It’s almost like keeping that spirit alive.” “When you live there, when you work there - it matters to have to refer to these names every day. “It matters,” said Michelle Browder, who once owned a fish and barbecue restaurant on West Jeff Davis. Gray and many others in Montgomery, the continued presence of Jeff Davis Avenue can serve as a reminder that the quest for racial equality is far from over. The push for broader recognition meets opposition Lightfoot that declared gerrymandering as a means of disenfranchising African-Americans unconstitutional. Gray won the landmark ruling in Gomillion v. In 1960, arguing before the Supreme Court as a 29-year-old, Mr. He also watched, and was one of, the Black men and women forced to pay their fare at the front of the bus and enter in the back, part of a string of daily indignities that would form the underpinning of his life’s work.īeyond his successful challenge to the Montgomery bus system, that work has included lawsuits that prompted Alabama’s most meaningful attempts at school desegregation in the decade after the 1954 decision Brown v. He watched the scenes of West Jeff Davis blur into the tapestry of upscale white neighborhoods like Cloverdale. His perspective changed when walks to Loveless became bus rides to Alabama State College for Negroes - now Alabama State University - on the east side of town. “The matter of segregation - it was a matter of law and it was what we all lived by,” he said. Routine, he explained, has a way of softening the edges of oppression. He is sure he was taught about Davis, but doesn’t remember giving much thought to living on a street named for the president of the Confederacy. “I never thought about who Jeff Davis was, probably didn’t know anything about him until I got in high school,” he said. Gray said, before he considered what it all meant, sleeping and doing homework within the nominal bounds of Jefferson Davis and the system that honored his legacy. Few of the city’s white residents lived on West Jeff Davis for many of them, knowledge of the neighborhood came by way of the women who took care of their kitchens and yards and children, located on the other side of town. It was a world familiar to many Black families in Montgomery. The children would sit on the front-porch rockers, helping their grandmother snap beans. Gray’s niece and the author of the memoir “Daughter of the Boycott,” remembered congregating at the frame house on Sundays after church. For years he walked to the Loveless School, crossing the part of the street where the red dirt turned to pavement. Gray recalled, was “just thankful to have a place to live.”įrom then on, Jeff Davis was his world. The family of five children and a recently widowed mother in Jim Crow Alabama, Mr. There was no running water - cold, tin-tub baths filled from the faucet a block away loomed. Gray Avenue, Alabama’s Republican attorney general, Steve Marshall, took aim in a video at the growing number of officials who have tried to pull down or recast Confederate memorials, arguing that they had done so “not out of courage,” but out of “fear.” Reed formally announced his plan to rename the street Fred D. In the aftermath of this summer’s protests, those debates have churned in earnest in Montgomery, the first capital of the Confederacy. Reed’s efforts come at a moment when the United States’ history surrounding racism is under intense reconsideration, especially in the naming of monuments, roads and schools for figures of the Confederacy. The law forbids the renaming of not just monuments, but also streets 40 years and older that “have been constructed for, or named or dedicated in honor of, an event, a person, a group, a movement, or military service.” There was one problem: The Alabama Memorial Preservation Act had recently been passed to prevent local officials from doing just what Mr. Gray had determined his life’s mission “to destroy everything segregated.” It was, Mr. Gray proposed renaming Jeff Davis Avenue, the place where he had grown up - the street named for the president of the Confederacy, the street where, as a young man, Mr. Gray himself how he wished to be honored.
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