LAWYER HELPED DESEGREGATE SOUTH
Fred Gray filed a series of transformative lawsuits beginning in the 1950s
MONTGOMERY, Ala. - As a young civil rights attorney in the 1950s South, Fred Gray set out to obliterate every law that kept it segregated. That practice began 62 years ago, when Gray came back from Ohio to practice law in Alabama — the state that forbade him from attending law school because of the color of his skin.
While greats like Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks mobilized the masses in Montgomery, where he was born, Gray quietly filed lawsuits that legally made it possible for the civil rights movement to keep moving.
He defended King and Parks from criminal charges. He worked with the Montgomery Bus Boycott, filing the suit that led to the U.S. Supreme Court’s condemnation of segregated bus systems. Suits he filed later desegregated higher learning institutions in Alabama.
“I have used the law to file a lawsuit so that African-Americans would be able to register and vote,” he said. “When the people were beaten back on what is now considered Bloody Sunday in Selma, they called me. I went across the (Edmund Pettus) bridge that night. And the next day before the close of day, I had filed (a) lawsuit.”
It forced officials to let people march from Selma to Montgomery, which influenced the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
That act resulted in minorities not only being allowed the vote, but also to run for public office.
Another suit he filed led to African-Americans being allowed to serve on civil juries.
Then he realized that the U.S.was still discriminating against black farmers.
“So we filed a case in 1968,” Gray said. “As a result of that suit, years later the heirs of black farmers who had been discriminated (against) in farm subsidies were able to receive millions of dollars.”
Throughout the decades Gray’s work in the civil rights era proved to be not just pivotal, but unwavering.
“I have kept focused on what I started out with. I started out saying that I was going to become a lawyer and use the law for the purpose of changing things,” Gray said. “And that’s what I have done.”