Browder v. Gayle, or How the Boycott Actually Ended
Near Montgomery, Alabama
Most people know the Montgomery Bus Boycott as a story that begins with Rosa Parks and ends three hundred eighty-one days later when Black Montgomerians returned to desegregated buses. What that summary usually leaves out is how the buses were actually desegregated, which was not through the boycott itself but through a federal lawsuit.
On February first, nineteen fifty-six, civil rights attorney Fred Gray filed a case in federal district court on behalf of four women who had been arrested under Montgomery's bus segregation laws: Aurelia Browder, Claudette Colvin, Susie McDonald, and Mary Louise Smith. The case, Browder versus Gayle, argued directly that bus segregation violated the Fourteenth Amendment.
A three-judge panel that included Judge Frank Johnson and Judge Richard Rives heard the case. On June fifth, nineteen fifty-six, they ruled two to one that Alabama's bus segregation was unconstitutional. The city and state appealed. On November thirteenth, nineteen fifty-six, the United States Supreme Court summarily affirmed the lower court ruling.
Martin Luther King was in a Montgomery courthouse that day, facing trial on charges about the boycott's carpool operation. A reporter walked in and told him the Supreme Court had just ruled. The Montgomery Improvement Association voted to end the boycott on December twentieth, nineteen fifty-six. Integrated buses began operating on December twenty-first.
Fred Gray, a Montgomery native who was twenty-five years old when he filed the case, went on to practice law in Alabama for the rest of his career. He is still alive. The four plaintiffs whose names are on the case are rarely mentioned in popular accounts.
