Attorney Fred Gray is an American hero – one of the most significant figures in the modern civil rights movement and an important contributor to advancements in healthcare regarding patient rights and bioethics.

His Civil Rights Legacy
In 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, Gray represented Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat to a white man on a city bus – the action that initiated the Montgomery Bus Boycott and led to the integration of public transportation in the city. He served as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s first civil rights lawyer and fought to gain full voting rights for African Americans and to desegregate Alabama's public schools and housing projects.  In 2002, he was elected president of the Alabama Bar Association, the first time in the law association's history that an African American had held its top post.

Contributions to Health Care
Healthcare professionals are well aware of Fred Gray’s efforts to expose decades of racial discrimination in patient care in a government-sponsored project known as the Tuskegee Experiment.  From 1932 to 1942, government physicians studied untreated syphilis in 399 black men from Macon County, Alabama.  The men were not told they had syphilis, not given counseling on avoiding spread of the disease, and not given treatment throughout the course of the study.  By the time the study was finally terminated in 1972, 128 people had died of syphilis and related complications.

The participants in the study were denied treatment and actively restrained from obtaining medicine to combat the disease, a practice that characterized the medical profession at the time. It was Fred Gray who, as attorney for these men in the 1970s, raised the moral and ethical concerns that had previously been ignored.  Gray eventually persuaded President Bill Clinton in 1997 to make an official apology to the participants of the study and pledge to strengthen bioethics programs across the country.  It was a wake-up call that triggered a wave of new legislation to protect patients and thrust bioethics into the national spotlight.

The Tuskegee Study has come to represent the potential for exploitation of any population that may be vulnerable because of race, ethnicity, gender, disability, age or social class. Healthcare professionals who care for an increasingly diverse nation have come to understand the study’s lasting implications for patients by developing new attitudes toward patient safety and empowerment, and informed consent.

Gray is the author of two books, Bus Ride to Justice and The Tuskegee Syphilis Study: The Real Story and Beyond.  He also co-authored, The Children Coming On:  A Retrospective of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Dr. Williams' research has focused on trends and determinants of socioeconomic and racial disparities in health, the effects of racism on health and the ways in which religious involvement can affect health. He is the author of more than 150 scholarly papers in scientific journals and edited collections and his research has appeared in leading journals in sociology, psychology, medicine, public health and epidemiology.

He has been involved in the development of health policy at the national level in the U.S.  He has served a on the Department of Health and Human Services’ National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics and on six panels for the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.

His current research includes studying the health of Black Caribbean immigrants in the U.S., examining how race-related stressors (racial discrimination in the U.S. and exposure to torture during Apartheid in South Africa) can affect health, and assessing the ways in which religious involvement is related to health.