Alabama v. King |
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12 Oktober 2023
This book is not entitled The Autobiography of Fred Gray, but it could be. No doubt that would not have sold as well - I certainly wouldn't have given it a second look. Before reading the book I had not heard of Fred Gray, nor was I familiar with the role he played as a lawyer in the American civil rights movement of the 1950's and 1960's. This book is more about his life and role in the case that brought King to national prominence. Every schoolkid in the US has heard of Rosa Parks not giving up her seat to a white person in Montgomery, Alabama, but how many have heard of Claudette Colvin, who was convicted of the same crime in the same town not long before her. Colvin, however, was an unwed pregnant teenager, and so not a good spokesperson. Fred Gray and Rosa Parks were both activists for equal rights and saw the segregated bus system as a good route to insight a protest. Together they planned her arrest, and while she was sitll convicted and the conviction upheld, her arrest incited the bus boycott in Montgomery where tens of thousands of blacks refused to ride the buses. It was for inciting this protest the Martin Luther King, Jr. was indicted, even though he arrived late to the game and just became the boycott's spokesperson because of his oratory skills. Unfortunately those skills are not much in evidence in this book because his testimony only represented a small part of the testimony. And in their books Abrams, Gray and Fisher lay out in detail the play by play of the trial as well as its legal context. In this I learned about Sarah Mae Flemming's simliar refusal to give up her seat on a white person on Columbia, South Carolina that actually, unlike Parks, led to her acquital and the federal court's overturning of segregation on buses. Unfortunately the Supreme Court didn't agree to hear South Carolina's appeal, so other states including Alabama claimed it noarrowly applied only to South Carolina. It would take another case, Browder v. Gayle argued by Fred Gray before the Supreme Court to explicitly overrule state segragation laws. This, however, was after the national news coverage of King in his trial made him a leader of the civil rights movement. This book does an excellent job of giving lawyers like Gray their due and made me proud to be an American.
