Time 23Mar2020

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