Dwight Lewis
·4 min read
It was not the type of telephone call you receive every day. However, here it was around noon on Sept. 10 that I answered my mobile phone and the voice on the other end, said:
“Dwight, this is Fred Gray. I am coming to Columbia, Tennessee on Sept. 19 to speak to a group there. I issued a challenge to the group and I want you to be among my special guests at an event they are having if your schedule permits.’’
Civil Rights Attorney Fred D. Gray Sr., now 93 years-old, is one of America’s most outstanding citizens.
In July 2022, he was presented nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom Award, by President Joe Biden.
In 1955, he represented Rosa Parks, who was arrested because she refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man, which ignited the Montgomery bus boycott.
He was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s first civil rights attorney.
He was counsel for people involved in the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study in 1972.
He was one of the first African Americans to serve in the Alabama Legislature, from 1970-1974, since Reconstruction.
He is the senior partner in the law firm of Gray, Langford, Sapp, McGowan, Gray, Gray & Nathanson. P.C., with offices in Montgomery and Tuskegee, Alabama.
Gray issued a challenge for all the people of Columbia
And now, Attorney Fred Gray, an “American,’’ was coming to speak in Columbia in Maury County, Tennessee, where in late February 1946 a series of racial disturbances took place.
Meanwhile, some 69 years later and following the shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina that left nine Black people dead at the hands of a white shooter, a diverse Peace & Justice Initiative was formed in Columbia to “explore the legacy of African American history in our community and promote justice in the present day.’’
Seeking to find out what the group might do to accomplish its goal, they took a trip to Tuskegee on July 10, 2019, to meet with Attorney Gray at a human and civil rights museum he has had built in Tuskegee.
“I issued them a challenge, to go back home and do something that could benefit all of the people in Columbia,” said Attorney Gray, who graduated from high school at Nashville’s now closed Nashville Christian Institute, a Church of Christ school for black youth.
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The result, Columbia’s Peace & Justice Committee, in conjunction with city officials and others, agreed to have a roundabout built at the intersection of South Main Street and East Eighth Street with a sculpture of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall featured.
Then the NAACP’S special counsel and head of the organization’s legal department, attorney Thurgood Marshall came to Columbia to join Nashville attorney Z. Alexander Looby and Maurice Weaver, a white Chattanooga attorney, in the defense of 25 black defendants who had been indicted on various charges in the February 1946 series of racial disturbances.
'Vote like you have never voted before'
“I am going to issue you another challenge,’’ Attorney Gray told members of Columbia’s Peace & Justice Committee, city officials and more than 400 others in attendance at the Sept. 19 event at the Maury Hills Church on Unity Drive in Columbia.
“Keep doing what you are already doing. You are doing so good, you’ve done it so well. Continue to help us solve problems that still exist. The last time I saw (Congressman) John Lewis before his death I asked him what could I do to help reduce the increase in racism that we are seeing these days and the resurgence of hate groups, and he said, ‘Brother, keep pushing, keep going. Set the record straight.’
“To all those here tonight and all those interested in human and civil rights, and maintaining a democratic form of government, go to the polls in November and vote like you have never voted before.
“Keep pushing, keep going and do it in a non-violent manner and continue to do it until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.’’
Amen.
Dwight Lewis, a Knoxville native,served as a reporter, columnist and editorial page editor at The Tennessean for 40 years before retiring in 2011.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Opinion: Fred Gray pushed for civil rights and voting in Tennessee
