Claudette Colvin (17 page)

During
Browder v. Gayle
, Fred Gray points out the seating plan for city buses

Fred Gray asked her to state her name and address and tell when she had stopped riding the buses. After that he led her through the account of her resistance and arrest on March 2, 1955. As Claudette related the story of her arrest, her voice became low, soft, and intense. Spectators leaned forward to hear her. The room gathered around the sound of her voice. When she described the policeman looming over her seat, she admitted that “I was very hurt . . . and I was crying . . . and the policeman said, ‘I will have to take you off.' I didn't move at all . . . so he kicked me.”

Claudette told of having been put into a car, handcuffed through the window, taken to city hall, and locked in an adult jail cell. At this point a spectator in the courtroom's balcony let out a wail and began sobbing loudly. Unable to stop crying, she finally stood and slowly made her way out of the courtroom.

Gray paused awhile, then looked up from his notes and said to Claudette, “Thank you . . . That's all.”

But that wasn't all. Now came the hard part. Claudette kept her eyes trained on the city attorney Walter Knabe, a slender man with close-cut, sandy hair. Knabe tapped his pencil on his desk, glanced at his notes one last time, and then advanced toward her, his eyes fixed on hers. The three judges listened intently.

Knabe began: “You and the other Negroes have changed your ideas since December fifth, have you not?”

Claudette shook her head. “No, sir. We haven't changed our ideas. It has been in me ever since I was born.”

Knabe persisted. “But the group stopped riding the buses for certain named things . . . that is correct, isn't it? . . . for certain things that Reverend King said were the things they objected to.”

“No, sir,” Claudette answered. “It was in the beginning when they arrested me,
when they seen how dirty they treated the Negro girls here, that they had begun to feel like that . . . although some of us just didn't have the guts to stand up.”

“Did you have a leader?” Knabe asked.

“Did we have a leader? Our leaders is just we, ourselves.”

“But
somebody
spoke for the group.”

“We all spoke for ourselves.”

Knabe kept hammering at the point he was trying to get Claudette to make for him. “Did you select anyone to represent you?”

Claudette looked away for a moment and thought it over. Returning his gaze, she spoke slowly. “Quite naturally we are not going to have any ignorant person to lead us . . . We had to have someone who is strong enough to speak up . . . someone who knows the law . . . It is quite natural that we are not going to get up there ourselves [when] some of [us] can't even read or write . . . But they knew they were treated wrong.”

Knabe sprang his trap—or tried to.

“Is the Reverend King the one you selected?”

“We didn't elect him.”

“You
said
you selected somebody who was better informed to represent you. Now who did you select?”

“Well, I don't know anything about selections, but we all just got together.”

“But
somebody
spoke for your group,” Knabe insisted. “Now who was it?”

“I don't know,” Claudette said. “We all spoke for ourselves.”

Knabe wouldn't let go. “Now just a minute ago I understood you to say that you
selected
somebody that knew the law better. Now who was that person?”

Claudette widened her eyes. “Who knew the law better? A lot of people know the law better. Now, are you trying to say that Dr. King was the leader of the whole thing?”

Knabe rubbed his head, seemingly in exasperation. Then, drawing the syllables out one at a time, as if speaking to a small child, he said, “I am merely asking if Reverend King was one of the leaders who represented your group at that time, and expressed to the city commission what the Negroes wanted.”

“Probably,” Claudette replied, “but I don't know.”

Knabe switched tacks. “Now, was Attorney Gray here one of those whom you felt knew the laws?”

“Yes, quite naturally . . . He is a lawyer.”

“Did you know at the time,” Knabe said, voice rising, “that he sustained that the state law didn't apply at all in the city of Montgomery?”

Claudette shook her head dismissively. “I go to school myself and I know there is a lot of law, state law, national law, and local law.”

Knabe asked the judges to instruct Claudette to answer questions more directly. Judge Rives told her, “If you know the answers just say ‘yes' or ‘no.' Don't make speeches.”

So for the next few minutes Claudette answered all of Knabe's questions with one word or the other, yes or no. She broke her pattern only when Knabe finally asked her the question that went right to the heart of the matter.

“Why did you stop riding the buses on December fifth?”

“Because,” Claudette answered, her gaze level and her voice even and intense, “we were treated wrong, dirty and nasty.”

Spectators in the crowd murmured yeses in response.

Knabe had had enough. “No further questions,” he said. Claudette got up and returned to her seat. Charles Langford, one of the lawyers for the plaintiffs, was deeply impressed by her presentation. “If there was a star witness in the boycott case,” he later told the writer Frank Sikora, “it had to be Claudette Colvin.”

C
LAUDETTE
:
Soon after I testified there was a noon recess. Jo Ann Robinson came up and took Mary Louise Smith and me to H. L. Green's, a five-and-ten-cent store, for lunch. I had never met Mary Louise before, and I hadn't heard her bus story until that morning. We sat there eating and comparing notes about what had happened to us. I liked Mary Louise and I was proud that two teenaged girls had stood up.

A
FTER LUNCH
, testimony resumed. Mayor Gayle and several city commissioners insisted the segregation laws were needed to maintain order in the city. One commissioner,
Clyde Sellers, warned, “If segregation barriers are lifted, violence will be the order of the day.”

Judge Rives thought this over for a moment in the silent courtroom. Then he asked Sellers, “Can you command one man to surrender his constitutional rights—if they are his constitutional rights—to prevent another man from committing a crime?”

Sellers had no answer to that. The hearing was adjourned in late afternoon.

C
LAUDETTE
:
When I came out of the courthouse, I was surrounded by adults. Everyone was shaking my hand. I was squeamish of people taking my hand and touching me, but I did like it when they said, “Oh, yes, you were great.”

I went back up to King Hill. Raymond was still asleep, and Mama Sweetie said, “He must have known you were up to something good because he didn't give us one moment's trouble.”

I described the whole thing to Mom over dinner. A. C. James came over from across the street and said, “You really spoke out!” Mom was proud of me. I felt relieved. I called my biological mom in Birmingham and my uncle C. J. McNear. Mom telephoned Reverend Johnson and said, “It's over. Claudette has testified.”

I called some of my schoolmates that I was still in touch with, and then rocked Raymond until he went to sleep. Finally I was alone with my thoughts. I was exhausted, but proud. I had been preparing for this in my head for three months. The questions seemed obvious by the time I heard them. I had looked white officials in the eye and stood up for my people. I felt I had done my best. Now it was up to the judges.

I looked over at Raymond, fast asleep in his bassinet, and I said, “I think I might have done us some good today.”

The Bell Street Baptist Church was reduced to rubble by a bomb thrown three weeks after Montgomery's city buses were integrated

Is Montgomery to be a city in which bullets fly between sundown and sunup?

—From an editorial in the
Montgomery Advertiser
, January 1957

A
S THE COURTROOM
was being cleared of spectators, the three robed men went into Judge Johnson's chambers, shut the door, and sat down. No one said anything for a while. Then Judge Rives said to Johnson, “Frank, you're the junior judge here. You vote first. What do you think?”

Johnson replied, “Judge, as far as I'm concerned, state-imposed segregation on public facilities [the buses] violates the Constitution. I'm going to rule with the plaintiffs here.” Justice Rives quickly agreed. Justice Lynne didn't. “The [Supreme] Court has already spoken on this issue in
Plessy versus Ferguson
,” he insisted. “It's the law and we're bound by it until it's changed.” But Lynne was outnumbered. By a 2–1 decision a federal court abolished segregated seating on Montgomery's—and Alabama's—buses. As Judge Johnson later said, “The testimony of . . . Miss Colvin and the others reinforced the Constitution's position that you can't abridge the freedoms of the individual. The boycott case was a simple case of legal and human rights being denied.”