Alabama v. King: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Criminal Trial That Launched the Civil Rights Movement
About this audiobook
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested when she refused to give up her seat to a white man on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. After years of mistreatment on public buses, the African American community organized a bus boycott. Eighty-nine people were indicted for violating the city’s anti-boycott statute. But rather than putting each of them on trial, the prosecutors chose to make an example of just one: twenty-seven-year-old minister Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This became the moment that transformed Dr. King into a national leader.
Fred D. Gray, then twenty-four years old and one of only two Black lawyers in Montgomery, had prepared with Rosa Parks for the bus moment and now became Dr. King’s first defense lawyer. The stakes were huge. This was not just a trial about a state statute; this was an attempt to launch a movement in the face of an often violent effort by a Southern city fighting to preserve segregation. And it would set Gray on a path that would lead him to making an impassioned argument to the Supreme Court against segregation in Montgomery’s public transit.
On the eve of the trial, Dr. King commented, “When the history books are written in the future generations, the historians will pause and say, ‘There lived a great people—a Black people—who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.’”
Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.
About the author
David Fisher is the author of more than twenty New York Times bestsellers. He lives in New York with his wife, Laura.
Dan Abrams is the chief legal affairs anchor for ABC News and CEO and founder of Abrams Media. He is also the host of top-rated Live PD on A&E Network and The Dan Abrams Show: Where Politics Meets the Law on SiriusXM. A graduate of Columbia University Law School, he is the author of the Washington Post bestseller Man Down and has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Yale Law & Policy Review, among many others. He lives in New York.
Fred D. Gray, one of the nation’s leading civil rights attorneys, was the lawyer for Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which began the modern Civil Rights Movement. His other cases and clients include the Freedom Riders, the Selma to Montgomery March, John Lewis, numerous school desegregation and voting rights lawsuits, and many others. He lives in Tuskegee, Alabama.
