"Lawyer for Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., the Montgomery bus boycott, the Tuskegee syphilis study, the desegregation of Alabama schools and the Selma march, and founder of the Tuskegee human and civil rights multicultural center."

Fred Gray grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, and had to leave the state to finish his education because blacks could not then attend Alabama law schools. He returned to his hometown in 1954 and became one of two black lawyers in the city. He was, he writes, determined to destroy everything segregated that I could find. He did not have to wait long. When Gray's friend Rosa Parks was arrested in 1955 for violating the segregated seating ordinance on a Montgomery bus, 26-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr., was chosen to lead the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and 24-year-old Fred Gray became his--and the movement's--lawyer. Gray's legal victory in the federal courts ended the boycott 381 days later. Over the four decades since, Gray has won scores of civil rights cases in education, voting rights, transportation, health, and other areas. He represented the Freedom Riders, the Selma-to-Montgomery marchers, the victims of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and many more. Bus Ride to Justice is the exciting story of a courageous life in the courtrooms of America and in the pulpits of churches where Fred Gray began as a child preacher and continues today, and of a strong human being filled with love and admiration for his fellow man.

First published in 1995, Bus Ride to Justice, the best-selling autobiography by acclaimed civil rights attorney Fred D. Gray, appears now in a newly revised edition that updates Gray's remarkable career of "destroying everything segregated that I could find." Of particular interest will be the details Gray reveals for the first time about Rosa Parks's 1955 arrest. Gray was the young lawyer for Parks and also Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery Improvement Association, which organized the 382-day Montgomery Bus Boycott after Parks's arrest. As the last survivor of that inner circle, Gray speaks about the strategic reasons Parks was presented as a demure, random victim of Jim Crow policies when in reality she was a committed, strong-willed activist who was willing to be arrested so there could be a test case to challenge segregation laws. Gray's remarkable career also includes landmark civil rights cases in voting rights, education, housing, employment, law enforcement, jury selection, and more. He is widely considered one of the most successful civil rights attorneys of the twentieth century and his cases are studied in law schools around the world. In addition he was an ordained Church of Christ minister and was one of the first blacks elected to the Alabama legislature in the modern era. Initially denied entrance to Alabama's segregated law school, he eventually became the first black president of the Alabama bar association. This volume also includes new photographs not found in the previous edition.

"When it comes to justice, there is no easy way to get it. You can't sugarcoat it. You have to take a stand and say, 'This is not right.'" - Claudette Colvin On March 2, 1955, an impassioned teenager, fed up with the daily injustices of Jim Crow segregation, refused to give her seat to a white woman on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Instead of being celebrated as Rosa Parks would be just nine months later, fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin found herself shunned by her classmates and dismissed by community leaders. Undaunted, a year later she dared to challenge segregation again as a key plaintiff in Browder v. Gayle, the landmark case that struck down the segregation laws of Montgomery and swept away the legal underpinnings of the Jim Crow South. Based on extensive interviews with Claudette Colvin and many others, Phillip Hoose presents the first in-depth account of an important yet largely unknown civil rights figure, skillfully weaving her dramatic story into the fabric of the historic Montgomery bus boycott and court case that would change the course of American history. Claudette Colvin is the National Book Award Winner for Young People's Literature, a Newbery Honor Book, A YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults Finalist, and a Robert F. Sibert Honor Book.

A black child protests an unjust law in this story loosely based on Rosa Parks' historic decision not to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955.

The saga of the Freedom Rides is an improbable, almost unbelievable story. In the course of six months in 1961, four hundred and fifty Freedom Riders expanded the realm of the possible in American politics, redefining the limits of dissent and setting the stage for the civil rights movement. In this new version of his encyclopedic Freedom Riders, Raymond Arsenault offers a significantly condensed and tautly written account. With characters and plot lines rivaling those of the most imaginative fiction, this is a tale of heroic sacrifice and unexpected triumph. Arsenault recounts how a group of volunteers--blacks and whites--came together to travel from Washington DC through the Deep South, defying Jim Crow laws in buses and terminals and putting their lives on the line for racial justice. News photographers captured the violence in Montgomery, shocking the nation and sparking a crisis in the Kennedy administration. Here are the key players--their fears and courage, their determination and second thoughts, and the agonizing choices they faced as they took on Jim Crow--and triumphed. Winner of the Owsley Prize Publication is timed to coincide with the airing of the American Experience miniseries documenting the Freedom Rides "Arsenault brings vividly to life a defining moment in modern American history." --Eric Foner, The New York Times Book Review "Authoritative, compelling history." --William Grimes, The New York Times "For those interested in understanding 20th-century America, this is an essential book." --Roger Wilkins, Washington Post Book World "Arsenault's record of strategy sessions, church vigils, bloody assaults, mass arrests, political maneuverings and personal anguish captures the mood and the turmoil, the excitement and the confusion of the movement and the time." --Michael Kenney, The Boston Globe