Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot.

There is a quote from the writer Edward Abbey that I have always liked. “…there are plenty of heroes and heroines everywhere you look. They are not famous people. They are generally obscure and modest people doing useful work, keeping their families together and taking an active part in the health of their communities, opposing what is evil (in one way or another) and defending what is good.”

Those words could describe the Alabama lawyer Fred Gray. On my recent trip south organized by the Nation Magazine, our group had an opportunity to meet with Attorney Gray in Tuskegee. He is now 93. He became a lawyer in the 1950s when there were hardly any African Americans able to be in that role. Back then it was very dangerous to be a Black lawyer in the South, especially one devoted to civil rights.

Gray has had a remarkable career. He grew up in segregation, opened his law office in 1954 and his early goal was “to destroy everything segregated I could find.”

Dr. King once called Gray “chief counsel of the protest movement.” For years, he was counsel to both Dr. King and Rosa Parks whenever they needed legal help. Along with a university professor, Jo Ann Robinson, Gray planned the Montgomery Bus Boycott. He became a lawyer for 15-year-old Claudette Colvin and for Rosa Parks. Both were arrested for refusing to obey a bus driver’s orders to relinquish their bus seat.

Gray had been looking for a chance to challenge the constitutionality of Montgomery’s segregation ordinances and Alabama’s segregation statutes. In the case of Browder v Gayle, Gray challenged the laws that required segregation of the races on city buses in Montgomery.

Gray worked closely with a number of lawyers from the NAACP including Thurgood Marshall and Robert Carter as well as a white lawyer, Clifford Durr. There was much personal retaliation directed against Gray by local racists and by the Alabama power structure. He received bomb threats, crank phone calls, hate mail and experienced an attempted stabbing.

After filing Browder v Gayle, he received a draft notice that he was re-classified 1-A. He had had 4-D draft status because he was also minister in a church. Gray was a preacher in the Church of Christ. The head of Selective Service, Lewis Hershey, had to intervene the night before Gray was going to be made to ship out for military service. Hershey stopped it. Gray later found out that the Montgomery County and the Alabama State Bar Association had wanted him re-classified and drafted into service.

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In June 1956, the federal court in Alabama ruled in the Browder case that city ordinances and the state statute requiring segregation were unconstitutional. The case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court upheld the Alabama decision and found city and state law violated both the due process and equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. This was the first case to establish such a precedent.

In the course of the Montgomery bus boycott, Gray developed a close working relationship with Dr. King. He and Jo Ann Robinson had picked King to be the public spokesman for the bus protest. Gray also became Ralph Abernathy’s lawyer. Abernathy told him, “Fred, you keep me out of jail and I will keep you out of hell.” Abernathy, in addition to being frequently arrested for civil rights activism, was also a Baptist minister.

As is the case now with voter suppression, back in 1957 the White Citizens Councils of Alabama devised a gerrymandering plan to nullify the potential African American vote in Tuskegee. They changed the city boundaries from a square to what Gray called a “25-sided sea dragon.” Lines were drawn to exclude substantially all African Americans while retaining all white votes.

In the case Gomillion v Lightfoot, Gray litigated against the racial gerrymandering being perpetrated by Alabama. The case also went up to the Supreme Court and Gray argued it. He had prevailed on the plaintiffs’ attorneys to argue that Alabama was violating the Fifteenth Amendment right to vote.

Surprisingly, in a 9-0 opinion authored by Justice Felix Frankfurter, the Court wrote: “When a legislature thus singles out a readily isolated segment of a racial minority for special discriminatory treatment, it violates the Fifteenth Amendment.”

Justice Frankfurter saw racial gerrymandering more clearly than the Supreme Court does today. Witness the 2024 South Carolina decision in Alexander v South Carolina that diminished the influence of Black voters through redistricting. In an interesting reversal after the Gomillion case was resolved, the city of Tuskegee asked Gray to become city counsel and he agreed. The Gomillion case was the first racial gerrymandering case that the Supreme Court ever considered.

I also need to mention the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and the Pollard et al v United States case. Beginning in 1932 and continuing for 40 years, the U.S. Public Health Service committed a massive fraud against 623 African American men. The men were misled into participating in a study of untreated syphilis sponsored by the government. The Public Health Service failed to disclose to the men both that they had syphilis and that treatment was available.

The Public Health Service led the men to think they were being properly treated for whatever diseases they had when they were not being treated at all. The study was racially motivated and it discriminated against African Americans in that no whites were selected to participate in the study. Only those who were poor, uneducated, rural and African American were recruited.

The Public Health Service failed to obtain the participants’ written consent to be part of the study. There were no rules and regulations governing the study. Gray was counsel in the class action against the government. The U.S. government had to admit to wrongdoing and had to compensate the aggrieved parties.

In Gray’s varied and effective efforts to end segregation, it must be noted he was a lawyer for the Selma-to-Montgomery marchers on Bloody Sunday in 1965. The publicity from that march led directly to the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Gray also successfully litigated the systematic exclusion of Black people from jury service and his cases ended up integrating all state institutions of higher learning in Alabama. On July 7, 2022, President Biden awarded Fred Gray the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

At a time when we are moving backward on civil rights, it was inspiring to meet a man who has accomplished so much and who was still very much in the fight.