On July 20, 2002, the first Black president of the Alabama State Bar Association was installed.Fred Gray, Sr., who defended Rosa Parks in her landmark bus segregation case and represented victims of the well-known Tuskegee syphilis experiment, broke a racial barrier at the age of 71. With his installation, he assumes a post that white attorneys normally achieve when they are in their 50s.
Alabama's law schools did not admit Blacks in the early 1950s, so Gray headed to Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. His goal, he said, was "to destroy everything segregated I could find."
Reference:
The Associated Press