Fred D. Gray, the low-key, soft-spoken Alabama lawyer who became a civil rights law legend early in his legal career, this week adds another honor to his achievements and efforts to end racism and reconcile relations between the races in America.
Lipscomb University, the private, liberal-arts institution in Nashville that is aggressively working to transform itself from its history of using religion to justify its embrace of racial segregation, celebrates the renaming of its legal seminars program the Fred D. Gray Institute for Law, Justice & Society in honor of the civil rights legal legend.
Gray, now 85 years old, was fresh out of college in the 1950s when, at age 24, he became the first attorney for an equally low-key Montgomery citizen, Rosa Parks.
She had been arrested for refusing to give up her seat on the city bus to a White man, triggering the historic Montgomery bus boycotts. He also worked as the first civil rights lawyer for the Rev. Martin Luther King, pastor of a Montgomery church, long before King became known worldwide as a champion for justice.
While Gray’s work for Parks and King are most noted, his portfolio of work over the years includes numerous civil rights cases on voting, employment, jury selection and law enforcement.
As Parks and King became legends in American history, so did Gray, a focused thinker who became recognized in the 1950s and 1960s and beyond as a tenacious legal brain. He took on any legal opportunity he could to attack and “destroy everything segregated” he could find, he wrote in his 1995 memoir, Bus Ride to Justice. The updated version of the book was released in 2014.
Gray, a native of Montgomery who attended the former Church of Christ-sponsored Nashville Christian Institute (NCI) as a child, also sued Lipscomb leaders in the 1960s over the distribution of proceeds from the sale of NCI property when the all-Black school was shut down.
