Time 23Mar2020

(Frankie) #1
1955 | DEMANDING DIGNITY

THE BUS RIDERS
BY OLIVIA B. WAXMAN

PARKS WAS ARRESTED AGAIN IN
FEBRUARY 1956 FOR PARTICIPATING
IN THE MONTGOMERY BUS BOYCOTT

with violating a segregation law. Years of involve-
ment in the civil rights movement factored into
this act of defiance; she has said she felt “pushed
as far as I could stand to be pushed.”
In theory, this opened up a path to challenge
the law, but civil rights leaders worried that
Parks’ case could get stuck in state courts—an
appeal by 1944 bus resister Viola White had
been tied up in the Alabama courts—and that
her NAACP activism could doom its chances. So
in February 1956, lawyer Fred Gray filed a sepa-
rate federal suit with Colvin, Browder, Smith and
longtime bus rider Susie McDonald, 77, as the
named plaintiffs. “No man is willing to
be on the case,” says Theoharis, author
of The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks.
But four women, including two teenag-
ers, were. A federal district court ruled
intrastate segregated buses unconstitu-
tional in Browder v. Gayle in June; the
U.S. Supreme Court upheld the decision
that November.
The boycott ended Dec. 20, 1956, having
cost the city over $750,000 (about $7 million
today). Facing death threats and unemploy-
ment, Parks and Colvin decided to move north,
but their actions had already helped inform a
new phase of the civil rights movement, and had
catapulted King into a new leadership position.
The plaintiffs never received the recognition
many male activists did, but their resistance in-
formed both Parks’ decision to stay seated and
the important legal fight that followed. With
their victory, these women paved the way for
the desegregation of public places, central to
the civil rights movement.

in The hOurS afTer rOSa ParkS’ arreST On
Dec. 1, 1955, Women’s Political Council president
and Alabama State College professor Jo Ann Rob-
inson used the school’s mimeograph machine to
run off a set of flyers. “Another Negro Woman
has been arrested and thrown into jail because
she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus
for a white person to sit down,” they read. “Don’t
ride the buses.”
At the time, 75% of the people who rode the bus
in Montgomery, Ala., were African American—
and they knew there was strength in numbers.
The boycott announced in that flyer lasted more
than a year, and its seeds had been sown
long before. Claudette Colvin, 15, had
refused to give up her seat that March.
So had Aurelia Browder, 36, in April
and Mary Louise Smith, 18, in October.
Black Montgomery residents were
aghast when two policemen dragged
Colvin off the bus on March 2. Mar-
tin Luther King Jr., an activist minister
who had just moved to the area six months prior,
helped fight Colvin’s arrest—knowing that, with
Brown v. Board of Education having struck down
school segregation in 1954, the door was open for
other legal challenges to segregation, says his-
torian Jeanne Theoharis. But while Colvin was
charged with violating the city bus segregation
law, she was only convicted of assaulting a police
officer, so a direct legal challenge to that specific
law couldn’t be made.
Parks was well aware of Colvin’s case, having
invited her to the local NAACP chapter’s youth
meetings. So Parks didn’t resist when she was
arrested, making sure she could be charged only

CLAUDETTE
COLVIN

FRANKLIN: ELLIOTT & FRY—NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY; MONROE: FRANK POWOLNY—MPTVIMAGES; PARKS: UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES; COLVIN: ALAMY^57

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