Claudette Colvin (16 page)

T
HE CROWD HAD ASSEMBLED EARLY
outside the federal courthouse because May 11, 1956, was a big day. It was the 159th day of the Montgomery bus boycott, with no end in sight. The lawsuit meant hope. Some boycotters had been stationed on the courthouse steps since dawn. One black laborer explained his presence to a reporter from
Jet
magazine by saying he had already walked 335 miles to and from work since the boycott started. But, he said, “while they're juggling that hot potato [the lawsuit] I'll keep on footin' it.”

Legs were tired and nerves frayed. Cash to keep the car pool going was hard to raise. Negotiations between black leaders and white authorities had hardened into a tense stalemate, with the whole Southern way of life at stake. Just a few weeks before, Mayor Gayle and the entire Montgomery City Council had made a public show of joining the White Citizens Council in a packed coliseum with thousands cheering their approval. The council was a group of powerful politicians and businesspeople dedicated to keeping Montgomery segregated.

Segregationists singled out Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., branding him a “troublemaker,” an “outsider” who had come from Atlanta to stir up local blacks. They bombed his house and threatened his life by mail and telephone. He remained outwardly unflappable. According to one magazine account, when someone called in the middle of the night to threaten “that N——who's running the bus boycott,” his wife calmly answered, “My husband is asleep . . . He told me to write the name and number of anyone who called to threaten his life so that he could return the call and receive the threat in the morning when he wakes up and is fresh.”

City leaders convinced themselves that blacks really wanted to ride the buses but that King's silver tongue had seduced them into rebellion. Police harassed boycotters as they waited at pickup stations for their MIA cars, ordering them to move on, threatening to charge them with loitering or hitchhiking—both crimes.

On February 21 a grand jury had indicted—formally accused of a crime—100 blacks for violating an obscure 1921 law banning boycotts “without just or legal cause.” Those charged included Dr. King, twenty-three other ministers, and all the car-pool drivers. Rosa Parks was indicted, as were Jo Ann Robinson, E. D. Nixon, and Fred Gray. Claudette was not named, though her minister, the Reverend H. H. Johnson, was. The boycotters decided not to wait for the sheriff to come and arrest them. E. D. Nixon strode right into the county courthouse, saying, “Are you looking for me? Well here I am.” He was booked, fingerprinted, photographed, and released on bond, wearing a broad smile as he stepped out of the courthouse. This touched off a parade of boycott leaders who filed inside the courthouse one by one and minutes later came out, freshly booked and fingerprinted, descending the steps into a cheering crowd of spectators. Fred Gray, one of those arrested, later recalled that it had been an honor to have been arrested, and that those not indicted felt a little insulted.

One hundred boycott leaders were indicted on conspiracy charges. All pleaded not guilty, including (top row) Fred Gray and Jo Ann Robinson; (bottom row) Rosa Parks, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and E. D. Nixon

But it was this “hot potato,” this lawsuit
Browder v. Gayle
(named after the plaintiff, Aurelia Browder, whose last name came first alphabetically, and W. A. “Tacky” Gayle, the mayor of Montgomery), that offered the first and best chance for blacks to end the boycott with a clean victory. This time it was
their
lawsuit, not one brought against them. This time
they
were using the Constitution, the rule book for
their
country, to achieve justice.

The crowd of dark-skinned figures in neatly pressed suits and church dresses had set off for the block-long federal courthouse just after dawn because
Browder v. Gayle
offered hope. Standing outside the courthouse that morning, E. D. Nixon looked around the crowd of his neighbors and friends and felt proud. “You could read a happiness on their faces, like they knew already that they were about to see the start of something very special,” he later recalled. “There was a feeling of comfort going into the federal courthouse, which was very different from going [to the] county courthouse . . . We felt like we was protected here.”

It had been exactly one hundred days since Fred Gray had filed papers to start this lawsuit, and they had been one hundred hard days of walking and doing without and praying. But May 11, 1956, the day of the trial, was finally here, and it was a sparkling spring morning. It was their day in court at last.

The courthouse doors opened, and spectators formed a line behind the security checkpoint. They took elevators to the second floor—blacks in one elevator, whites in another—and stepped into a large, dark, wood-paneled courtroom with a spacious, high
ceiling. Tall windows were framed by pale yellow drapes, pulled back now so that sunshine flooded the chamber, throwing soft spotlights onto the blue carpet. Behind the three empty judges' chairs, a great round-faced clock with Roman numerals was embedded into the wall. To the left of the clock stood the flag of the United States, with all forty-eight stars brilliant against a navy field. On the opposite side was the Alabama flag, sporting red bars crossed diagonally against a white field, fixed in the same pattern as the stars and bars of the Confederate flag.

About one hundred spectators, mostly blacks, settled into seats behind a rail on the main floor, and about one hundred more took the stairs to seats in a balcony above. Media were banned from the courtroom, but dozens of reporters and photographers staked out positions in front of the courthouse. Dr. King and Jo Ann Robinson were among the boycott leaders in attendance. As the hands on the big clock closed in on nine o'clock, the air buzzed with expectancy, like the tension before a prizefight.

The crowd's murmur subsided when the plaintiff team, including Fred Gray, several other lawyers, Claudette, and the other three black women, entered the courtroom and took their seats on the right side of a central aisle. There were only four plaintiffs now, since one of the women, Jeanette Reese, had dropped out under pressure from her employer. The city's attorneys and key witnesses took their seats on the left.

At one minute after 9:00, the bailiff bustled into the courtroom hollering, “All rise,” followed close behind by three white men draped in black robes. Federal Justices Richard Rives, Seybourn Lynne, and Frank Johnson settled into adjacent thronelike chairs and stacked their papers on the polished bench before them. The crowd sat back down and listened as Justice Rives read out the plaintiffs' complaint, namely that laws and ordinances requiring segregated seating on public buses violated the equal rights provision of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Justice Rives then turned to Fred Gray and said, “Call your first witness.”

Gray had carefully planned the order in which he would present his four witnesses. He wanted to start fast, maintain a steady pace, and finish strong. He led off with Aurelia Browder, a sturdy, well-spoken, and confident thirty-seven-year-old ASC graduate with a strong history of involvement in community affairs. She had raised six children by herself as a seamstress after her husband's death. She had seen a lot of life and wasn't easily intimidated. Mrs. Browder was called to the witness stand, raised her right hand, and swore to tell the “truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” She sat down.

Led by Gray's questioning, Mrs. Browder described herself as a longtime Montgomery resident who had ridden the bus “two or three times a day” until December 5, 1955. Why did she stop? “I knew if I would cooperate with my color [by boycotting] I would get [better treatment],” she explained. Gray asked if she had had “difficulty . . . in connection with the seating arrangements.” She told of having been made to stand up by a bus driver so that whites could sit down. Gray asked, “If you were permitted to sit any place you wanted on the bus, would you be willing to ride it again?” She replied, “Yes, I would.”

Gray then yielded the right to question Mrs. Browder to the city attorney Walter Knabe, who tried to induce her to say that the bus boycotters were nothing but puppets of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Mrs. Browder would have none of it. After several futile questions, Knabe excused Mrs. Browder, and she returned to her seat.

The next two witnesses, Susie McDonald, seventy-seven, and Mary Louise Smith, who had by then turned nineteen, gave similar testimony to similar questions. McDonald, a widow and housekeeper for her son, said she was “often mistreated” on the bus and quit riding to support the boycott. She, too, said she would ride again if the buses were integrated and denied that she was under the spell of Dr. King. “I reached my own judgment,” she said. “I stopped because I thought it was right and because we were mistreated.”

Mary Louise Smith told of her refusal to get up from her bus seat for the redhaired white woman, and of the policeman's arrival. “I told him [the police officer], ‘I am not going to move out of my seat. I got the privilege to sit here like anybody else does.' ” She also testified, “I would ride the city buses again provided we had no segregation on the city buses.” Knabe tried to trap her into saying Dr. King had
bewitched them all. “He [King] didn't represent no one,” Mary Louise said. “We represented ourselves. We appointed him as our leader . . . he and his assistants.” After Knabe yielded, she answered one question from Fred Gray and was dismissed.

Through Knabe's questioning of the first three witnesses, the city's strategy became clear. It had two parts:

1. To try to get witnesses to say that the black community had not objected to segregated bus seating before the boycott. Knabe reminded them that before, leaders had always pushed for black drivers, courteous treatment, and a different segregated seating plan—but never for an end to segregated seating. This was true, but only because leaders had never dared to hope for integrated seating until the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled against segregated schools, just two years before.

2. To show that Dr. King had stirred up all the trouble. The city tried to paint him as a silver-tongued outsider who never rode the bus in Montgomery himself but knew just how to make everyone who did feel unhappy. If it hadn't been for King, the city contended, blacks would be satisfied with things as they had always been.

As her turn to testify approached, Claudette fought the ever-tightening knot in her stomach. Fred Gray had deliberately saved her for last, for her story was the most powerful. She had been arrested, dragged from a bus, charged with breaking the segregation law, and jailed. She alone had fought the charges in court. She may have been only sixteen, but Claudette had more experience than anyone else when it came to challenging Jim Crow on the Montgomery buses. Proclaiming her constitutional rights as the police seized her wrists that day, she had objected not just to the seating plan on the bus but to the overall injustice of segregation. She had taken her stand without ever having spoken with Dr. King. Fred Gray and the other lawyers had faith in her. Mary Louise Smith stepped down from the witness stand, glancing at Claudette on the way back to her seat.

“Call your next witness, Mr. Gray,” said Judge Rives.

“I call Claudette Colvin,” said Fred Gray.

After Claudette raised her right hand and was sworn in, Fred Gray took a moment to go over his questions. From the witness box, Claudette felt hundreds of eyes settle upon her. She scanned the crowd for familiar faces. There was Jack Salter,
a neighbor who worked at the federal courthouse. He gave her a thumbs-up from the back. She spotted A. C. James, her across-the-street neighbor who had come to lend support. And of course there was her dad, Q.P., smiling at her, always on her side and always there no matter what.