Apology A Milestone In Civil Rights March Attorney Who Represented Rosa Parks Pushed Tuskegee Study Lawsuit

When President Clinton apologizes today to the frail old men who survived the government’s notorious Tuskegee Study, and to the relatives of the dead, Fred Gray will be there - for a ceremony that is just the latest milestone in 40 years spent working for civil rights.

Gray, a prosperous-looking lawyer in his tasteful dark suits, asked for the presidential apology and brought the survivors to Washington. Not many people will recognize him amid the East Room crowd. Baltimore Circuit Court Judge Kenneth L. Johnson said more Americans should.

“You are dealing with a guy who, a hundred years from now, will be up there with Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King,” Johnson said. “He is a great, unassuming person who is an unsung hero.”

“There’s no question he’s underappreciated as a historic figure,” said Taylor Branch, author of “Parting the Waters,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the civil rights movement.

In 1972, Gray filed suit on behalf of the hundreds of participants in the Tuskegee Study - all poor black men who were never told that they had the deadly disease syphilis. Government doctors followed the men for 40 years, withholding treatment even after penicillin was found to be an easy cure in the 1940s. That suit was settled for $10 million in 1974.

Ten years before that, Gray won a federal court case that held blacks could not systematically be excluded from juries.

Before that, in 1960, he won a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that said gerrymandering to dilute black voting strength is unconstitutional.

And before everything, in 1955, there was Parks.

When Parks, a department store seamstress, refused to give up her seat to a white person on a Montgomery, Ala., bus in 1955, Gray was her lawyer. He was 25 years old. He believed the courts could help change society.

“What you will find in the civil-rights movement is that lawyers for the most part have been written out of the history, except for Thurgood Marshall,” Gray said. “They’ll talk about the speeches and the marches, but the speeches and the marches didn’t change the spectrum of the law in this country. It was the lawsuits.”

The Parks arrest touched off the Montgomery bus boycott, a yearlong show of defiance. It gave Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., then a young preacher, a platform for organizing peaceful resistance to segregation laws.

Gray lost Parks’ case in the Montgomery court. She was fined $14. But Gray appealed. And the bus boycott continued until the Supreme Court affirmed a federal court ruling that held Alabama’s bus-segregation laws were unconstitutional.

Parks, who lives in Detroit, said Gray “deserves attention because he was very concerned about the civil rights movement. He also did quite a bit of legal work for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He was dedicated to the movement.”

Gray wasn’t allowed to attend law school in 1950’s Alabama. That was just how it was. Rather than enroll blacks in white schools, Alabama paid qualified students to attend schools out of state. An honors graduate of the Alabama State College for Negroes, Gray traveled to Ohio’s Western Reserve University’s law school.

When he came back to Montgomery, a member of the Ohio and Alabama bars, he became only the second black lawyer in town.

Gray set up an office above a Sears Auto Shop and started an ordinary general practice - wills, title examinations, divorces, a few criminal cases.

Then Parks - who remembers Gray as “a very polite and nice young man, quite serious about his work” - called. And the bus boycott started.

Why isn’t he better known? The civil rights movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s was a series of battles fought in the streets and in the courts. The street fighting drew much more attention.

“Thirty years ago, in the 1960s, there was this monumental struggle in the streets of Alabama: marches, singing, demonstrations, police dogs, blood, tears,” said J. L. Chestnut, who was the only black lawyer in Selma in the mid-1950s.

“At the same time, a monumental struggle was going on in the state and federal courts. This was out of sight, out of mind - slow and tedious work. Even the people active then were unaware of this quiet struggle going on in the courts,” Chestnut said.