In this “Ordinary People Can do Extraordinary Things” profile, we look at a man who at age 94 is still doing the extraordinary work that he started 70 years ago: lawyer and civil rights era activist, Fred David Gray.
Gray’s role in the civil rights movement was critical but largely behind the scenes. He was involved in civil rights actions even before Martin Luther King, Jr. got involved. In time, MLK, Jr. would come to refer to Gray as the “chief counsel” of the civil rights movement.
Born December 14, 1930 in Montgomery, Alabama, Gray was the youngest of four children and lost his father when he was just two years old. His mother had little education and few resources but plenty of faith. When the local preacher suggested that Gray begin training to be a preacher himself, it was decided he would go to a Christian boarding high school. Gray told AARP in a 2024 interview, “When I was growing up, there were two professions a Black man could take up: a preacher or a teacher.”
Gray attended the Nashville Christian Institute (ultimately becoming a preacher in the Churches of Christ in 1957), and then he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1951 at Alabama State College for Negroes (now Alabama State University). His plan at that time was to add a teaching certificate to his credentials. However, encouraged by a professor, Fred Gray had a change of heart that would have great significance for the civil rights movement.
Riding back and forth across Montgomery for college, Gray was increasingly disturbed by the treatment of Black commuters on his city bus ride. He’d come to understand that a lawyer’s essential role was to help people who had problems. “And I thought that the Black people in Montgomery had problems…so I was going to become a lawyer to help solve those problems,” he told NPR in a 2022 interview.
Gray’s overarching goal, as he put it, became to “destroy everything segregated (he) could find.”
All of the law schools in Alabama were still segregated, so Gray went to Cleveland, Ohio to study at Case Western Reserve University (at that time Western Reserve) School of Law. In 1954, he passed the Bar exams in Ohio and Alabama, and he returned to his home state to open a law office. Just six months later, Gray argued his first civil rights case when he represented 15-year-old Claudette Colvin.
Speaking of unsung heroes, nine months before Rosa Parks made history by refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus, Claudette Colvin was arrested for the same. On March 2, 1955, she was sitting in the “Negro” section of a very full bus. When asked by the bus driver, three of her friends stood up to make room for a young white person. But Colvin felt it was her right to stay seated. (The white woman had three seats available to her, but would not sit in the same row as a Black passenger.) Colvin had recently been studying heroes of Black history in her segregated school, and she says she was inspired by women such as Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth.
Fred Gray was inspired by Colvin’s bravery. When Colvin was arrested, Gray stepped up to represent her in juvenile court. And nine months later, in December, 1955, he represented Rosa Parks. It was Parks’ famous gesture that kicked off the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
That very day in December 1955, Fred Gray, along with Alabama State professor Jo Ann Robinson and the NAACP’s Edgar Nixon began planning the bus boycott. Robinson suggested that her church’s preacher, Martin Luther King, Jr., would be a great spokesperson for the boycott, though he’d had no previous civil rights experience.
While MLK, Jr.’s voice infused the boycott with energy, Gray kept it on the straight and narrow. “I wasn’t the one talking to the public, but I had to keep the law straight. It was my responsibility that everything they did was legal.” (Group Travel Leader 2024)
Gray worked closely with MLK, Jr. for the next 382 days of protest, and for many years to come. “We did not call it a boycott because it wasn’t a boycott. We called it a protest,” said Gray. When King was arrested three months into the protest, Gray pulled together a legal team and represented him.
Other notable cases that Gray argued during the sixties and seventies, to name just a few, include: Dixon vs. Alabama (1961, due process rights for Black students at public universities); Williams vs. Wallace (1963; protecting Selma to Montgomery marchers); a successful settlement in Pollard vs. U.S. Public Health Service (1972; class action law suit regarding the federal Tuskegee Syphilis Study); and legal representation for the NAACP for eight years.
All told, Gray helped to desegregate more than 100 local school systems and all of the public colleges and universities in his home state of Alabama. In addition to practicing law for nearly 70 years, Gray was elected to the Alabama House of Representatives in 1970; he and Thomas Reed were the first Black state legislators elected in Alabama in the 20th Century. Gray was president of the National Bar Association in 1985 and he received the American Bar Association’s top honor, the Thurgood Marshall Award.
Fred Gray still works at his law practice, with offices in Montgomery and Tuskegee. In his most recent civil rights case, in 2021, he filed a suit against the United Daughters of the Confederacy to have a Confederate statue removed from the Tuskegee town square. He received some much-deserved attention in July 2022, when President Joe Biden awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Gray also enjoys spending time at the Tuskegee History Center, which he cofounded in 1997 as the Tuskegee Human and Civil Rights Multicultural Center. Gray explains that the museum’s exhibits show important civil rights achievements, as well as highlighting issues yet to be solved. Gray says that the struggle for equal justice and against underlying prejudice continues (NPR 2022). “While we have gained some things, if we’re not careful we can end up losing some of the gains we have…and that’s the challenge before us today…those basic problems are the same: racism and inequality.” At age 94, Fred Gray is still working to solve problems.