D'Army Bailey was an American lawyer, circuit court judge, civil rights activist, author, and film actor.
27 Facts About D'Army Bailey
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D'Army Bailey had roles in seven other movies, including portrayals ranging from a minister to a street-hustling pool player.
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D'Army Bailey received his law degree from Yale Law School in 1967.
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D'Army Bailey received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 2010.
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D'Army Bailey presided over a nationally recognized trial lasting four months in 1999 in which three major tobacco firms were acquitted of wrongdoing in contributing to the deaths of smokers.
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D'Army Bailey was twice nominated to serve on the Tennessee Supreme Court.
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D'Army Bailey lectured at law schools, including Harvard, Loyola in California, Washington and Lee, Washington University in St Louis, and Notre Dame University.
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D'Army Bailey published legal articles at the law schools at Harvard University, the University of Toledo, Washington and Lee, and Howard University.
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D'Army Bailey has served on the executive committee of the Tennessee Judicial Conference.
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D'Army Bailey was born in South Memphis and grew up near Mississippi Boulevard.
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D'Army Bailey attended the segregated Booker T Washington High School from 1955 to 1959, as Tennessee resisted desegregating its schools, as did numerous other southern states.
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D'Army Bailey attended the nation's largest historically black university, Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
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D'Army Bailey led a class boycott later, resulting in his expulsion.
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News of D'Army Bailey's ouster coursed through the civil rights community to Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, where sympathetic students had established a scholarship for a civil rights activist.
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D'Army Bailey invited and hosted Malcolm X as a guest speaker at Clark, worked briefly with Abbie Hoffman in the Worcester leftist movement's early days, and interacted with such civil rights and student activist icons as James Meredith, John Lewis, Tom Hayden, and Allard Lowenstein.
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D'Army Bailey began to understand the power of law in advancing change as he assisted with the filing of legal complaints with the federal government to halt discrimination in the city.
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D'Army Bailey was elected to the Berkeley City Council, where he served from 1971 to 1973.
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In 1982 D'Army Bailey became part of a group of attorneys and activists who raised $144,000 to buy the Lorraine Motel, site of the King assassination.
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D'Army Bailey became more involved in working with others to preserve the motel and establish a civil rights museum there, organizing a foundation to raise money for this purpose.
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D'Army Bailey served as the Board President from 1983 until the Museum opened in 1991.
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D'Army Bailey said he felt fellow board members had lost sight of a central mission of the museum, which he felt was to inspire advances in civil rights.
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D'Army Bailey hosted a local television program, Memphis Forum, and has appeared as a legal and political analyst for Court TV.
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D'Army Bailey served three terms as president of the Memphis chapter of the National Bar Association.
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D'Army Bailey was elected to three judicial terms and was twice nominated to serve on the Tennessee Supreme Court.
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D'Army Bailey focused on medical malpractice, nursing home liability, and catastrophic injury.
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D'Army Bailey was married to the former Adrienne Marie Leslie; the couple had two sons, Justin and Merritt.
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D'Army Bailey died on July 12,2015, of cancer at Methodist Hospital in his native Memphis, Tennessee.