Supreme Court affirms Browder v. Gayle; Alabama's bus segregation laws fall
For eleven months, Black residents of Montgomery had walked or piled into carpools rather than ride the city's buses. On November 13, 1956, the Supreme Court summarily affirmed a three-judge district court panel in Browder v. Gayle, which had held on June 5 that enforced segregation on Montgomery buses violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The affirmance effectively invalidated Alabama's laws requiring segregated buses. The boycott ended five weeks later, on December 20.
The boycott is remembered through Rosa Parks and the mass meetings, but the legal result came from a federal lawsuit argued by attorney Fred Gray for four women arrested on city buses. The Court's affirmance put the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause behind the end of segregated buses in Alabama.
QWhich of the four Browder v. Gayle plaintiffs had been arrested the earliest, and how long before the boycott began?
Claudette Colvin, arrested on March 2, 1955, more than nine months before the boycott started on December 5. Aurelia Browder followed on April 19, 1955, and Mary Louise Smith and Susie McDonald were arrested in October 1955. All four arrests came before the boycott began. The plaintiffs were selected for one shared experience: each woman had been arrested for refusing to give up a seat on a Montgomery bus. The lawsuit was built from those earlier incidents, The case bears the name of Browder, not the name of the woman whose December arrest set the boycott in motion.
QWho dropped out of the lawsuit before it was decided, and why?
Jeanetta Reese. She was initially a plaintiff in the case but withdrew because of intimidation by segregationists. Her departure is the clearest sign of the pressure surrounding the suit: putting a name on a federal complaint against the city's bus system carried personal risk, and at least one person stepped back from it. The four women who remained, Browder, Colvin, McDonald and Smith, were the ones whose names stayed on the filing through the district court ruling of June 5, 1956, and on to the Supreme Court's affirmance on November 13.
QHow did the boycott's carpool system keep people getting to work, and who was behind some of the wheels?
Boycott leaders organized a system of carpools in which car owners volunteered their vehicles. One detail in the arrangement cuts against the expected picture of the city's divisions: some white housewives drove their Black domestic servants to work. Household employment tied many of the city's families together, and for those employers a worker stranded without a bus was a practical problem at the breakfast hour. The carpools had to be sustained through a full winter, spring and summer while the lawsuit moved through the courts, so the volunteer drivers were still on the road when the Supreme Court's order arrived.
