Raymond J. de Souza: Fred Gray — the civil rights lawyer who helped change the course of history

It’s a very fine memoir of Fred D. Gray, whom Martin Luther King called the “chief counsel to the civil rights movement.” The book was released in late May; in early July, Biden announced that Gray would be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honour. It was awarded last week.

Gray wanted no part of the Jim Crow south. Growing up in Montgomery, he had ridden segregated buses back and forth to Alabama State. It was on those buses that he decided to become a lawyer in order to challenge segregation. So he went north to law school in Cleveland and returned as one of a handful of Black attorneys in Alabama.In December 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger.

King lost at trial, but the nation admired the courageous young pastor and had to acknowledge the reality of segregation. King emerged a hero in the Black community and a national civil rights leader with credibility amongst all races. And Fred Gray, though losing that case, pioneered a legal strategy that would launch his own career and a thousand other civil rights cases — many of the most prominent of which Gray would handle himself.

King, the young preacher-protest leader, and Gray, the young preacher-lawyer, would discuss the moral question at the heart of the civil rights movement. Should unjust laws be obeyed?

Ooooh, the Biden come-from-behind caress.

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