Claudette Colvin

by Phillip Hoose

  It was this idea—separate but equal—that the Supreme Court justices struck down in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954. The justices wrote, “We conclude, unanimously, that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.” But did it still have a place in transportation? Sixty years after Plessy v. Ferguson, Fred Gray and the other lawyers were fashioning a lawsuit to insist that the answer was no.

  The attacks continued. In early February a stick of dynamite landed on E. D. Nixon’s front lawn. About that time Jo Ann Robinson’s picture window was shattered by a huge rock, which her neighbors said had been thrown by a policeman. Days later two men dressed in full police uniform walked into the carport beside Robinson’s house and scattered acid over her Chrysler sedan. According to neighbors, when they were finished, the pair calmly walked to their squad car and drove away. The substance burned holes the size of silver dollars through the vehicle’s top, fenders, and hood. Neighbors told Robinson what they saw but were too frightened to make an official report of the crime.

  With violence mounting and negotiations stalled, protesters asked one another how this would end. While everyone longed and prayed for success, many held private doubts—it was hard to imagine that whites would ever give up control.

  Fred Gray thought he saw the way out—it was the same path he had envisioned from the day he heard of Claudette’s arrest. Why not go to court and sue the city of Montgomery and the state of Alabama, arguing that if segregated schools were unconstitutional—as the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in Brown v. Board of Education—then weren’t segregated buses? Instead of politely asking for modest reforms in seating patterns and more courteous behavior from the drivers, why not try to obliterate the segregation laws in court? If judges agreed, the city would have to give up. Once the buses were integrated, there would be no need for a bus boycott.

  Gray, like the NAACP lawyers in New York who were closely following the boycott, was tired of playing defense. He wanted to mount a legal attack on behalf of all black riders as a class-action suit, not just to defend protesters who got arrested and charged as criminals one by one. Success would depend on putting the right case in front of the right judges in the right courtroom.

  Since judges representing the state of Alabama and the city of Montgomery court systems were all but certain to be hostile, the lawyers knew that their only chance was to argue their case in a federal court, where judges might listen with an open mind to an antisegregation suit offered by black lawyers.

  Any lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a state law was supposed to be heard by a panel of three judges in a federal court—that was the rule. Whether federal judges based in Alabama would actually follow it and hear the case was the big question. If they did, the suit would still be heard and decided in Alabama, but the judges would represent the United States government, not the state of Alabama or the city of Montgomery.

  The Montgomery Improvement Association voted to let Gray go ahead with the lawsuit—the “second front,” as it came to be called—and raise money to pay for it. Gray went to New York to huddle over legal strategies with NAACP lawyers, then returned to Montgomery and filed the suit in the federal building. To his delight, the suit was accepted as a constitutional challenge to state law and assigned to a threejudge federal panel.

  Next Gray began to look for plaintiffs—those people whose names would appear on the lawsuit and who would testify in court. The idea was to put on the witness stand black passengers who would testify to how Jim Crow had made their lives miserable while they were just trying to get from place to place.

  Courage would be their number one requirement. They would be placing their lives in grave danger, and the lives of those they lived with. From their seat in a tiny witness box in a packed courtroom, plaintiffs would face aggressive white lawyers firing questions at them as white judges looked on. Fred Gray knew well that all their lives black people had been taught to defer to whites. Somehow these plaintiffs would have to find the steel to speak freely and the composure to think clearly while seated in a pressure chamber. And they would need to have a good story to tell.

  The lawyers ruled out Rosa Parks. Her case was still being appealed, and they wanted the new federal lawsuit to be independent of any existing criminal case. Besides, Mrs. Parks had been arrested for disturbing the peace, not for breaking the segregation law. The MIA members proposed many candidates, and Gray interviewed the most promising. In the end, he whittled the list down to five names. All were women. This was because more women than men rode the buses, and because Gray and his colleagues wanted to protect the jobs of men, who were typically regarded as the breadwinners in families. All five women Gray selected had been bullied and insulted and cheated on buses, and all were still angry about it. It may have been a short list, but Gray thought it was a good one.

  Ironically, the only one of the five who had previously appeared in court on a bus case was the youngest. But she had gone through the most. She had been tested by fire. Claudette Colvin had been on Fred Gray’s short list from the moment he conceived the suit. He picked up the phone and dialed a familiar King Hill number.

  CLAUDETTE: When Fred Gray called our house in January, we were all surprised. The boycott was almost two months old, and I hadn’t heard from any of the leaders since it started, not even Rosa Parks. I was seven months pregnant. But we told him to come on out.

  He arrived one evening with his secretary, Bernice. We sat around the coffee table in our living room, just as we had the year before, after I got arrested. He was still dressed in a dark suit and he still talked like a lawyer. Bernice still took dictation. The only change was my big belly. He described the case and discussed what would be expected of me if I took part. Because I was still a minor, he asked my parents if they would let me do it. Mom and Dad said yes.

  Then he asked me. I was sitting on the piano stool. Bernice’s fingers moved whenever I spoke. He didn’t mention that there would be anyone else in the suit. I thought I was going to appear alone. As I listened, I was of two minds. In one mind I was afraid. The way life was in the South, how could you not be afraid? You never knew who was KKK, or who would target you. Every day on the radio, I’d hear angry white callers shouting that the Communists had invaded the black churches and people had to act now.

  But I was not a person who lived in fear. My mom had always said, “If God is for you, the Devil can’t do you any harm,” and that’s how I felt, too. We all just lived that way. And I felt that if they really needed someone, I was the right person. It was a chance for me to speak out. I was still angry. I wanted white people to know that I wasn’t satisfied with segregation. Black people, too. And it didn’t sound like the trial would happen until after my baby was born. You had to do what you had to do. So I said yes.

  “WE TALKED TO ALL THE FAMILY AT ONCE,” remembers Fred Gray, “and there was no reservation on anyone’s part. I wouldn’t have taken anyone with any reservation. I told them what would happen, what they would be subjected to. That there would be phone calls, there would be threats. I liked that family. They were self-sufficient. If there had been reprisals, they would have still gotten by. It took real courage to be a plaintiff in that suit. It wasn’t easy. And Claudette was the youngest.”

  Claudette’s pastor, Rev. H. H. Johnson, makes a point at a mass meeting. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (left) and E. D. Nixon stand beside him

  CLAUDETTE: After they left, my mom called our pastor, Reverend Johnson, and told him what Fred Gray had asked me to do. And my reverend came out to my home. Some of my neighbors were already afraid to talk to me. White Citizens Councils had formed to take jobs away from people who joined the boycott. I felt like no one wanted to be near me because I was so outspoken about ending segregation.

  But Reverend Johnson really knew me and cared for me and stood by me. He worried about how I was going to hold up against those white people drilling me in court. He knew the terror was real. He kn
ew what the stakes were. At my home he took my hands very gently and said to me, “Claudette, do you really feel up to it?” And once again I heard myself say, “Yes, Reverend Johnson, I do.”

  My baby was born in Montgomery on March 29, 1956. I named him Raymond, after my uncle. Velma was with me in the hospital. Raymond came out very fairskinned with blond hair and blue eyes. At the hospital, the attendants kept bringing him in and asking me the name of his father. I wouldn’t tell them. They didn’t believe the father was black, and they held it against me. I would cover my head up because I didn’t want to hear the awful things they were saying about us. I didn’t need to hear that. I loved Raymond from the moment I saw him.

  I only had about six weeks after Raymond’s birth to get ready for the boycott lawsuit. I wanted to get my body ready so I could fit into a good dress, and to get my mind ready, too. I rehearsed what I wanted to say. I prayed. My mother had always said, “If you can even talk to a white person without lowering your eyes you’re really doing something.” Well, I was determined to do that and more. Miss Nesbitt said, “Claudette, you always wanted to be in plays, to do Shakespeare. Now here is your stage.” And she was right: I had been speaking out against injustice since ninth grade.

  At night, while I would lie in bed and rehearse the things I was going to say, Raymond slept beside me in a little bassinet. It was just the two of us in the front room, him breathing or fussing or pulling at his bottle, and me thinking about what I would say at the trial. Sometimes I thought about Harriet Tubman, about her courage. I prayed I could have her kind of courage on the trial day.

  Or sometimes I would imagine, Claudette, you’re a Christian, and you’re about to get thrown to the lions and you have one speech to give to the Senate.

  That was more like it. In my imagination that courtroom seemed like the Colosseum, and it felt like I had one last speech. I was going to make the most of it.

  PART TWO

  PLAYING FOR KEEPS

  Browder versus Gayle changed relationships of blacks and whites in America and the world.

  Yet few people know about the case and even fewer know about the plaintiffs.

  —Filmmaker and journalist William Dickerson-Waheed, Rivers of Change

  All the boycotts and sit-ins and marches in themselves did not cure the illness of discrimination.

  It was the court decisions that did it.

  —Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr.

  The Montgomery Advertiser, February 2, 1956, front page news

  CHAPTER NINE

  BROWDER V. GAYLE

  Our whole strategy is based on the May 11 trial.

  —Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

  May 11, 1956

  CLAUDETTE: I woke up to the smell of coffee like any other day. Every day no matter what, Mom’d get up and make biscuits, grits, and sausage, bacon, eggs, or ham. I bottle-fed Raymond. Then Mama Sweetie came over with her daughter, Scrap, to take care of Raymond while Q.P. and I went to the trial. Mom had to work. Mama Sweetie was still a big part of my life. She had moved from Pine Level to Montgomery a few years after we had. She was about seventy now, a little more wrinkled but still petite and still kind. Just the sound of her voice in the house made me think things would be all right.

  It was cool out but not rainy. I was glad I didn’t have to wear a rain bonnet. I pumped milk from my breasts so that I wouldn’t leak and put on my best dress, light blue with a cummerbund and a V cut. It looked good on me in the mirror. I drank my coffee slowly and thought about the day to come.

  Then my cousin James Henderson pulled up to drive us to the courthouse. Before we left, we all bowed our heads and Mom said a prayer. We were around the table—me, Mom, Q.P. in his chair, Mama Sweetie, Scrap, James, and little Raymond in his bassinet. Mom prayed for me to have courage, and for Fred Gray to do his best, and for success in defeating this horrible system. Then we all said the Lord’s Prayer and we went on our way.

  By the time we pulled up to the courthouse, there was already a big crowd waiting outside: men in suits and brimmed hats, and women wearing their best Sunday dresses. There were cameramen out on the sidewalk. I got out and went looking for

  Fred Gray.

  THE FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT TO THE

  U.S. CONSTITUTION

  In Browder v. Gayle, lawyers representing black riders claimed that the segregation laws governing Montgomery’s city buses violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Ratified in 1868 to secure freedom for slaves, the Fourteenth Amendment said in section one,

  No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

  This amendment was used in several important cases during the civil rights era to dismantle legal segregation, including Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

  THE 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.