Alabama v. King: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Criminal Trial That Launched the Civil Rights Movement

by Dan Abrams, Fred D. Gray, David Fisher (With)

Overview

“A story for the ages.” —New York Times

The defense lawyer for Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, the Selma marchers and other civil rights heroes reveals the true story of the historic trial that made Dr. King a national hero.

Fred D. Gray was one of only two Black lawyers in Montgomery, Alabama, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus. The ensuing Montgomery bus boycott led Gray to become Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s defense lawyer and later, chief counsel for the protest movement. This trial—with eighty-nine indictments for violating the state’s anti-boycott statute—was not going to be just any trial. It would be an attempt to launch a movement in a city fighting to preserve segregation.

With Gray’s memories of the extraordinary events, as well as the transcribed words of King’s vivid courtroom testimony, this book transports readers to the trial that sparked the Civil Rights Movement and introduced Martin Luther King Jr. to the world.

“Poignant, sometimes harrowing.” —Wall Street Journal

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781335449597
Publisher:	Hanover Square Press
Publication date:	05/09/2023
Edition description:	First Time Trade
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	86,992
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Dan Abrams is the chief legal affairs anchor for ABC News and CEO and founder of Abrams Media. He is also the host of top-rated Live PD on A&E Network and The Dan Abrams Show: Where Politics Meets the Law on SiriusXM. A graduate of Columbia University Law School, he is the author of the Washington Post bestseller Man Down and has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Yale Law & Policy Review, among many others. He lives in New York.

Fred D. Gray, one of the nation’s leading civil rights attorneys, was the lawyer for Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which began the modern Civil Rights Movement. His other cases and clients include the Freedom Riders, the Selma to Montgomery March, John Lewis, numerous school desegregation and voting rights lawsuits, and many others. He lives in Tuskegee, Alabama.


David Fisher is the author of more than twenty New York Times bestsellers. He lives in New York with his wife, Laura.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Dan Abrams and David Fisher

“Dan Abrams and David Fisher write the heart-pounding pulse of history.” —Diane Sawyer on Lincoln’s Last Trial

“Abrams and Fisher do a superb job of clearly presenting the issues in this remarkable and intensely dramatic trial.”
—Scott Turow on Theodore Roosevelt for the Defense

“Abrams and Fisher are gifted writers, and their prose is neither overly spare nor showy; they're clearly fascinated by the trial, and their enthusiasm for their subject matter shows.” —NPR on Theodore Roosevelt for the Defense

“The authors do a remarkable job of spinning the court transcripts into a fascinating tale of intrigue and underscoring the men and the issues at play.”—Fredericksburg Book Review on John Adams Under Fire

“An engrossing, lively and expertly crafted courtroom drama filled with colorful characters and having significant resonance for the present."—Washington Post on Kennedy’s Avenger

"Clear, straightforward writing and superb research that pays attention to tension as well as humor make this riveting courtroom drama that feels as alive as it did it 1963."—NPR on Kennedy's Avenger

Praise for Alabama v. King

“A fascinating story of grit, determination and courtroom acumen. … The stirring tale of how an inexperienced 25-year-old lawyer, only two years out of law school, played a pivotal role in King’s emergence as the ‘American Gandhi’ is a story for the ages.”—The New York Times

"Poignant, sometimes harrowing."—Wall Street Journal

From the Publisher

01/01/2022

New York Times best-selling authors Abrams and Fisher join forces with Gray, the young Black lawyer who served as Martin Luther King's defense attorney when King was tried for his part in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, to tell the story of the trial in Alabama v. King (150,000-copy first printing). Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bissinger chronicles The Mosquito Bowl, a football game played in the Pacific theater on Christmas Eve 1944 between the 4th and 29th Marine regiments to prove which had the better players (400,000-copy first printing). In The Spy Who Knew Too Much, New York Times best-selling, Edgar Award-winning Blum recounts efforts by Tennent "Pete" Bagley—a rising CIA star accused of being a mole—to redeem his reputation by solving the disappearance of former CIA officer John Paisley and to reconcile with his daughter, who married his accuser's son (50,000-copy first printing). Associate professor of musicology at the University of Michigan, Clague reveals how The Star-Spangled Banner became the national anthem in O Say Can You Hear? Multiply honored for his many history books, Dolin returns with Rebels at Sea to chronicle the contributions of the freelance sailors—too often called profiteers or pirates—who scurried about on private vessels to help win the Revolutionary War. With The Earth Is All That Lasts, Gardner, the award-winning author of Rough Riders and To Hell on a Fast Horse, offers a dual biography of the significant Indigenous leaders Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull (50,000-copy first printing). With We Refuse To Forget, New America and PEN America fellow Gayle investigates the Creek Nation, which both enslaved Black people and accepted them as full citizens, electing the Black Creek citizen Cow Tom as chief in the mid 1800s but stripping Black Creeks of their citizenship in the 1970s. Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter Hoffman's Give Me Liberty profiles Cuban dissident Oswaldo Payá, who founded the Christian Liberation Movement in 1987 to challenge Fidel Castro's Communist regime (50,000-copy first printing). Forensic anthropologist Kimmerle's We Carry Their Bones the true story of the Dozier Boys School, first brought to light in Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Nickel Boys (75,000-copy first printing). Kissinger's Leadership plumbs modern statecraft, putting forth Charles de Gaulle, Konrad Adenauer, Margaret Thatcher, Richard Nixon, Lee Kuan Yew, and Anwar Sadat as game-changing leaders who helped create a new world order. From a prominent family that included the tutor to China's last emperor, Li profiles her aunts Jun and Hong—separated after the Chinese Civil War, with one becoming a committed Communist and the other a committed capitalist—in Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden. New York Times best-selling author Mazzeo (Irena's Children) reveals that three Sisters in Resistance—a German spy, an American socialite, and Mussolini's daughter—risked their lives to hand over the secret diaries of Italy's jailed former foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciano, to the Allies; the diaries later figured importantly in the Nuremberg Trials (45,000-copy first printing). A Junior Research Fellowship in English at University College, Oxford, whose PhD dissertation examined how gay cruising manifests in New York poetry, Parlett explains that New York's Fire Island has figured importantly in art, literature, culture, and queer liberation over the past century (75,000-copy first printing). Author of the New York Times best-selling Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy and a former CIA officer, Reynolds argues in Need To Know for the importance of U.S. intelligence during World War II in securing victory. As he reveals in Getting Out of Saigon, White was directed by Chase Manhattan Bank to close its Saigon branch in 1975 and went beyond orders by evacuating not just senior Vietnamese employees but the entire staff and their families (75,000-copy first printing).

Library Journal