With Medal of Freedom, civil rights attorney honored for helping solve problems | Opinion

I met Fred Gray on July 10, 2019, and it is a highlight in my life. I had heard about him through mutual friends. I had taught dozens of university classes on ethics that began by recounting his work to redress a major ethical lapse in the history of medicine.

Three years ago, we had a short conversation after a speech he made. The soft-spoken octogenarian was gracious enough to sign my copies of "Bus Ride to Justice: The Life and Works of Fred Gray" and "The Tuskegee Syphilis Study: An Insider's Account of the Shocking Medical Experiment Conducted by Government Doctors Against African American Men." Both are treasured volumes in my library.

At 91 now, Gray maintains his practice and speaks at civic and religious events. The attorney's life has been an exemplary case study in defending human rights. In addition to arguing four civil rights cases successfully before the U.S. Supreme Court, he has represented housewives, college students and Alabama farmers in situations where “they had a problem.”

If you don’t recognize the name Fred D. Gray, you should know that he is among a group of notable Americans recently awarded our country’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He and 16 others — including athlete Simone Biles, actor-director Denzel Washington, and posthumous awards presented to Sen. John McCain and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs — received the tribute at a White House ceremony on July 7.

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Gray received some of his earliest education at the Nashville Christian Institute. He graduated from Case Western Reserve School of Law in 1954. He would become an implacable foe of segregation and all other forms of human indignity over a seven-decade career.

Gray represented the Reb. Martin Luther King Jr., Claudette Colvin, Rosa Parks, John Lewis and many others whose names are far more widely known than his own. His was the legal voice behind the Montgomery bus boycott and the desegregation of Alabama public schools.

It was Gray who filed suit against the federal government for its breach of faith with 623 African American men who were used in a misguided medical study that began in 1932 to study “the effects of untreated syphilis in the Negro male.” Even when penicillin was found to be a specific curative agent for syphilis in the 1940s, treatment for participants in that study — along with their wives and children — was denied until the study was unmasked in 1972.

Subsequent medical care for survivors, a pittance in financial damages and an eventual apology from the federal government (that came only in 1997) hardly compensates for the moral failures in such an immoral and un-scientific “scientific investigation.” That anything came of it for the benefit of its victims traces back to the work of Gray. He would become the principal founder of the Tuskegee Human & Civil Rights Multicultural Center, a nonprofit organization memorializing syphilis study participants.

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In an interview with Jerry Harris in 2018, there was a recurring line. As Gray recounted his advocacy for Claudette Colvin for her arrest for failing to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, he said, “She had a problem, and so I defended her.” The same for Rosa Parks. Dr. King. Protestors beaten and put in jail. “They all just had a problem,” he said.

The “problem” they had and that Gray insisted be addressed hasn’t been resolved. His life's work has made significant strides in addressing it — both formally in the courts and practically in opening some doors of opportunity.

With the Presidential Medal of Freedom, honor has been given where honor is due. Thank you, Mr. Gray, for leading where less adept and less courageous souls could not. Thank you, Mr. Gray, for reminding us of what remains to the rest of us.

Dr. Rubel Shelly is a philosopher-theologian who has taught medical ethics for four decades. 

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Civil rights attorney duly honored with Presidential Medal of Freedom