Thomas Gray

Thomas Gray, a lawyer and brother of Fred Gray Sr., drove people to work in support of the bus boycott. (Lloyd Gallman, Montgomery Advertiser)

By William F. West
Montgomery Advertiser

Thomas Gray recalls feelings of shock when hearing Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus to a white man.

"We just decided this was just the most horrible thing that could happen to people in our neighborhood, although we knew they had been doing this to others," Gray said.

It was Thursday, Dec. 1, 1955. Gray, a low-key man, was in the radio and television sales and service business in Montgomery. He and his wife, Juanita, a schoolteacher, were raising a family.

But the defiance of Parks, a seamstress and civil rights worker, inspired Thomas Gray and other blacks to mobilize.

They were the nucleus of the Montgomery Improvement Association, which coordinated a boycott of the city's segregated buses in protest, with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. named the leader.

Gray recalled his reaction that Monday to the sight of the mass-transit vehicles chugging down the streets without black passengers.

"I said, 'This is unbelievable, unbelievable,'" he said.

Gray said he knew he and other activists had to keep the demonstration alive by shuttling blacks to and from their jobs. Gray used his 1954 Plymouth to pick up people at 6 a.m. in front of a church along Mobile Road.

Montgomery's white-led government and police responded with belligerence.

"They turned on us," Gray said. "They just were opposed to anything."

They issued traffic tickets based on bogus reasons and old Alabama anti-boycott code, and booked and fingerprinted black drivers, including Gray.

Vigilantes also responded by bombing the homes of King and activist E.D. Nixon, as well as a white minister, Bob Graetz, a friend of Gray's who decided to leave Montgomery.

Blacks countered with their own legal punch.

Gray's brother, Fred, an attorney, representing a group of black women, filed a lawsuit Feb. 1, 1956, in federal court calling for the desegregation of the buses. They won their favorable ruling that November.

Thomas Gray compared the joyous moment in the black community to a Roman holiday.

"Those who were walking seemed to have been walking a little differently," he said. "It just appeared that way to me. You could tell. It wasn't like it had been."

He went on to a legal career in Ohio that included working in the legal department of the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority and serving as general counsel to the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority.

He returned to Montgomery and worked much of the 1990s as a federal administrative law judge before retiring. He says he enjoys bowling, golf and pinochle, and he and his wife go to Houston Hill to play bridge.

Yet when he drives in the city and sees the buses - including the vintage 1950s vehicle meandering on downtown streets - the memories immediately come back.

"They're rather vivid," he said.