Growing up in Montgomery in the 1930s and 1940s, Fred Gray’s mother told him that he could do anything in life, as long as he did three things: keep Christ in your life, get a good education, and “don’t get involved with the criminal justice system, because it doesn’t always work out.”
The laws of segregation wouldn’t allow him follow his mother’s third piece of advice.
Particularly, Gray said what motivated him to leave home, get a law degree in Ohio, and come back to Montgomery to “destroy everything segregated [he] could find” was the “problems on the buses.” He’s been trying to fight similar “problems” for the past seven decades since completing law school, since he served as an attorney for Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr…