Pioneering civil rights attorney Gray honored
University of Alabama grants honorary degree
Fred David Gray received an honorary doctorate Sunday from the University of Alabama School of Law, largely for his landmark civil rights work that, among many other things, helped integrate the institution.
The irony didn’t need to be heavily underlined during afternoon commencement ceremonies at Coleman Coliseum: After the Montgomery native earned a bachelor’s degree from Alabama State University, Gray moved out of state, to Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, where he earned his juris doctor degree in 1954.
UA was not an option for a Black man in the 1950s.
“I am honored, appreciative and humble that this university has conferred this on me,” Gray, 91, said with a resonant, authoritative voice honed in courtrooms and at pulpits, following more than six decades as a practicing attorney, and a similar span as preacher in Churches of Christ.
“Honored, because when I was growing up, on the west side of Montgomery, as a youngster in the cradle of the Confederacy, I didn’t know much about the University of Alabama,” he said. “But I knew African-americans were not permitted to attend. Therefore, I didn’t even bother to apply.”
Appreciative, as when he’d filed suit to help Vivian Malone Jones desegregate UA, from which she’d become its first Black graduate in 1965, he didn’t dream such an honor.
“My only concern was to open the doors, so African-americans could attend,” Gray said.
The humble acceptance, he said, he made on behalf of 67 years of clients, including familiar names such as Rosa Parks, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and E.D. Nixon, and organizations such as the NAACP. But Gray also drew attention to less-sung heroes, including the 623 men of the Tuskegee Experiment for whom he won monetary compensation, and all the many thousands marching, performing sit-ins and freedom rides in the fight against racism, and for equity and justice.
One of those lesser-known clients was a young woman whose stand against the Montgomery bus racism preceded that of Parks’, “... Claudette Colvin, a 15-year old girl, nine months before Rosa Parks, did the same thing that Mrs. Parks did, without the knowledge and instruction that she had.”
“These are the people who laid the foundation so that you can honor me today,” Gray said.
He’s author of books, including “Bus Ride to Justice: The Life and Works of Fred Gray” and “The Tuskegee Syphilis Study: An Insiders’ Account of the Shocking Medical Experiment Conducted by Government Doctors Against African American Men,” based on some of his life’s work. Gray is also the co-author of an upcoming book, “Alabama vs. King,” built around his successful legal defense of the civil rights leader. Gray saw King acquitted of tax evasion charges by an all-white jury.
Gray urged the spring 2022 law school graduates to seek problems in need of solutions, and become part of the process of eliminating racism, and striving for equality, “... in a non-violent way, until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream,” Gray concluded, echoing King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, itself paraphrasing lines from the biblical book of Amos.
The timing was fortuitous, said Mark Brandon, dean of the law school, as this marks 50 years since the first Black law students graduated, in 1972. Michael Figures, Booker Forte Jr. and Ronald E. Jackson served long careers as attorneys, also doing service in politics, and on social issues, including civil rights efforts. Mobilian Figures, a five-term state senator, was among the team that sued the United Klans of America into bankruptcy, following the 1981 lynching of 19-year-old Michael Donald.
Those legacies rippled from Gray’s advocacy, Brandon said.
“Without his courageous work, we would not be gathered here in the way that we are,” Brandon said.
The dean noted that it was while attending Alabama State that Gray “secretly vowed to destroy everything segregated.” At the time, Alabama would pay Black students to study law only if they studied elsewhere. In the same year the U.S. Supreme Court decided the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, stating the “separate but equal” notion was unconstitutional, Gray was graduating from Case Western.
“If the state of Alabama thought it was rid of Fred Gray,” Brandon said, “he had other ideas.”
In most respects, it was a classic ceremony, beginning with the procession of students — 133 receiving the juris doctor degree, 11 master of laws degree, and 11 more master of laws in taxation or business transactions — to a string quartet playing Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 in D.” Most were decked out in basic black caps and gowns, highlighted with accents in purple, the color designated for graduates in law and jurisprudence. Makenzie Lauren Moore, a member of the graduating class, sang the national anthem a cappella.
Falling as it did on Mother’s Day, the commencement was scattered with reminders of team efforts, including families, fellow students and of course faculty.
Student Bar Association President Dakota Slaughter began on a note of levity, performing a credible impersonation of Barack Obama: “To borrow from an actual president, ‘We are gathered here on this momentous occasion’ ....” he said, to laughter.
He added that the students’ past three years together came at times of unprecedented change, not just from the COVID-19 pandemic, but from social uprisings, yet they had endured to become “the little torches that lead us through the dark,” a phrase popularized by Whoopi Goldberg.
“It’s been quite the whirlwind, but hey, we made it y’all,” he concluded. “It’s been quite a journey. Congratulations and Roll Tide.”
Three students actually earned such exceptional, better-than-4.0 GPAS, and piled up such academic accomplishments, that the valedictorian had to be chosen from among them. In addition to Kyle Glynn, who was chosen to speak, the other top achievers were Tuscaloosan Price Mcgiffert Jr., and Katherine Ferazzi.
“... I am not any more qualified than any single one of our classmates to summarize the entirety of our law school experience in five minutes,” Glynn said, and recalled John Donne’s words that “no man is an island.”
“These degrees are just as much our families’ as they are our own,” he said.
Keynote speaker Liz Huntley began her address by personally thanking Gray, for paving a way for students such as her. Born to drug-dealing parents, at the age of 5 she suffered her mother’s suicide and father’s incarceration. Raised largely in Clanton, she was sexually abused by an uncle, and grew up in poverty.
But with the aid of educators, religious faith, and hard work, she earned a scholarship to Auburn University, then one to the UA School of Law. She’s now senior counsel and director of community relations and engagement at Birmingham law firm Lightfoot, Franklin and White. Huntley wrote the book “More Than a Bird” about her journey.
The wife and mother of three said “I can think of no better gift for a mother than to watch their child walk across the stage to accept a juris doctorate degree,” especially feeling weight lift off their pocketbooks.
“I know that law school is horrible,” she said, to laughter. “I say ‘horrible’ in an endearing way, because it’s some of the hardest work you’ve ever done in your life.”
She stressed purpose, and the taught gift of synthesis, to see not only how a legal outcome may change the present, but how it can ripple into the future.
“What law school has done is (it has) equipped you to be a change agent, a gatekeeper of liberty and justice in our society,” Huntley said. “It is an amazing thinking tool to help you impact society. What are you gonna do with what you have?
“What a gift. And you’d better not go out there and embarrass us, either,” she said.
Fitting with the others’ evocations of famous words, she ended with Dr. Seuss: “Oh, the places you’ll go.”
“Without his courageous work, we would not be gathered here in the way that we are.”
Mark Brandon