70th Anniversary of Montgomery Bus Boycott - Bus Ride to Justice

Bus Ride to Justice, the best-selling autobiography by acclaimed civil rights attorney Fred D. Gray, appears now in a newly revised edition that updates Attorney Gray’s remarkable career of “destroying everything segregated that I could find.”

Of particular interest will be the details Gray reveals for the first time about Rosa Parks’s 1955 arrest. Gray was the young lawyer for Mrs. Rosa L. Parks, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery Improvement Association, which organized the 382-day Montgomery Bus Boycott after Parks’s arrest.

February 1, 1956 Attorney Gray filed the landmark Federal case Browder v. Gayle, that withstood appeal and was affirmed by the United States Supreme Court, a mighty blow to racial segregation through the world.

As the last survivor of that inner circle, Gray speaks about the strategic reasons Mrs. Parks was presented as a demure, random victim of Jim Crow policies when in reality she was a committed, strong-willed activist who was willing to be arrested so there could be a test case to challenge segregation laws.

Gray’s remarkable career also includes landmark civil rights cases in voting rights, education, housing, employment, law enforcement, jury selection, and more. He is widely considered one of the most successful civil rights attorneys of the twentieth century and his cases are studied in law schools around the world.

In addition he is an ordained Church of Christ Minister and was one of the first Blacks elected to the Alabama Legislature in the modern era.

Initially denied entrance to Alabama’s segregated law school, he eventually became the first Black President of the Alabama Bar Association.

Give thanks to his amazing walk.
Michael Harris, Chair
Rosa Parks Day in California