Claudette Colvin

by Phillip Hoose

  JUDGE FRANK M. JOHNSON, JR.

  The judge who sat just to the right of the witness stand was the youngest and most recently appointed of the three federal judges in the courtroom. In fact, Browder v. Gayle was the first big case for thirty-seven-year-old Frank M. Johnson, who had just been appointed by President Eisenhower as the new federal judge for the middle district of Alabama.

  Johnson later became famous for presiding over landmark cases of the civil rights era, including the decision to let activists march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, without police interference. He also ruled that blacks could sit on Alabama juries and that Alabama’s schools must be desegregated. He made it much easier for blacks to vote and required that black state troopers be hired in numbers equal to whites.

  At first, observers assumed Judge Johnson would reliably rule with segregationists, since he was from Alabama. But nobody could predict what Frank Johnson would do. He ruled according to the merits of the case. His independence came naturally: Johnson had grown up in Winston County, a small pocket of northern Alabama that had sided with the North during the Civil War. His great-grandfather had fought for Lincoln and the Union.

  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.

  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 . . . an
d 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.”

  CLAUDETTE: 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.

  AFTER 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.

  CLAUDETTE: 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

  CHAPTER TEN

  RAGE IN MONTGOMERY

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

  —From an editorial in the Montgomery Advertiser, January 1957

  AS 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 th
e 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.”

  The decision, which took all of ten minutes to make, was announced on June 19, 1956. Shocked, Mayor Gayle declared that the city would appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. But protesters rejoiced in a mass meeting at the Holt Street Baptist Church, a celebration tempered by the realization that they would have to keep walking at least until the city’s appeal reached Washington. The case probably wouldn’t be considered until fall. And there was no guarantee even then that the Supreme Court would agree with the Alabama judges.

  WHAT THE JUDGES SAID

  IN BROWDER v. GAYLE

  Writing for the majority, Judges Johnson and Rives said:

  We hold that the statutes and ordinances requiring segregation of the white and colored races on the motor buses of a common carrier of passengers in the city of Montgomery and its police jurisdictions . . . [violate] the due process and equal protection of the law . . . under the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.

  The “separate but equal” doctrine set forth by the Supreme Court in 1896 in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson can no longer be applied.