As a colleague of and eventual attorney for Martin Luther King Jr., Fred Gray was active in the civil rights movement. Gray was born in 1930 and raised in a segregated black division of Montgomery, Alabama. He earned his undergraduate degree from Alabama State College while also working as the district manager of the Alabama Journal. After earning his JD from Case Western Reserve University, he opened his own law firm in Montgomery.

Gray represented Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks when they received charges of disorderly conduct for refusing to give up their bus seats to white passengers. He was instrumental to the Montgomery bus boycott, serving as an attorney in the civil suit Browder v. Gayle that eventually integrated the city’s buses. In 1970, Gray became one of the first two African-American legislators to be elected in Alabama since the Reconstruction era.

Gray continues to practice law as a senior partner at Gray, Langford, Sapp, McGowan, Gray & Nathanson in Alabama. He was born in 1930.

For more on Gray, check out our Modern Law Library podcast from 2013, in which we spoke to him about his civil rights memoir and his time serving as Rosa Parks’ attorney.