The Fred D. Gray sculpture outside the Alabama State Bar in Montgomery has been selected to represent Alabama in 250: A Celebration of Public Art in the U.S., a national curated exhibition presented by CODAworx in commemoration of America’s 250th anniversary. The exhibition features one public artwork from each state, along with Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico — placing Attorney Gray’s likeness among the works chosen to tell the country’s story at its semiquincentennial.
Created by sculptor Steven Whyte and unveiled in April 2025, the life-size bronze sits in the Fred D. Gray Courtyard on Dexter Avenue, just steps from the Montgomery church and streets where the modern civil rights movement took shape. It depicts Attorney Gray seated on an Alabama-sourced limestone bench, holding a legal folio engraved with the words “Lawyers Render Service” — the phrase he coined during his 2002 term as president of the Alabama State Bar, and one the Bar later adopted as its official motto. The selection honors not only the artwork but the seven decades of advocacy behind it: Attorney Gray’s representation of Rosa Parks, Claudette Colvin, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, and the survivors of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and his lifelong insistence that the law be an instrument of justice.
The full announcement from the Alabama State Bar’s The Sidebar is available here, along with more information about the national exhibition here.