By Cynthia Price
Legal News
The 2010 State Bar of Michigan Liberty Bell Award winner is a former educator who just will not give up on young people learning, and specifically, learning about the law.
Audrey Nesbitt Gray is an attorney’s wife whose involvement with the Michigan Lawyer’s Auxiliary (MLA) has taken the form of decades of membership, serving as president, and chairing the group’s juvenile services committee.
Though she is best known for spearheading creation of a 32-page booklet named You Are the Law, distributed to ninth-grade classrooms across Michigan, Gray’s acceptance speech focused more on her work with the Kalamazoo County Juvenile Home. There she set up a reading program 17 years ago that has been replicated in communities from South Haven to Kent County, called The Late Show.
“As a former teacher I was shocked to find out that the juvenile homes didn’t have libraries to encourage these young people to read,” Gray said. So, working through the Kalamazoo County Bar Association, she set about recruiting adults to read to the children there, and found that the best time for all concerned was later in the evening before the young residents went to bed.
Since then each year has seen 100 readers willing to take turns reading two evenings a week. And a positive repercussion of the program’s success is that, in 1995, the Home established a library, named after her.
Gray said that when Governor Jennifer Granholm, then the Attorney General, encountered You Are the Law, which is published jointly by the State Bar of Michigan and the MLA, she asked, “Mrs. Gray, this has been going on since 1966 and until now I’ve not been aware of it. Why is that?”
Gray replied that it was called “hiding your light under a bushel.” She stated that from here on out she intends to focus as much public attention on such programs as she can, because she wants people to know that the bar and affiliated organizations such as MLA are doing great work. She related that when she first went to the juvenile detention center, the education director “sort of looked at me and said, I didn’t know that lawyers and their wives did things like this.”
Gray continues to develop the programs, working with donors of books and money, and advises to the efforts in South Haven, Kent County, Midland and Saginaw. She also has served on gubernatorial and State Bar advisory groups on drug-free schools.
“Starting tomorrow morning let’s change this mindset of hiding our light under a bushel,” Gray concluded.
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