At its inaugural symposium in Montgomery, Alabama, the Fred D. Gray Institute for Human and Civil Rights appointed Ayesha Bell Hardaway, Director of the university’s Social Justice Institute and Professor of Law, and Bryan L. Adamson, Associate Dean for Diversity and Inclusion and the David L. and Ann Brennan Professor of Law, to its second cohort of Gray Institute Fellows.
The Gray Institute Fellows are a national group of outstanding individuals with distinguished backgrounds and great competencies, appointed to two-year terms. They will be project-based, providing leadership and work as well as substantial external relationships to benefit the Institute’s initiatives. Institute Fellows steward generative possibilities for thought and action arising from the 2025 Symposium - especially Gray’s work in medical racism, voting rights, gerrymandering, human and civil rights law, and equal access to quality education for all. Fellows will help cultivate the 2026 Symposium through planning, participation and overall wisdom, and will nurture Institute relationships and bring expertise, ideas and substantial work to the entire enterprise.
Fred D. Gray (LAW ‘54) is one of the nation’s foremost civil rights attorneys. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called Gray “the Movement’s Lawyer.” Gray represented Rosa Parks, Dr. King, John Lewis and hundreds more in the civil rights movement, leading cases to challenge segregation, protect the Selma-to-Montgomery March, integrate schools and universities, defend voting rights and freedom of speech, and advocate for the victims of the Tuskegee Syphilis Studies, among many other causes. Encouraged by a teacher to apply to law school despite earlier plans to become an historian and preacher, Gray moved to Cleveland and received a JD degree from Case Western Reserve University School of Law in 1954. At the time, there was no law school in Alabama that would accept African Americans.
Gray and the board founded the Fred D. Gray Institute for Human and Civil Rights to remember and study the legacy of Gray’s work and the Civil Rights Movement, to assess its progress and struggle in the present, and to advance justice and equity into the future.
The new cohort of institute Fellows includes Adamson, Bell Hardaway, Bryan Fair of the University of Alabama School of Law, Jeffrey R. Baker of the Pepperdine University Carrouso School of Law, Pastor Derrick Jackson of First Baptist, Gallatin, Tennessee, and Trent Ogilvie of the Columbia Peace and Justice Initiative, Maury County, Tennessee.