SEARCY: Renowned civil rights attorney to speak at Harding

By Jeremy Peppas

LITTLE ROCK — Fred Gray has traveled a long and, at times, lonely path.

Tonight, Gray will speak about his life and his work for more than 50 years as a civil rights attorney at Harding University in Searcy. Gray is scheduled to speak at 7:30 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

In 1954, Gray, then 24, was admitted to the Alabama bar after graduating from law school at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland. It was less than a year later when Rosa Parks went to Gray, then in a solo practice In Montgomery, Ala., and asked for his help.

Parks had gotten into trouble for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on the city’s bus service. So when Parks went looking for a lawyer, it was Gray she found. The result was the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and Gray also represented Martin Luther King, Jr.

What Parks didn’t knowwas Gray had returned to Montgomery with a goal he had made in law school, “...return to Alabama, and destroy everything segregated I could find,” he said on his Web site.

Gray is now senior partner at Gray,Langford, Sapp, McGowan, Gray & Nathanson and has lectured at colleges on both coasts, from Harvard to Pepperdine, and in 2004 he received the American Bar Association’s Thurgood Marshall Award for his work on behalf of civil rights.

Another highlight of his career was his work on what became known as theTuskegee Syphilis Study, started in the Depression and going into the 1970s. It was a clinical study conducted by the United States and forced on rural, black males in Macon County,Ala. Those going through the study were denied treatment for syphilis. In 1997, President Bill Clinton formally apologized for the government’s role in the study, and Gray helped establish the Tuskegee Human and Civil Rights Multicultural Center in Tuskegee.

In 1998, Gray’s The Tuskegee Syphilis Study was published, it was his second book. His first was Bus Ride to Justice, published in 1995.

While Gray has maintained a busy schedule of public appearances, his last notable appearance was in 2004 when he was called on as a witness inthe confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.

In 1960, Gray had been successful as the lawyer on Gomillion v. Lightfoot, a case argued in front of the Supreme Court, and it became the foundation of the legal concept “one man, one voice.”

In 1957, Gray had become involved with what he called approximately 400 African-Americans who had become registered to vote in the municipal elections of the City of Tuskegee. In response, the city changed the city limits to exclude as many of those 400 as possible, and it left, as Gray said in 2004, all but three or four. The Supreme Court ruled that boundary change was unacceptable.

As a federal judge, Justice Alito had disagreed with the Supreme Court’s ruling in 1960, and Gray asked the Senate confirmation committee to “carefully scrutinize Judge Alito’s disagreement with these cases. A nominee to the Supreme Court who has a judicial philosophy that’s set against the [Earl] Warren court and against the reapportionment cases is in effect saying that he would turn the clock back.”

Gray’s appearance is co-sponsored by the College of Nursing, L.C. Sears Collegiate Seminar Series and White County Medical Center. For more information, call (501) 279-4497.

- jpeppas @arkansasonline.comNOTABLE EVENTS IN FRED GRAY’S CAREER◊1954: Admitted to Alabama Bar Association, 1954 and Ohio Bar Association.

◊1955-1956: Attorney for Claudette Colvin, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Montgomery Bus Boycott participants.

◊1956: Browder v. Gayle, Supreme Court held City Ordinances requiring segregation of buses in Montgomery, Alabama to be unconstitutional.

◊1963: Vivian Malone v. Dean of Admissions, University of Alabama - This case opened the door for blacks to attend the University of Alabama in spite of Gov. George Wallace’s school door stand.

◊1963: Franklyn v. Auburn University - This case opened the door for blacks to attend Auburn University.

◊1965: Gray represented freedom marchers in the state of Alabama. Freedom walkers and freedom riders needed legal action to provide protection as they participated in the Selma to Montgomery March, which subsequently led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

◊1979: Elected to the Alabama State Legislature - One of the first blacks to serve since reconstruction.

◊1985: President of the National Bar Association.

◊2002: President of the Alabama Bar Association.

◊2004: Received the American Bar Association’s Thurgood Marshall Award.

Three Rivers, Pages 54, 55 on 03/13/2008