Exhibition commemorates bus boycott

Unknown figure

Gray, 74, though not a household name, is one of the civil rights movement’s most important figures, having helped blacks gain equal rights in voting, housing and jury service.

"Fred Gray’s story is that of an idealist deeply committed to the law as a way of righting wrongs and promoting justice for African-Americans,” law professor Jonathan Entin writes in the 2005 book, "Black Leadership and Ideology in the South Since the Civil War.”

An young start

A Montgomery native, Gray was 24 and a recent graduate of Western Reserve University Law School in Ohio (now Case Western Reserve University) when he took on Rosa Parks’ case.

In fact, Gray had been friends with Parks, a seamstress and an NAACP program director, for nearly a year, and they’d discussed discrimination on city buses, which required blacks to sit at the back. Gray recalled Parks’ "quiet exemplification of courage, dignity and determination,” adding: "I will always be humbled by the faith Mrs. Parks showed in me as a young attorney.”

On Dec. 5, four days after Parks’ arrest for disorderly conduct, she was found guilty and fined $14. The boycott began that day and would last just over a year; more than 40,000 Montgomery residents walked, carpooled or rode taxicabs.

In February 1956, Gray filed the case that would go to the U.S. Supreme Court and eventually end segregation on Montgomery’s buses.

More successes

Among Gray’s other pioneering legal victories was the 1965 case that ordered Alabama Gov. George Wallace to protect protesters marching from Selma to Montgomery, and the 1975 case that arranged financial compensation for blacks mistreated in a human syphilis experiment in Tuskegee, Ala.

Today, Gray lives in Tuskegee and is president of the city’s Human and Civil Rights Multicultural Center, an educational facility. Gray’s wife of 40 years, Bernice, died in 1997. Their two sons work at Gray’s Tuskegee and Montgomery law offices, and their two daughters live in Tuskegee and Montgomery.

Recently

Outside the Holt Street Baptist Church recently, the silver-haired Gray, wearing a charcoal suit and red tie, appeared to be in robust good health.

The same couldn’t be said for the church, with its broken windows and sidewalks overgrown with weeds. Its congregation has moved on, and only a plaque outside identifies it as a landmark: thousands gathered here on the bus boycott’s first night, when the 26-year-old preacher Martin Luther King Jr. spoke for the first time as a movement leader and proclaimed the need for nonviolent protest, famously saying "there comes a time.” Gray remembers the speech as "soul-stirring.”

It’s not over yet

Today, Gray sees much still to be done in civil rights.

"I’ll be the first to admit things in this city and this state have changed tremendously,” Gray tells Smithsonian magazine, adding that overt segregation is gone. But in its place is a more subtle discrimination, he says, such as lower income and poorer health care for minorities — symptoms of what he calls entrenched racism.

He laments that not enough resources are invested into combating inequality. "It has to start with a recognition that we still have a race problem,” he says.