Dan Abrams - Alabama v. King: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Criminal Trial That Launched the Civil Rights Movement

Praise for Dan Abrams and David Fisher

Dan Abrams and David Fisher write the heart-pounding pulse of history.

Diane Sawyer on Lincolns Last Trial

Abrams and Fisher are gifted writers, and their prose is neither overly spare nor showy; theyre clearly fascinated by the trial, and their enthusiasm for their subject matter shows.

NPR on Theodore Roosevelt for the Defense

The authors do a remarkable job of spinning the court transcripts into a fascinating tale of intrigue and underscoring the men and the issues at play.

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An engrossing, lively and expertly crafted courtroom drama filled with colorful characters and having significant resonance for the present.

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Dan Abrams is the chief legal affairs correspondent for ABC News, host of Dan Abrams Live on NewsNation and host of The Dan Abrams Show: Where Politics Meets the Law on SiriusXM. He also hosts and produces numerous shows for A&E Network. A graduate of Columbia University Law School, he is CEO and founder of Abrams Media, which includes the Law & Crime Network. He lives in New York. With David Fisher, he has coauthored Kennedys Avenger, John Adams Under Fire, Theodore Roosevelt for the Defense and Lincolns Last Trial, which received the 2018 Barondess/Lincoln Award.

Fred D. Gray, one of the nations leading civil rights attorneys, was the lawyer for Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which began the modern Civil Rights Movement. His other cases and clients include the Freedom Riders, the Selma to Montgomery March, John Lewis, numerous school desegregation and voting rights lawsuits, and many others. He lives in Tuskegee, Alabama. Gray has authored two books, Bus Ride to Justice: The Life and Works of Fred Gray and The Tuskegee Syphilis Study.

David Fisher is the author of twenty-five New York Times bestsellers. He lives in New York with his wife, Laura.

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ALABAMA v. KING

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. AND
THE CRIMINAL TRIAL THAT LAUNCHED
THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

DAN ABRAMS and
FRED D. GRAY
with
DAVID FISHER

Lawyers often talk about fighting for justice, but what they typically mean is that inside a courtroom they vigorously represent a clients position. Sometimes they even take unpopular or controversial positions of public significance and pay a price for fighting on behalf of a noble cause. But Fred Gray literally lived these fights. When he was battling for equality throughout his career, he was both attorney and in many cases, indirectly, client as well. He, like so many others, was being forced to sit in the backs of buses and to stay outside whites only public facilities. He was being discriminated against, threatened, mistreated and underestimated. Yet through it all he always kept his eye on how to best effect change, strategically determining which cases to file, which arguments to make and which plaintiffs to include in an effort to walk that fine line between principle and chance of success. That made Fred not just a great lawyer, but a great leader. Even as we were writing this book, various honors and awards were bestowed on Fred that felt overdue. Thank you, Fred Gray, for allowing us entry into your world.

Dan Abrams and David Fisher

Contents

Looking back, sixty-seven years after my admission to the bar, after representing Claudette Colvin, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, the NAACP, the plaintiffs in Gomillion v. Lightfoot, the men in the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Freedom Riders, the Selma to Montgomery marchers, and the plaintiffs in the cases that desegregated the schools in Alabama from kindergarten to the universities, I never imagined that I would be invited to join Dan Abrams and David Fisher to tell this story. However, it happened. That has been the history of my life, helping to make the impossible possible.

When I was approached by them to coauthor this book, I was surprised, shocked, astonished, and didnt really believe it was happening, but it did.

I did not set out to play a role in history. I was just determined to change conditions in Alabama. Growing up in segregated Montgomery in the 1940s and early 1950s, I came to understand the promises of America were being denied to African Americans solely because of the color of our skin. I knew what the US Constitution said and I knew what the Alabama laws said, and I knew for sure that they werent the same thing. As I was sitting in the back of a bus, going back and forth across the city to Alabama State College for Negroes, I decided I was going to be a lawyer in Alabama, I was going to fight segregation anywhere, anytime, I was going to destroy segregation wherever I found it and I was going to do that for the rest of my life.

So far, so good.

Segregation was insidious. It poisoned every aspect of African American life. It was designed and applied not simply to control actions but, perhaps more importantly, to create a mindset of inferiority that would limit dreams. My mother fought that every day for her five childrens lives. I dont know exactly why I believed I could rely on the law to change the law in order to fight segregation when the law had been used for so long to make segregation legal. But I did. I always did. Perhaps my religious background and my ministerial training gave me the faith and courage that I needed.

I had no specific plans for how I was going to fight for civil rights. When I opened my first office, there was no national unified civil rights movement. There were no national African American leaders. My primary concern was figuring out how to obtain clients and pay the fifty-dollar-a-month rent. At that time there was only one African American lawyer in Montgomery and he had been practicing for only a year. However, I was fortunate to be guided by some very smart, very determined people within the Black community. Many of them are represented by statues and plaques today, but at that time they were of flesh and blood, and they were willing to risk their lives and livelihoods in order to obtain equal justice. Many of them are well-known, E. D. Nixon, Rufus Lewis, Jo Ann Robinson, Rosa Parks, Dr. Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy, Claudette Colvin and John Lewis, for example, but there were others, and so many of the mostly forgotten people mentioned in the following pages stood up when that wasnt a safe or easy thing to do.

As we write about in this book, I was there at the birth of the civil rights movement.

This book is the story of Alabama v. King, the first civil rights trial of Dr. Kings career. When it began, no one, absolutely no one, understood how important it would be in history. Thats why so few photographs exist. I was a young Montgomerian and I knew from experience not to have any great expectations about obtaining justice on a local level. Even that early in what was to evolve into a national movement, it was my belief that our victories in the war against legal segregation would come on the federal level and thats where I intended to make my fight. This trial began as just another step on a long climb to the promised land of equal justice for all.

The county solicitor believed it would not take long to convict Dr. King. That result would serve as a warning to the rest of the community about what was going to happen if they didnt end this protest.