Fred Gray Sr.
On this date in 2002, the first Black president of the Alabama State Bar Association was installed.
Fred Gray, Sr., who defended Rosa Parks in her bus segregation case and represented victims of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, broke another racial barrier at age 71. With his installation, he assumed a post that white attorneys usually achieve in their 50s.
Alabama's law schools did not admit Blacks in the early 1950s, so Gray headed to Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. His goal: "To destroy everything segregated I could find."
