On this Day: Supreme Court Outlaws Bus Segregation

The legal battle to end a racist law that separated bus riders according to color began on Feb. 1, 1956. On that day, four Alabaman women filed a lawsuit—Browder v. Gayle—that became a landmark in civil rights history.

When Aurelia S. Browder, Susie McDonald, Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith entered litigation in the Alabama District Court, the city of Montgomery was embroiled in racial tension.

Two months earlier, on Dec. 1, 1955, 42-year-old civil rights worker Rosa Parks had refused to relinquish her bus seat to a white man, galvanizing Montgomery’s African-American community, which launched a massive boycott of the city’s bus system.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott lasted for 381 days, crippling the city’s transportation system and signaling the beginning of the modern civil rights movement in the United States. The state of Alabama’s Department of Archives and History offers a detailed recount of the events leading up to and during one of the most well known, and well organized, acts of civil disobedience in American history.

Six months after the lawsuit was filed, Browder v. Gayle made its way to Alabama’s Middle District Court, where a three-judge panel ruled to strike down the city’s bus segregation laws: “The enforced segregation of Negro and white passengers on motor buses operating in the City of Montgomery … violates the Constitution and laws of the United States.”

When the town’s Mayor W.A. Gayle appealed the decision, the U.S. Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, unanimously upheld the District Court’s ruling.

One month later, on Dec. 20, 1956, the court’s order went into effect in Montgomery. The next day, after 381 days, the Montgomery bus boycott ended.

According to a Nov. 14, 1956, article from The Montgomery Advertiser, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called the Supreme Court’s decision a “glorious daybreak to end a long night of enforced segregation.” However, civil rights opponents in Montgomery responded to the ruling with veiled threats of violent retribution. Luther Ingalls, a leader of the pro-segregation Montgomery Citizen’s Council, told the Advertiser that “any attempt to enforce this decision will inevitably lead to riot and bloodshed.”

Since successfully arguing Browder v. Gayle in 1956, civil rights lawyer Fred Gary Sr. has accrued a long list of accomplishments, according to The Montgomery Advertiser. In 1970 Gary became one of the first two African-American men elected to the Alabama Legislature since Reconstruction. In 1985 he was elected president of the National Bar Association. Gray was friend and attorney to both Rosa Parks and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and has said that the first thing he wanted to do after becoming a lawyer was “tear down everything segregated I could find.”

Browder’s case was overseen by the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Education Fund, which was led by Chief Legal Officer Thurgood Marshall. Marshall spearheaded the organization’s work to end racial segregation for nearly 20 years, arguing the case Brown v. Board of Education in front of the Supreme Court in 1954. Marshall went on to become the nation’s first African-American Supreme Court Justice in 1967, serving on the court for 23 years before retiring on June 17, 1991, The Supreme Court Historical Society writes.

Aurelia Shines Browder was the lead plaintiff in the case, a role for which lawyer Fred Gary Sr. found her well-suited: “I chose her because she was a matured person, and I thought she would make an excellent first witness if I needed to put someone on.” Browder was born on Jan. 29, 1919, received a bachelor’s degree in science with honors from Alabama State University, and like Rosa Parks, was jailed in 1955 after refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man.