D'Army Bailey (November 29, 1941 – July 12, 2015) was an American lawyer, circuit court judge, civil rights activist, author, and film actor.
Bailey was the founder of the National Civil Rights Museum which opened in 1991 at Memphis’s Lorraine Motel, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was slain in 1968.
A second book, The Education of a Black Radical, published in October 2009 by LSU Press, recalls Bailey's own history in the civil rights movement.
He 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.
He joined actions such as a sit-in at a Greyhound bus station, picketing against discriminatory hiring practices at Baton Rouge businesses, and leading a march from the Southern University campus to downtown to support fellow students jailed for demonstrating.
He 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.
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.
In the tumultuous politics of Berkeley, he pushed efforts to open new job opportunities and for expanding housing, recreational, and child-care programs for residents of the city next to the University of California campus.
[6][12][14] The museum complex's exhibits trace the story of the struggle for African-American civil rights from the arrival of the first Africans in the American colonies in 1619 through the assassination of King in 1968.
A 2001 expansion acquired new buildings for the museum, including the former Bessie Brewer's rooming house at nearby 418 South Main Street, where the shot that killed Dr. King was allegedly fired.
After 19 years as a circuit court judge in Tennessee’s Thirtieth Judicial District, Bailey resigned Sept. 15, 2009 to resume a career as a civil trial lawyer.
[citation needed] A member of the Screen Actors Guild, Bailey had worked in film for three decades, including with such directors as Oliver Stone, Miloš Forman, Michael Hausman, and Jim Jarmusch.
He described acting as “hard work, but it's something different for me.”[17] In The People vs. Larry Flynt, Bailey played a judge, in a film that included a supporting role by political consultant and pundit James Carville.