Fred Gray is a “lawyer by trade” and a Church of Christ “preacher at heart” who won the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2022 at age 91 for his boundary-shattering Civil Rights work.

Fred Gray’s portrait by Michael Shane Neal hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Gray represented Martin Luther King Jr., Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks and won the case to integrate the Montgomery, Alabama, bus system. As a lawyer, he helped desegregate more than 100 public school systems and the University of Alabama and Auburn University. He successfully argued a case at the Supreme Court that gave the NAACP the right to operate in Alabama, and he became one of the first African Americans elected to the Alabama state legislature in the 20th century. Gray also won a settlement for some of the survivors of the shameful medical “experiment” perpetrated on 600 black men at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.

Gray has served as a preacher and elder for decades at the Tuskegee Church of Christ, and he has never stopped working to bring racial healing and harmony into the church in addition to society at large. In a 2020 interview with the Christian Chronicle, Gray said, “Racism is contrary to what Jesus taught. We need to stop it and correct it.”

Gray has been honored in multiple ways in the past few years, including a statue in his honor outside the Alabama Bar Association in Montgomery that was dedicated in 2025, a street named in his honor in Montgomery in 2021, and a portrait added to the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in D.C. in 2024. Now 95, he continues to speak at events and symposiums around the country and is slated to speak at the Fred D. Gray Institute for Human & Civil Rights second national symposium in March. The two-day event will bring together advocates, students, educators, legal and community leaders, and “all those committed to the work of justice, education, and civil rights.”

According to the Institute’s website, Gray launched the initiative in 2024 “with a national agenda, that builds on the foundation of his legal work to positively impact generations to come. Attorney Gray’s life mission has been to destroy racial segregation wherever he finds it, and that is what he continues to do.”

Gray’s memoir, Bus Ride to Justice, was published in 1995 and updated in 2002. It details many of his most famous cases and tells of his life in the courtrooms and pulpits of America.