Fred David Gray, a native of Montgomery, Alabama living in Tuskegee with his wife Carol, at age 91, is in the general practice of law specializing in civil rights litigation. He was educated at the Nashville Christian Institute (Tennessee), Alabama State University and Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Oh. He is the senior partner in the law firm of Gray, Langford, Sapp, McGowan, Gray, Gray & Nathanson, P.C., with offices in Montgomery and Tuskegee, Alabama.
Spanning a legal career of more than 65 years, he is admitted to practice in the Supreme Court of Ohio, Supreme Court of Alabama, U. S. District Court for the Middle, Northern & Southern Districts of Alabama, Supreme Court of the United States, and U. S. Court of Appeals for Fifth, Sixth and Eleventh Circuits.
Enthusiastic, energetic, and fresh out of law school, true to a secret promise he made to himself as a young man, he returned to Alabama to “destroy everything segregated he could find”, Gray began a dynamic civil rights career, launched by his representation of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. and participants in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. His first civil rights case involved representation of Claudette Colvin, a 15-year-old high school student who, on March 2, 1955, refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a city bus in Montgomery. Gray was with Colvin in 2021 when she successfully petitioned a family court in Montgomery, Alabama to expunge her juvenile record.
Certain of his notable cases include City of Montgomery v. Rosa Parks; State of Alabama v. Martin Luther King, Jr. (2 cases-1956 and 1960). Many others may be found in most constitutional law textbooks including, but not limited to: Aurelia A. Browder, et al v. W.A. Gayle, et al (integrated the buses in the City of Montgomery); Gomillion v. Lightfoot, (a gerrymandering case which laid the foundation for the concept of "one man one vote"); NAACP v. Alabama, ex rel. John Patterson, Attorney General; Dixon, et al v. The Alabama State Board of Education; Williams v. Wallace (Court ordered State of Alabama to protect marchers from Selma to Montgomery after being beaten on Bloody Sunday. The court order assisted in the enactment of the Voting Rights of 1965); William P. Mitchell, et al. v. Edgar Johnson, et al (one of the first civil actions brought to remedy systematic exclusion of blacks from civil jury service); Lee v. Macon County Board of Education (integrated all state institutions of higher learning and facilities under the Alabama State Board of Education, and 104 of the then 121 elementary and secondary school systems in the state).
He was counsel in preserving and protecting the rights of persons involved in the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study beginning in 1972, the case of Pollard, et al v. United States of America, filed in 1973, and helped convince President Bill Clinton to make a public apology on May 16, 1997 for the shameful role of the federal government in withholding treatment from them. Gray was the moving force in the establishment of the Tuskegee Human and Civil Rights Multicultural Center, Tuskegee, Alabama. A 501(c)3 corporation. It serves as a memorial to the Study participants and educates the public on contributions in the field of human and civil rights by Native Americans, Americans of Africans of European descent. It also strives to educate on the role Tuskegee-Macon County played in the Civil Rights Movement.
One of the first African Americans to serve in the Alabama Legislature since reconstruction, Gray was also the first African American elected as president of the Alabama State Bar Association (2002-2003). Gray also served as the 43rd president of the National Bar Association (1985). He is a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation and American College of Trial Lawyers. He served on many court-appointed committees including in 2007 as a member of the Merit Selection of Appellate Judges Committee. He is a member of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, a minister of the gospel and elder of the Tuskegee Church of Christ.
He is the recipient of numerous awards including the Charles Hamilton Houston Medallion of Merit from the Washington Bar Association; Harvard University Law School’s Charles Hamilton Houston Medallion; ABA’s Thurgood Marshall Award, and the Federal Bar Association’s Sarah T. Hughes Civil Rights Award. Gray has also been featured in many publications, radio and television interviews, and serves on many boards and organizations. Gray is also the recipient of many honorary degrees. Lipscomb University named its institute for Law, Justice and Society the Fred D, Gray Institute for Law, Justice and Society. Case Western Reserve Law Review, in its summer 2017 edition interviewed and chronicled Gray in an article, In Honor of Fred Gray: Making Civil Rights Law from Rosa Parks to the Twenty-First Century. The Fred D. Gray Symposium is conducted annually at CWRU School of Law.
Gray’s most recent civil rights case was filed on September 1, 2021, Macon County vs. Tuskegee Chapter if United Daughters of the Confederacy, et al., for the purpose of having the court to declare Macon County is the owner of the old courthouse site that the then governing body of Macon County in 1906 ordered conveyed to the Tuskegee Chapter United Daughters of the Confederacy for the purpose of converting the same to a park for white people and for the purpose of erecting a monument to the memory of the confederate soldiers from Macon County who were in the war between the states and for no other purpose. The case is pending.
An author, Bus Ride to Justice first released in February 1995, Revised Edition released May 2013, was previewed at the Jimmy Carter Center and broadcast on C-Span Book TV. Upon receipt of a copy, President Barack Obama wrote in a letter to Gray, “Today, we stand on the shoulders of giants who helped move us toward a more perfect Union, and I appreciate your sharing your story.” The Tuskegee Syphilis Study was released in May 1998. He also wrote The Sullivan Case: A Direct Product of the Civil Rights Movement, a review for Case Western Reserve Law Review. He is co-author with Dan Abrams and Mark Fisher of Alabama vs. King, to be published May 2022.
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