Schedule March 14-15, 2025

The Inaugural National Symposium

Fred D. Gray Institute for Human & Civil Rights

Friday, March 14

  • 12:30 – 4:00 pm Optional Pre-Event Opportunities

Montgomery is the birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement, and it is altogether appropriate that you visit some important venues, even before the main event! Please email sprowlaura@gmail.com to let us which optional pre-event opportunity you will be joining.

  1. We will facilitate a two-hour, two mile, guided walking tour of downtown Montgomery, with an emphasis on civil rights and law. The experience starts at the location where enslaved men, women, and children were taken from rail or ship and marched to holding pens on Commerce Ave, awaiting their sale and fate. The tour will include sites steeped in the history of slavery, the Civil War, segregation, the Civil Rights Movements, and crucial issues of Constitutional law and history that resonate today. Professor Jeff Baker, an Alabama attorney and seasoned guide, will lead this group that will depart from the lobby of the Renaissance Hotel on Friday at 1:30 pm and will return by 3:30 pm.
  2. Another “Pre – Dinner” option will be an excursion to Tuskegee to explore the Tuskegee History Center and Memorial to the Victims of the notorious syphilis “study.” Mr. Cal Walker, who hails from Tuskegee and is an esteemed member of the Board of Directors for the History Center, will be the guide. The group will depart from the Renaissance Hotel parking lot on Friday at 12:30 pm and return by 4:00 pm.
  3. A third possibility will be the opportunity to visit EJI’s Legacy Sites, the new national landmark institutions, including the Legacy Museum, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, which are a stone’s throw from the Dinner and Symposium venue. Admission is $5 and self-guided. 

The Inaugural Dinner

  • 4:00 – 5:00 pm – Gray Institute Partners” reception just before dinner. Gray Institute Partners are a nationwide network of advocates with a passion for justice who stand with Attorney Gray through their financial support for the Institute’s vision and work. With their gift of $1,000, Partners together create a “living endowment” that helps for a just society, one where every 100 partners generate the equivalent of a $2 million endowment. Host, Randy Lowry with Attorney Fred Gray. 
  • 5:00 – 6:15 pm – Dinner, Host, Mr. Cal Walker, Tuskegee History Center, Board of Trustees
    • Welcome from Montgomery Dignitaries and Friends
    • Introduction of Special Guests
    • Invocation
    • Dinner 
  • 6:30 – 8:30 pm – The Evening Program, co-hosts Mr. Cal Walker & Dr. David Fleer
    • “No Ways Tired: An Artistic Tribute to The Life & Legacy of Attorney Fred D. Gray,” Alabama State University College of Visual and Performing Arts, under the direction of Dr. Wendy Coleman 
    • Bryan Stevenson, Founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative
    • Attorneys Bryan Stevenson & Fred Gray in a moderated interview with Professor Ayesha Bell Hardaway, Case Western Reserve University School of Law
    • A Closing Word from our Host 
    • Benediction, Fred Gray, Jr.

Saturday, March 15

  • 7:30 – 8:50 am – Deans’ Breakfast, The Alcove in the Renaissance’s restaurant, Host, Randy Lowry
  • 8:00 – 8:50 – Participants’ Continental breakfast and Conversation, Meeting Room, Alabama B, Hosts, Tuskegee Board of Trustees
  • 9:00 – 9:25 – Welcome, Orientation, and Recognition of our Sponsors: David Fleer and Attorney Fred Gray, Alabama B
  • 9:25 – 10:45 – Panel I: Racial Justice in Voting Rights, Alabama B
  • 10:45 – 11:00 – Break
  • 11:00- 12:20 pm – Panel II: Racial Justice in Education, Alabama B
  • 12:30 – 1:10 – Lunch, Alabama D & E 
  • 1:15 – 1:50 – Bryan Fair, Alabama Law, Thomas E. Skinner Professor of Law, “Courage Under Fire: The Life and Legacy of Mr. Fred Gray,” Host, David Fleer, Alabama B
  • 1:55 – 3:25 – Panel III: Racial Justice, Medical Ethics, & Healthcare, Alabama B  
  • 3:35 – 5:00 – Session IV: Community Building & Activism, Moderators, Ayesha Bell Hardaway and Jeff Baker, Alabama B and Breakout Groups in Riverview Rooms 1-6
    • 3:35 – 3:45 Introduction & Stage Setting, Ayesha Bell Hardaway, Alabama B
    • 3:45 – 4:25 Breakout Groups, Riverview Rooms 1-6
    • 4:35 – 4:55 Report – Outs, Alabama B
    • 4:55 – 5:00 Wrap, Jeffrey Baker, Alabama B
  • 5:00 – 5:15 – Session V: Attorney Fred Gray, “Final Exhortation,” Alabama B

Commitments: How the symposium is “building out”

Speakers

  • Bryan Stevenson (Equal Justice Initiative, Keynote, Friday night) 
  • Fred D. Gray (Moderated Interview, Friday night)
  • Ayesha Bell Hardaway (Case Western Reserve University School of Law, Interview Moderator, Friday Night)
  • Bryan K. Fair (University of Alabama School of Law, After Lunch Speaker)

Panelists And Sessions

VOTING RIGHTS, Alabama B

Moderator: Shaun Casey, Special Representative for Religion & Global Affairs

Panelists:

  • Paul Gowder, Northwestern University, Pritzker School of Law)
  • Roslyn Satchel, Kennesaw State University, Radow Institute for Social Equity and the New Georgia Project

Lead Conversant: Michael Anastasi, Senior Vice President of Local News, Gannett Co. Inc. and USA Today and former editor of The Tennessean

EDUCATION, Alabama B

Moderator: Bryan Adamson, Case Western Reserve University, School of Law

Panelists: 

  • Shay Farley, Southern Poverty Law Center, Regional Policy Director
  • Jerome Dees, Faulkner University, Thomas Goode Jones School of Law
  • CPJI, Columbia Peace and Justice Initiative, Columbia, TN, Trent Oglive, Russ Adcox, & Demetrius Nelson
  • Robert L. Solomon, Case Western Reserve University, Vice President for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Engagement

Lead Conversants:

  • Brian Stogner, Michigan School of Psychology, President
  • Kenneth Williams, Texas Tech University School of Law, Fred Gray Endowed Chair for Civil Rights and Constitutional Law

MEDICAL ETHICS, Alabama B

Moderator: Jeffrey R. Baker, Pepperdine Caruso School of Law

Panelists:

  • Marisa Giggie, University of Alabama, College of Community Health Sciences
  • Patrick T. Smith, Duke University Divinity School, Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities, and History of Medicine, Duke University Medical School
  • Stephen Sodeke, Tuskegee University, Center for Biomedical Research; NIH All of Us Research Program, Southern Network, UAB Hub; UAB Minority Health & Health Equity Research Center

Lead Conversant: Angela D. Sims, Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School, President

COMMUNITY BUILDING AND ACTIVISM, Alabama B and Breakout Groups in Riverview Rooms 1-6

Moderators: Ayesha Bell Hardaway & Jeffrey Baker

Small group discussions to build and develop community, inspire ideas, and activate capacity. Small groups will be self-selected by topics; participants will join working group leaders for lightly moderated prompts arising from the panels and keynote discussion, including conversations with Grassroots Activists for equality and justice in communities across the country.

Rationale & Description

  1. The Inaugural National Symposium seeks to provide innovative scholarship that leads to practical outcomes, especially as an outgrowth of Attorney Gray’s life’s work in medical racism, voting rights, gerrymandering, human and civil rights law, equal access to quality education for all, and toward the rejuvenation of Tuskegee and the surrounding region.
  1. The annual symposium will address the most important issues of our day, enabling the Gray Institute to be unique in its character and helping to establish its high quality and reputation.
  1. The symposium will include moderated panels with diverse speakers to address these topics, and these panels will include ample time for participants to join the conversation and contribute to Q&A and reflection sessions and small-group discussions. The symposium will open with a notable keynote speaker and a closing session to plan for future action. Participants and speakers will have time before, during, and after the symposium for generative conversations and connection. 
  1. The Goal for each session is to create “heuristic grist,” that is: to discover where the presentations and discussions lean into further exploration, interdisciplinary dialogue, and especially practical outcomes and strategic actions. The sessions should answer questions like: What are the interdisciplinary implications? How can we deepen this conversation? What shall we do? What’s next?
  1. The audience for the symposium will be quite expansive: lawyers, law professors, students, community organizers and leaders, public officials, activists, persons engaged in voting rights, medical ethicists, educators, and other thoughtful members of the public. The audience will also include participants from the dinner, including the 100 invested and engaged Partners.
  1. For example, the inaugural symposium will focus, in part, on the place of civil rights law during an era when the judiciary seems indifferent or even hostile to civil rights claims, and it will consider the relationship between civil rights lawyering and social mobilization. Much of Mr. Gray’s career as a lawyer took place during an era when the courts were more receptive to civil rights than they are now, but his work consistently showed his understanding that lawyers do not operate in a vacuum but must have a symbiotic relationship to grass-roots activism.