Bus Ride to Justice: The Life and Works of Fred Gray

Fred Gray grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, and had to leave the state to finish his education because blacks could not then attend Alabama law schools. He returned to his hometown in 1954 and became one of two black lawyers in the city. He was, he writes, "determined to destroy everything segregated that I could find." He did not have to wait long. When his friend Rosa Parks was arrested in 1955 for violating the segregated seating ordinance on a Montgomery bus, 26-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr., was chosen to lead the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and 24-year-old Fred Gray became his—and the movement’s—lawyer. Gray’s legal victory in the federal courts ended the boycott 381 days later. Over the four decades since, Gray has won scores of civil rights cases in education, voting rights, transportation, health, and other areas. He represented the Freedom Riders, the Selma-to-Montgomery marchers, the victims of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and many more. Bus Ride to Justice is the exciting story of a courageous life in the courtrooms of America and in the pulpits of churches where Fred Gray began as a child preacher and continues today, and of a strong human being filled with love and admiration for his fellow man.