Olde Hornet
Well-Known Member
One of the most consequential attorneys for the Civil Rights Movement, ASU alumnus and famed civil rights attorney Fred Gray Sr., was recognized Thursday, June 7, for keeping a promise to himself – to destroy through the legal system “everything that was segregated.”
In a White House ceremony, President Joe Biden presented Gray with The Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, for spending his life achieving his goal of advocating for human rights.
The honor is reserved for people who have made exemplary contributions to the prosperity, values or security of the United States, world peace or other significant societal public or private endeavors.
Gray, still an active attorney at 91, was one of the first African American members of the Alabama Legislature after Reconstruction. He has been the legal mastermind behind many of the nation’s pivotal civil rights cases, particularly during the birth of the modern civil rights movement in 1955 when he defended Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Gray’s prominence grew throughout his decades-long career as he successfully defended a succession of history-making cases such as his representation of the plaintiffs in the “Tuskegee Syphilis Study,” which involved doctors leaving black men untreated for the disease for decades.
