mr. Gray
penned the Resolution that launched the Boycott and was also Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr.'s first civil rights attorney.
The civil rights cases that Mr. Gray has won have transformed this country and are in most constitutional law
textbooks. They include, but are not limited to, the following: Browder v. Gayle (1956), challenging the
constitutionality of Alabama state laws mandating segregation on buses and ultimately leading the US Supreme
Court to order integrated buses in Montgomery; Mitchell v. Johnson (1966), one of the first civil actions brought to
remedy systematic exclusion of blacks from the civil jury pool; Lee v. Macon County Board of Education (1967),
as lead trial counsel, along with civil rights icons Jack Greenberg and Constance Baker Motley, Mr. Gray obtained a
trial order that desegregated all Alabama public schools; Gomillion v. Lightfoot (1960), leading the Supreme Court
to find that an electoral district with boundaries created to disenfranchise African Americans violated the Fifteenth
Amendment (now quoted in over 600 federal court opinions); Knight v. Alabama (1995), where the Eleventh
Circuit held that there were still vestiges of racial discrimination in higher education in Alabama; Dixon v. Alabama
State Board of Education (1961), leading the 5th Circuit to end the doctrine that colleges and universities could act
in loco parentis to discipline or expel their students; and Williams v. Wallace (1965), class action suit brought by
African Americans against Governor Wallace and the State of Alabama, where the court ordered Governor Wallace
and the State of Alabama to protect marchers as they walked from Selma to Montgomery 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.
