Thomas Gray with Coretta Scott King (left) and Rosa Parks (right).
The Story
In 1950...
before Montgomery, Alabama, knew Martin Luther King Jr., before Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger, before the city’s famous bus boycott, a Negro man named Hilliard Brooks was shot and killed by a white police officer in a confrontation after he tried to board a city bus. Thomas Gray, who had played football with Hilliard when they were kids, was outraged by the unjustifiable shooting. Gray protested, eventually staging a major downtown march to register voters, and standing up to police brutality.
Five years later...
he led another protest, this time against unjust treatment on the city’s segregated buses. On the front lines of what became the Montgomery bus boycott, Gray withstood threats and bombings alongside his brother, Fred D. Gray, the young lawyer who represented Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and the rarely mentioned Claudette Colvin, a plaintiff in the case that forced Alabama to desegregate its buses.
An incredible story of family...
in the pivotal years of the civil rights movement, Daughter of the Boycott is the reflection of Thomas Gray’s daughter, award-winning broadcast journalist Karen Gray Houston, on how her father’s and uncle’s selfless actions changed the nation’s racial climate and opened doors for her and countless other African Americans.
Meet the Author
Karen Gray Houston is an award-winning journalist, whose career in broadcast news has spanned 41 years at radio and television stations and networks in Boston, New York City and Washington, DC. She retired from WTTG-TV, Fox-5 in Washington, DC, in May of 2014 after nearly 20 years as a local news reporter. She worked as a radio and TV correspondent for NBC News covering the Reagan White House, was a reporter/anchor for WTOP News-radio in DC and WHDH-AM in Boston and anchored on the ABC Radio Network. Karen was a writer/associate producer at WCBS-TV in New York and a reporter/writer/editor with United Press International in Boston.
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