Daughter Of The Boycott

"Award-winning broadcast journalist Karen Gray Houston tells the story of the key roles played by her father, Thomas Gray, and her uncle, Fred D. Gray, in the historic Montgomery bus boycott, the action that kick-started the civil rights movement"--

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.

Provides portraits and cameos of over sixty women who were influential in the Civil Rights Movement, and argues that the political activity of women has been the driving force in major reform movements throughout history.

Margaret was already twenty years old, married and had her first child, when she found out from strangers that the man she called Dad was not her biological Father. She was told her biological Father was a German, during the second World War, an enemy of the Dutch people therefore neither her Mother or any of her Family were willing to talk about her birth. Then on a trip to Amsterdam the Netherlands the Author was able to obtain Margaret's original Birth certificate. This Birth certificate contained some important dates which sent him on a trip through two World Wars and believes he discovered what happened to Margarets Father.