Bar Associations
Longtime civil rights chief Fred Grey will obtain ABA Medal
Calling Fred Grey a “civil rights icon,” the ABA on Wednesday introduced that he’ll obtain this 12 months’s ABA Medal. Picture by Corkythehornetfan, CC-BY-SA-4.0, by way of Wikimedia Commons.
When Fred Grey was 24 years outdated, he was the lawyer for Rosa Parks, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which started the trendy civil rights motion. He later represented marchers concerned within the Selma to Montgomery March and helped desegregate the bus system in Montgomery, Alabama, and the college techniques in Alabama.
Calling Grey a “civil rights icon,” the ABA on Wednesday introduced that he’ll obtain this 12 months’s ABA Medal. The award, which is the affiliation’s highest honor, “acknowledges exceptionally distinguished service by a lawyer or legal professionals to the reason for American jurisprudence.”
“Fred Grey is a big within the American authorized career,” stated ABA President Deborah Enix-Ross in a press release. “As a pioneering lawyer and as a brave civil rights chief, he’s a task mannequin for a lot of. Fred Grey, a longtime ABA member, embodies all the pieces that our members aspire to be.”
Grey graduated from the Case Western Reserve College Faculty of Legislation in 1954, and started his civil rights apply in Montgomery and Tuskegee, Alabama. His motto was “to destroy all the pieces segregated I might discover,” and thru a profession that spanned greater than half a century, he additionally labored to forestall disenfranchisement of Black voters and the systematic exclusion of Black residents from jury service.
Grey, who moreover represented the victims of the Tuskegee syphilis research, was elected to the Alabama Home of Representatives in 1970. One of many first two Black Alabama state legislators since Reconstruction, he served till 2015.
An ABA member since 1959, Grey additionally was president of the Nationwide Bar Affiliation in 1985 and was the primary Black president of the Alabama State Bar in 2002.
“I’m honored, appreciative and humbled that the ABA Board of Governors has chosen me because the 2023 recipient of the ABA Medal,” Grey stated within the press launch. “It’s a nice honor to be acknowledged by my friends. I’m honored as a result of the ABA said it’s doing so for ‘your conspicuous service in the reason for American jurisprudence.’”
Grey, who still practices with Grey, Langford, Sapp, McGowan, Grey, Grey & Nathanson in Montgomery and Tuskegee, Alabama, added that he’s “appreciative as a result of it comes late in life, on the age of 92, whereas I nonetheless can take pleasure in it.”
He’ll obtain the ABA Medal on the ABA Common Meeting on Aug. 5 through the 2023 ABA Annual Meeting in Denver.
Its previous recipients embrace U.S. Supreme Court docket Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Felix Frankfurter, Thurgood Marshall, William J. Brennan Jr., Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer; ethics chief Lawrence Fox; World Justice Mission founder and former ABA President William Neukom; social justice activist Bryan Stevenson; Watergate Particular Prosecutor Leon Jaworski; and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
See additionally:
ABAJournal.com: “Rosa Parks’ lawyer: ‘If the story can be instructed, I’d have to inform it’ (podcast)”
