Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
February 2 - February 3, 2019
Miss Nesbitt said, “Claudette, you always wanted to be in plays, to do Shakespeare. Now here is your stage.”
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 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
...more
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.”
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
Mary Louise Smith told of her refusal to get up
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.
2. To show that Dr. King had stirred up all the trouble.
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.
By a 2–1 decision a federal court abolished segregated seating on Montgomery’s—and Alabama’s—buses.
But I didn’t hear from any of them after I left the courthouse.
was shunned because I had gotten pregnant.
The U.S. Supreme Court had just affirmed the lower court’s ruling in Browder v. Gayle. They had won!
A team of creative lawyers and four tough women—two of them teenagers—had just booted Jim Crow off the buses.
Her grandmother answered that she preferred to sit in the back. “Darling,” she explained, “the bus boycott was not about sitting next to white people. It was about sitting anywhere you please.”
Claudette received nurse’s training and took a job as a nurse’s aide in a Catholic hospital in New York, where she cared for elderly patients, often at night.
Decade by decade, she watched Rosa Parks’s fame grow as the person who had ignited the movement by refusing to surrender her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.
Browder v. Gayle, overshadowed by the more famous school case, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, was rarely mentioned in histories of the movement.
it cracked open. In 1975 Frank Sikora, a Birmingham newspaper reporter writing a story on the Montgomery bus boycott,
who got arrested before Rosa Parks but was “not the right person” to be a boycott leader.
In the year 2000, while I was writing my book We Were There, Too!: Young People in U.S. History, someone told me that a fifteen-year-old African-American girl had taken the same defiant stand as Rosa Parks, in the same city, but almost a year earlier.
Her protest had taken place almost nine months to the day before Rosa Parks had famously taken the same stand.
Hers is the story of a wise and brave woman who, when she was a smart, angry teenager in Jim Crow Alabama, made contributions to human rights far too important to be forgotten.
www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/ will take you to the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia.
www.riversofchange.org is the Internet address for a fine set of educational materials on Browder v. Gayle and the plaintiffs, including Claudette.
www.stanford.edu/group/King/ is the Web site for the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute at Stanford University.
