Karen Gray Houston Carries on Her Family’s Civil Rights Legacy

She grew up living what she thought was a carefree childhood in the Deep South. She occasionally sensed that her father and uncle were up to some “good trouble,” but school and life went on. Like many others of that time, Little Karen Gray was unaware of something called the KKK, and hardly even noticed that the unpaved street where she spent her time was named after a man who epitomized the worst for her people. And, she says, “as certain as the sun shines, the Gray family was in church every Sunday morning.”

She is Karen Gray Houston and she has written a memoir about her family in the pivotal years of the civil rights movement called Daughter of The Boycott: Carrying On A Montgomery Family’s Civil Rights Legacy. The book is theoretically about when and how Blacks stopped using segregated buses in Alabama’s capital city in 1955. But the story becomes about much more.