Books

Fred D. Gray is the author of two books – Bus Ride to Justice and Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Bus Ride to Justice was first released in February, 1995. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study was first released in May, 1998.

Bus Ride to Justice

A native son of the sovereign State of Alabama, Fred Gray was denied admission to Alabama’s segregated law school, was forced to go to school “up north”. Gray returned to Alabama, passed the bar and opened a law office at age twenty-three, determined to “destroy everything segregated that I could find.”

His friend, Rosa Parks, was arrested for violating the segregated seating ordinance on a Montgomery city bus. He was her lawyer. When twenty-six year old Martin Luther King, Jr. was chosen to lead a boycott against the segregated buses, twenty-five year old Fred Gray became his—and the movement’s—lawyer. The struggle and success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott captured the attention of the national and was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court by Gray.

Although that case by itself would have secured Gray’s place in history, his attack on segregation had barely begun. Over the next 40 years, he attacked segregated restaurants, schools, housing, professional associations, parks and recreation, jails, law enforcement, and other vestige of slavery and segregation. The quiet, dignified lawyer usually won.

But, bit by bit, case by case, he played a major role in changing his home town, his native state, and the nation.

Along the way, he built a very successful law firm, raised a fine family, and followed his other calling as a minister.

In Bus Ride to Justice, Fred D. Gray recalls and reflects on his life and distinguished career that has been at the center of recent U.S. history.

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study:

The Real Story and Beyond

In 1932 the U.S. Public Health Service recruited 623 African American men from Macon County, Alabama, for a study of the “the effects of untreated syphilis in the Negro male.” For the next 40 years—even after the development of penicillin, the cure for syphilis—these men were denied medical care for this potentially fatal disease. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study was exposed in 1972, and in 1997 the government settled a lawsuit, but stopped short of admitting wrongdoing. In 1997 President Clinton welcomed five of the Study survivors to the White House and, on behalf of the the nation, officially apologized for an experiment that was wrong as well as racist. In this book, the attorney for the men describes the background at the Study, the investigation and the lawsuit, the events leading up to the Presidential apology, and the ongoing efforts to see that out of this painful and tragic episode of American history comes a lasting good.