Fred Gray (attorney)

Fred Gray
Gray speaking at Emporia State University on September 15, 2016.
Member of the Alabama House of Representatives
In office 1971–2015
Personal details
Born	(1930-12-14) December 14, 1930 (age 86) Montgomery, Alabama, U.S.
Spouse(s)	Bernice Hill (1956)
Children	four
Alma mater	Alabama State College Case Western Reserve University
Occupation	lawyer

Fred David Gray (born December 14, 1930) is a civil rights attorney, preacher and activist who practices law in Alabama. He litigated several major civil rights cases in Alabama, including some that reached the United States Supreme Court for rulings. He served as the President of the National Bar Association in 1985 and in 2001 was elected as the first African-American President of the Alabama State Bar.

Born in Montgomery, Alabama, Gray attended the Loveless School until the seventh grade. (His aunt taught there.) He attended the Nashville Christian Institute (NCI), a boarding school operated by the Churches of Christ, where he assisted NCI president and noted preacher Marshall Keeble in visiting other churches of the largely white denomination. After graduation, Gray matriculated at Alabama State College for Negroes, and received a baccalaureate degree in 1951. Encouraged by a teacher to apply to law school despite his earlier plans to become a historian and preacher, Gray moved to Cleveland, Ohio, and received a juris doctor degree from Case Western Reserve University School of Law in 1954. At the time there was no law school in Alabama that would accept African Americans.

After passing the bar examination, Gray returned to his home town and established a law office. He also began preaching at the Holt Street Church of Christ (where his parents had long been devout members).

In 1957, Gray fulfilled his mother's dream by becoming a licensed preacher of the Churches of Christ. In 1974, Gray helped merge the denomination's white and black churches in Tuskegee, Alabama, where he had moved. Gray also served on the board of trustees for Southwestern Christian College, a historically black college near Dallas, Texas affiliated with the Churches of Christ. In 2012 Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee, also affiliated with the Churches of Christ bestowed a doctorate of humane letters honoris causa upon Gray in 2012. Gray once challenged Lipscomb's segregation practices.