March 11, 2003 – Only one year out of law school, 23-year-old attorney Fred Gray took on a case that would forever change the landscape of America. Almost half a century later, he shared his experience with the people of the Virgin Islands Monday night.
Gray, addressing a full house on the University of the Virgin Islands St. Croix campus, gave an account of the circumstances surrounding the 1955 arrest of his friend Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama; his subsequent role as the first attorney for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.; and the influences in his life that set him on that path.
Gray, who attended Alabama State University, said he realized while still a junior there the pervasiveness of segregation in the South.
"I decided while I was a student that we needed at least one lawyer who would handle civil rights cases, and because I couldn't attend the University of Alabama [law school] because of my race, I would return to Alabama, pass the bar exam, and destroy everything segregated that I could find," he said.
Gray, born in an Alabama ghetto, said that even to entertain such an idea then was unheard of. "At least I had enough sense not to tell anybody," he said.
While studying law at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, he said, he began preparing for the Alabama state bar exam. Three years later he passed it as well as the Ohio exam, and he began practicing law in Montgomery on Sept. 8, 1954.
While Rosa Parks' arrest for refusing to relinquish her bus seat to a white man on Dec. 1, 1955, is widely recognized as the incident that led to the historic Montgomery Bus Boycott, Gray said a teen-age girl had played a major role nine months earlier.
Gray also represented the girl, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin, who was dragged off a bus and arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white man. It was Claudette who "planted the seeds of change in the minds of a lot of people in Montgomery," the attorney said.
The day Parks was arrested, Gray said, he had eaten lunch with her. He then went out of town, only to return and learn of the incident. "We were determined not to let what happened to Claudette happen to Rosa Parks," he related.
He said few people know about the teen-ager's part in the story. "If there had been no Claudette, there may very well have been no Ms. Rosa Parks as we know her today," he said. "There may very well never have been a Dr. Martin Luther King as we know him today."
King — who was then a pastor at a Montgomery church — and Parks, Gray and several others formed an impromptu group that helped organize the bus boycott that would extend for 381 days and dominate news media across the nation and beyond. The move propelled King to the forefront of the civil rights movement and ultimately resulted in a Supreme Court decision outlawing bus segregation.
Hundreds of people of varying backgrounds, races and ethnicity are "unsung heroes" in the fight for civil rights, Gray said. "They are the ones who made it possible."
He paralleled the momentum of that movement with the possibilities for social change in the Virgin Islands and encouraged the students in his audience to find their "niche in history."
"You can make a big difference in more ways than you know," he said. "People in the community can play a real role in helping change conditions."
He said students on the campus of the Tuskeegee Institute were instrumental in seeing the first blacks elected into the Alabama State Legislature, one of whom was Gray.
"They are the ones who went into the voting areas and worked as poll watchers" to ensure the legitimacy of the elections, he said. He added that Alabama State College students were an integral part of the bus boycott. "You can have a role in helping change things in these beautiful islands," he said.
"I want to address the young people," he said. "Don't be too eager to leave the island and develop somebody else. Bring that training back home and help others."
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