On July 7, 2022, Fred Gray, legendary civil rights attorney and Alabama State University alumnus, received the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The award is presented to Americans who have made meritorious contributions to the United States or to the world.

While a student at Alabama State College (now University), Gray vowed to “return to Montgomery and use the law to destroy everything segregated he could find.” This resolution launched Gray on an almost unparalleled half-century legal career. The 26-year-old attorney represented Rosa Parks following her arrest on December 1, 1955, an event that led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Two months later, Gray filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Montgomery Improvement Association, the organization overseeing the boycott. The Browder v. Gayle case challenged Montgomery’s anti-boycott laws. By winning this case, Gray helped to end racial segregation on Montgomery city buses and to launch the modern Civil Rights Movement.

The bus boycott case initiated one of the nation’s most celebrated legal careers. Other cases Gray argued carried long-standing implications, including State of Alabama v. Martin Luther King, Jr. In this 1960 case, Gray successfully cleared Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., of an Alabama tax evasion charge, thereby illuminating how false tax charges were used as a tool to derail the bus protest and intimidate civil rights activists. Additionally, Attorney Gray participated in a 1964 case reinstating the NAACP in Alabama, after it had been barred from operating in the state. He was also the lead attorney in the landmark Lee v. Macon County Board of Education case, where Gray’s advocacy led to the desegregation of public schools in the state of Alabama. In the 1973 Tuskegee Syphilis case, Gray won $10 million from the United States and an apology from President Clinton for the surviving plaintiffs. These cases represent just a portion of the long list of precedent-setting court cases argued by this celebrated jurist.

Attorney Gray, who is an ordained minister, and who is a former Representative in the Alabama State legislature, still practices law in Alabama. He is the author of Bus Ride to Justice: The Life and Works of Fred Gray, and co-authored the newly released book, Alabama v. King: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Criminal Trial that Launched the Civil Rights Movement.