Q: Okay I hope that everybody had a good supper and that you\'re ready
for the continuation of this kind of march from Thursday to Sunday to
another Thursday to Sunday. So we will wind up with a march next Sunday
in some when we go across the bridge. But tonight we've got someone that
I am really proud to be able to introduce. He's\-- I have worked with
him a couple of times before and every time I come away in awe of the
new things that I find out about him. Fred Grey is probably the attorney
who has done the most in the State of Alabama to argue black causes and
has done so remarkably successfully. I will just give you a very short
run through of some of the things. He was the attorney for Rosa Parks
during the Birmingham, when she was arrested for refusing to give up her
seat on the bus. He was the attorney for the Montgomery Improvement
Association, which was the organization largely responsible for the bus
boycott. He was the attorney for Martin Luther King, all of this back in
the 1950's. he was also the attorney four years later, five years later
for Dr. Gamillian (ph?) here in Tuskegee for what was probably on of the
first major voting rights cases. That had to do with the gerrymandering
of Tuskegee. He argued that case before the Supreme Court and later will
give you the website where you can go to actually listen to his argument
before the Supreme Court. He was the attorney for the Tuskegee Syphilis
Study Case. He was the first black attorney to be elected as president
of the Alabama State Bar. He was the personal attorney for Dr. King when
he was being attacked by using the tax laws. He continues to do work and
he also continues to speak. He will be leaving in the morning to go to
Durham for a program related to black history month and then I think
you\'re on the road for the entire week aren't you?

**Fred Grey:** I leave there and come back and go down to Florida.

Q: But I present Fred Grey and I\'m really pleased that he could come
join us.

**Fred Grey:** Thank you very much, uh.. Mr. Black and to all of you
including you young people, be very happy that you\'re here. I am
particularly here that you\'re in Tuskegee. Because and uh.. you know
about and will be hearing a great deal for the next week about the Selma
to Montgomery March and about all the ramifications involved in it. And
I was the lawyer that they called after they were beaten back on Bloody
Sunday for the purpose of filing a lawsuit, in fact they called me that
Sunday after it occurred and the next day I filed a suit to make the
State of Alabama protect them. And that case was appealed to the Court
of Appeals in New Orleans and uh.. we were successful so the march could
take place. There is a real misconception in both the media and across
the state and the nation in terms of where the real cradle of the Civil
Rights Movement is. It was not in Montgomery and I helped to organize
that and represent all the persons involved. It was not in Selma, even
though I got the court order to make the march that was in '65,
Montgomery was '55. Because then uh.. Birmingham I was not directly
involved in that because the dean of black lawyers in this state Arthur
Shores was in Birmingham and he didn\'t need my helped, but I used his
help a great deal in all of my cases. But I want you to know that there
can be no truly Civil Rights trail in Alabama if it does not include
Macon County, Alabama. Because years before Selma, years before
Montgomery, years before Birmingham, you had African-American men and
women in this county Tuskegee, Macon County, trying to get the right to
vote. Now the president of the university had the right to vote, the
African-American who was the director of the VA Hospital they permitted
him to vote and a few others. But the other 85% of African-American
population in this county were denied systematically the right to vote.
We had people like C. G. Gomillian (ph?) uh.. like uh.. uh.. Mr. William
P. Mitchell, uh.. Mr. Daniel and many others who worked in this
community in the late 30's and the early 40's. Lawsuits were filed in
this city, some of the appeals when they were denied the right to vote
by the Macon County Board of Registrars was filed in the Circuit Court
of Macon County and the court house is just two blocks from here. So
truly you\'re beginning your knowledge, obtaining knowledge about the
right to vote by coming to Tuskegee and the whole history of Tuskegee
from the time that Booker Washington came and was the first president of
the university. The campus of Tuskegee University for a long time was
the only safe place in the State of Alabama where an integrated group
could meet and even discuss these matters. You don\'t know about these
lawsuits that were filed and even the Boswell Amendment which in 1945
was a lawsuit that was filed to declare it unconstitutional. What that
amendment did was to require a person to be able to read, write and
interpret the constitution of the United States. Now how in the world
can a layman interpret the constitution when even the members on the
Supreme Court, the highest court of the state of the nation have
differences of opinion because sometimes you have three or four
different opinions that the court hands down. So it is proper that you
meet here and when my late wife and I recognized a few years ago that a
lot of the rich history that was being\-- that had been made here was
not being preserved so that people would be able to see it we started
talking about a facility that would be able to preserve that history.
And right in the middle of that my wife died unexpectantly in 1997. So
after her funeral we decided that we would go on and so uh.. the men in
the Tuskegee syphilis study as it's been indicated I represented them
and what those men said they wanted was a permanent place, a permanent
memorial in Tuskegee that would not only show their contributions but
the contributions others had made in the field of civil and human
rights. And when Mr. Humin Shaw one of the participants of the study
whose picture is downstairs and I was instrumental in getting President
Clinton to make an apology to those men and I went to Washington with
them and before Mr. Shaw introduced the President of the United States
he announced that the men wanted a permanent memorial here and that they
had formed the Tuskegee Human Rights Multicultural Center for the
purpose of preserving not only their contributions but the contributions
all the others have made in the field of civil and human rights. So you
now sit in a facility, a partial fulfillment of those dreams and when
this center is fully developed it will show the contributions made by
the various ethnic groups in this area, Native Americans, Americans of
African descent, Americans of European descent. You know this land
belonged, the whole country belonged to Native Americans and the
Europeans came in and took their land. You are sitting now in the county
where that's on the Trail of Tears, Native Americans were brought from
South Georgia through Alabama others came down from Notasulga and met
here taken on to Montgomery shipped on, put on ships sent down the\-- to
the Gulf and then back up the Mississippi and then took them out west.
Then the Europeans came and along with them came\-- they brought their
slaves, so we had slavery, then we had emancipation, then we had
reconstruction, then we had the whole area of laws being formed for the
purpose of discriminating against African-Americans. But all of these
groups and then we had the Civil Rights Movement. This museum here will
show all of that and if you\'re fortunate to come back after May and we
extended we\-- all- all of where you\'re sitting now will be completely
changed, downstairs will be changed and you will have a time wave walls
and a complete new facility showing the history. Now I\'ve talked with
you a little bit about the past history, but let me give you a little
something about what I was asked to talk to you about. And that was
Gomillian (ph?) versus Lightfoot. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was about
to end and it did end in 1956. About the same time of course before it
ended the State of Alabama enjoined the NACP from doing business in this
state and I represented the NACP and for the next eight years, I worked
with uh.. uh.. Bob Cotter whose now\-- he was joint counsel for the NACP
then, he is not a retired uh.. senior judge of the United State District
Court for Manhattan. So with the NACP out, then the question came up,
about and now lawsuits have now been filed, the government being to get
active, we being to get a few voters in the city of Tuskegee, not enough
that an African-American could be elected but enough that the
African-American vote could be the balance of power. Then Senator Sam
Engelhard of Shorter who was our state senator introduced a bill uh..
140 into the Alabama Legislature which changed the city limits of
Tuskegee. The original city limits, it was a square and they changed it
so that and my brief to the Supreme Court I said it was a 28 sided sea
dragon, in which it went out to get white people to keep them in and
came in to take black people out. And then they wanted to say, you\'re
not denied the right to vote, you can vote in city elections, you can
vote in uh.. state elections, you can vote in federal elections, you can
vote in county elections, but you can't vote in city elections and you
can't solely because of the fact that you no longer live in the city.
Well that was- that was a very difficult case, nobody thought I could
win it but me, I was able to get Bob Cotter who had been working with me
on the NACP case and who had worked with me on Brouder versus Gale,
which is the case that integrated the buses in Montgomery. And I went up
to uh.. I met him in Texas and took a copy of my proposed complaint and
he agreed to work with me on it. And there is included in all of what
I\'m telling you- you can read about it in my autobiography, Bus Ride to
Justice, including a map that has superimposed in it, the old city
limits and the new city limits. But this was a very difficult case for
the courts because and particularly for Jerry Johnson who had ruled with
us on some other earlier cases. But it was difficult because in
Colegrove versus Green they were districting a congressional
redistricting case in Pennsylvania, where the race was not an issue but
political parties was an issue. So they drew the lines to protect uh.. a
political party incumbent and what the court said, we're not going to
look at it because that\'s a political thicket and the courts will stay
out of it. And that's what the defendants in this case said when we
represented Dr. Gomillian and others. But I felt the best way that the
court could understand the real issue was for them to see a map with
both of them superimposed then they could see the result of what
happened. I asked Mr. Mitchell, uh.. who was executive director of the
Tuskegee Civic Association which is the organization which is really
responsible for all this litigation around Macon County and he had a map
drawn to scale and I ended up attaching that as a part of my pleadings.
And I went to court but I didn\'t get a chance to use it in the district
court here because Judge Johnson dismissed my complaint based on
Colegrove versus Green and said it was a political issue. I appealed it
to the Court of Appeals then the \_\_\_\_\_ Circuit down in New Orleans
and uhm.. I lost there but Judge Brown wrote a wonderful descent opinion
and what\-- I went home and was talking to my wife, she said, "Well Grey
I don\'t understand you go and lose a case and you happy.". I said,
"Yeah, I\'m happy but Judge Brown has given us a roadmap on what we need
to do and what we need to argue once we get to the Alabama Supreme\--
United States Supreme Court.". And I felt that if I could get one out of
three judges in the \_\_\_\_ Circuit, I may be able to get five out of
nine on the United States Supreme Court. I go up to Washington and
actually as- as I uh.. begin Bus Ride to Justice, to show you the
importance of this case, I start off saying this, the \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ men
in sight were not waiting on me as I walked up the white marble steps of
the United States Supreme Court on a warm May morning in 1959, but I was
waiting for them. I and those I represented had been waiting for several
centuries. Across the top of the building were the famous word- words
"Equal justice under the Law" as I passed beneath the chiseled phrase I
recall the constitutional law teaching a professor Oliver Schroeder
(ph?) who taught me constitutional law in Cleveland and I\'m now on
their board and I talked to Professor Schroeder just this past Saturday
when I was there for a board meeting. And what he use to always say as
he taught us, he would make a statement and talk about a case and then
he would say, we shall see. So as I went up to the Supreme Court we were
going to see whether there was equal justice under the law. I had my
briefcase in one hand and my map under my arms that I\'d never gotten
the chance to use. I made an arrangement with the clerk and the marshal
that as soon as my case is called put this map up right behind me so
that the justices can see it. They did. And as soon as that happened Mr.
Justice uh.. Frankfurter before I could start my argument good, wanted
to know what is that behind you? And I told him, I said, that\'s a map
showing the city limits of Tuskegee before and after. He said, "Where is
Tuskegee Institute?", I pointed out Tuskegee Institute. He said, "Now
Tuskegee Institute is still in the city isn't it?". I said, "No sir, Mr.
Justice, Tuskegee Institute is not in the city limits, it was before but
after the act is not.". He said, "You mean to tell me Tuskegee Institute
is not in the City of Tuskegee?". I said, "It's not.". I think that won
Frankfurter's vote and we got an unanimous court and so Gomillian versus
Lightfoot is a very, very important case because it set the precedent
for other cases that enable you to have single member districts and all
of these other good solid constitutional principles so that now we have
thousands of African-Americans and other minorities who hold office
throughout this nation. So I\'m happy that you\'re here in addition to
the voter registration case but this county also is the county, you've-
you've heard a lot about discrimination in the agriculture and about
black farmers. But do you know in the early 60's we filed a case, Dr.
Henderson versus the Macon County ASCS, which is the county agencies
that provide for all the farm subsidies. It was in this county that we
filed the first such case and the first chairman of the county
commission, I mean not of a county commission but of a\-- of ASCA Board
was in this county. When I decided to practice law here I don\'t care
how good my cases were and we had 85% of the people were
African-Americans I could never win a jury case, we would have a- a list
of jurors of about 100 and only two or three African-Americans were
there. So I filed a lawsuit in Judge Johnson's court, Johnson uh.. it
was uh.. Mitchell versus Johnson, the chairman of the Macon County uh..
Jury Commission, so that in jury cases African-Americans and all other
minorities can be represented. Then in school desegregation it was in
this county that the case of Levey Macon a very important school
desegregation case and most of you, if you\'re not in uh.. three
selected areas that had school cases before 1965 you attended integrated
schools because of a case we filed right here. The high school across
the street I have to get my bearings straight, back over here, uh.. it
was Tuskegee High School at that time. It was suppose to be integrated
by court order Government Wallace sent the state troopers in and would
not let it be integrated and I said well if the Governor can stop one
school system from being integrated I\'m going to ask the court to order
him and the State Board of Education to desegregate all the other school
systems in the State of Alabama, that's not under court order. It was 99
out of the 119 and then I'd already filed five other desegregation
cases. The court\-- it took me six years to convince the court to enter
that order but it finally entered then. And do you know cases that are
filed in '65, my two sons Fred Jr. and Stanley are still handling some
of those cases because they don\'t have terminal orders in them. So I\'m
glad you\'re here, I'll probably talk too long. I'll let you ask me some
questions, but we want you to know that you are truly sitting on holy
ground and you\'re going to hear a lot about Selma and a lot about
Birmingham and a lot about other places. But don\'t be fooled it all
started here and you\'re going to be able to see it documented that way,
because that's the history. And while our building and some of my
artifices are- are gone the history is still there and we just will have
to demonstrate that history in just another\-- a different way but you
can't erase the history and while the people who were involved here in
doing Civil Rights activities didn\'t want people to know that they were
doing it. Because most of them worked at the university and they were
getting a little money from the state and the state would have stopped
that. Or they were working at the VA Hospital and they were afraid that
they would say they\'re violating the \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_. So uh.. we're
happy that you\'re here, this city and this county played major roles in
the Civil Rights Movement and you are blessed to be able to uh.. learn
about it and I just hope, because I talk to students across the nation
that you will realize that all of your brilliance, you have tremendous
minds and you can do a lot of things, whatever you want to do. But in
the final analysis you are going to have to make up in your mind that
you can do what you want to do. I want to leave you with what my mother
told me and uh.. uh.. she was not an academically educated woman uh.. my
father died when I was two and there were five of us and I\'m the
youngest. Uh.. but she taught us that if you do three things you can be
anything you want to be. One, place Christ first in your life. Two, stay
in school and obtain an education and three, stay out of the criminal
justice system, don\'t get in trouble. That has worked for me, I think
it will work for you. You can dream, I had a dream, it wasn't a dream,
it was really a personal commitment and I talk about this in Bus Ride to
Justice, when I was a junior at Alabama State College in Montgomery, and
as I observed all the desegregation that was going- going on and I lived
on one side of town, had to use the public school system and I saw our
people being discriminated against on buses and being mistreated. And if
a black person had a cause of action against a white person, you
couldn\'t hardly find anyone who would\-- no lawyer would handle it. I
decided that we needed a lawyer in Montgomery and in Alabama that would
handle Civil Right cases, I made a secret commitment and that commitment
was that I would leave Alabama because I couldn\'t go to the university-
university of Alabama Law School, graduate, take the Alabama Bar, pass
it, become a lawyer and destroy everything segregated I could find. That
was my secret desire, I was blessed enough to finish law school in three
years, stop by the Ohio Bar Justing Case and took that exam and six
weeks later took the Alabama, passed both the first time and in six
months after I was licensed to practice, six months from September on
March the 2nd I handled my first Civil Rights case, involving Montgomery
buses. It wasn't Rosa Parks, who know who I represented? Who was it I
represented?

**M1:** Mrs. Carven.

**Fred Grey:** Claudette Carven, Claudette Carven was a 15 year old
African-American girl from Montgomery who lived in the Kinghill section
of Montgomery she got on the bus the same place Ms. Parks did, on her
way home from school she rode the city buses and had to transfer in
downtown Montgomery and Claudette rode one block and was asked to give
up\-- get up and give her seat to a white man. And Claudette did not get
up, and when the police came she would not walk off the bus, they drug
her literally off. I represented Claudette in the juvenile court of
Montgomery County before Judge Hill and Claudette gave the model courage
to Mrs. Parks who was working with the youth, to Edie Nixon who was Mr.
Civil Rights, to me who had an ambition to come back and do exactly what
I was doing. And to Dr. King who was selected to be the spokesman for
the movement. If there had been no Claudette Carven, there may very well
have never been a Mrs. Rosa Parks as we know her. And if there had been
no Mrs. Rosa Parks as we know her, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. may never
have been introduced to the public as he was introduced to the public on
December the 5th, 1955 and went on to become an international famous
person. I say in statements across the nation that there are many
persons like Claudette Carven who laid the foundation and made it
possible so that we can honor and I filed probably one of the first
bills in the Alabama Legislature or in this country to make a holiday
for Dr. King. I did it in 1973 when I was in Alabama Legislature, long
before these others came along, of course I was ahead of my time it
didn\'t get out of- out of committee, it remained for other legislatures
to come along and do. But the point I\'m trying to make is that there
are literally hundreds of persons whose names never appear in the media
whose faces never appear on television but they are the ones who laid
the foundation and who made it possible so we can honor Dr. King and
Mrs. Parks and our other great leaders. Thank you very much.

Q: Great, and I really appreciate you\'re being here. Do you have just a
minute or two that you can take some questions?

**Fred Grey:** Yes.

**M2:** \<inaudible\>.

**Fred Grey:** Uh.. that\'s a good question, right in this book and my
wife was determined that the book be written but uh.. actually it took
us over a period of time, it was five or six years because I did it in
my- my leisure and I really started off with my- with just my little
handheld tape recorder and just started talking into it and then as time
passed we would take it and we would refine it. Uh.. and actually the
first edition of it was hardback that came out in 1995 and now I\'ve got
to update it, I'll write another one, so many things has happened since
then. Now a lot of the incidents that I told you about that happened
here in Macon County if it were day you could go by the court house
there is a monument, a plaque outside the Macon County Bar and Alabama
State Bar put and on that plaque it talks about a lot of these cases,
including uh.. Gomillian versus Lightfoot.

**F1:** What was it like being the first black attorney in Montgomery?

**Fred Grey:** I really wasn't the first black attorney in Montgomery.
Uh.. Charles Langford who still lives in Montgomery, he's incapacitated
now because of an unfortunate accident over a year ago and who is one of
my law partners. He actually practiced before me, but even before then
there was a man named Arthur Madison who was one of the original
Madison's from Madison Park uh.. who practice in New York but also
practiced in Alabama. He is another pioneer who was working in
Montgomery, early on trying to get people registered to vote and some
people indicated that they didn\'t authorize him to represent them and
he ended up getting disbarred. So uh.. I wasn't the first lawyer and
Arthur Shores really in Birmingham had been handling Civil Rights cases
all over Alabama long before uh.. uh.. I was licensed to practice. It
isn\'t solely important that you be the first anything, I think the
important thing is to decide what you want to be and then be willing to
make the sacrifice in order to obtain it. Yes.

**F2:** How important was Judge Johnson's\-- were Judge Johnson's
opinions to the Selma to Montgomery March?

**Fred Grey:** It was uh.. it was the determining fact, because you know
what happened the first time when they tried to march and if they had
tried to do it again without federal protection, it would have been a
disaster. No one was killed in that one even though persons were hurt,
uh.. but Judge Johnson played a major role in the march and not only the
march but in the development of Civil Rights Law. Because once we found
that he was a judge that was willing to rule properly then we tried to
give him an opportunity to rule on as many different areas of the law as
we could. Now some of them he didn\'t rule with us, and sometimes we
were able like we were in Gomillian to get him reversed and then there
were other times we- we didn\'t. For example, I think one of the uh..
one of the cases that I really hate he did not rule with us is in 19
about '68 you know Alabama State had been in Montgomery for years. The
only state supported school and then Alban University wanted to have a
branch and when they started I filed a suit to try to stop it, but the
judge didn\'t uh.. didn\'t rule with us in the Supreme \<skip\> in a
case that was filed in '85 that held that there are still vestiges or
racial discrimination in this state in higher education and he has now
set a hearing in Rome, Georgia uh.. for May 4 and 5 on one of the issues
in that case. Yes.

**M3:** \<inaudible\>?

**F3:** Okay, because you've already accomplished so much and you said
that you\'re personal goal was to destroy all types of desegregation
that you could. Do you have any current personal goals that you\'re
trying to meet now?

**Fred Grey:** Well what I\'m trying to do right now is if you pass by
the square you\'ll see our burnt out offices. And the first order is why
we have local uh.. local facilities as to pick up the pieces and rebuild
but what I tell people across the country though in the field of Civil
and Human Rights we have not\-- we are not where we ought to be while
we've made some progress. And I think one of the worst things now is
economic discrimination. Uh.. when I talk about economic discrimination
I\'m talking about the guff between the average income of the majority
and the average income of the minority. And it's not getting closer it's
getting farther apart and we have young people like you who attend
integrated schools with other persons or the majority race and you
finish and then usually the white kids will be able to find much better
jobs than black kids and then some of the black kids can't find jobs at
all. So they end up somebody give them a package and ask them to deliver
it and behold it is drugs and a law enforcement person is giving it to
them. And they get tied up into the criminal justice system, so we then
have more African-American young men in prison than in college and
that's a tragedy. I think that there should be someway to end this type
of racial economic discrimination because it is causing uh.. the whole
nation, because it causes a lot more to house prisoners then it does to
educate individuals.

**M4:** \<inaudible\> the order, that came down\-- it was in '69 went
the order came down that I guess didn\'t indicates but up to that point
integrated schools to a point in '69 that was the year that you said the
case started \<inaudible\>?

**Fred Grey:** I think the case started in '65, I think it was either
'68 or '69.

**M4:** Okay.

**Fred Grey:** It's correcting the book, I had my records then, but what
the- what the court did after the Governor sent the state troopers in I
amended the complaint and filed a supplemental complaint added the
Governor, added the superintendent, state superintendent of education,
the Board of Education, alleged all of these laws that gives the Board
of Education real control over all of these local school boards and uh..
told the court that uh.. if that authority could be used to close a
school, that authority could be used to require the state superintendent
of education to require the state boards, the county boards or all of
the school systems in Alabama to produce a plan to desegregate their
school systems and that's what happened. That\'s it?

Q: I want to thank you very much. I have a personal reason for and for
appreciating the opportunity to thank you. In 1963 I was a student at
Lee High School in Huntsville, Lee High School in Huntsville was one of
the schools that was ringed bumper to bumper by state patrol cars and I
could not physically get into the building. And uh.. it was a case that
Mr. Grey brought uh.. that it was able to force the schools to open and
force the schools to open that not only in the schools that at that time
were under court order. Huntsville, Birmingham, Mobile, Macon County,
Tuscaloosa I guess was the fifth one.

**Fred Grey:** Something like that.

Q: Something like that, but forced the schools to open statewide, but I
was at one of the schools that was under court order, was suppose to
have opened, looked like it was going to open peacefully and then the
day that I arrived for school I could not physically get to it because
it was bumper to bumper surrounded by the state patrol cars. Now all of
you live in Alabama, everyone of you are enjoying privileges that you've
achieved because of work that Mr. Grey has assisted you with. And I
think he's a very special citizen for our state, so thank you.

**Fred Grey:** Thank you very much and we want you to come and uh..
see\-- you\'re- you\'re really privileged you get a chance to see it the
way it is now and then you can come back a few months from now and see
it the way it will be then. Provided I can raise about \$200,000 to
match that grant, so you might have to go and help us do that. Thank you
very much.

\<crew talk\>

\#### End of Tape A25 \####