On cross-examination, the city’s attorney tried to trap Claudette into saying that she had been swindled by the silver-tongued Martin Luther King, who put her up to all of this. But Claudette was too smart for him. “Why did you stop riding the buses?” the attorney asked, hoping she would talk about how the Montgomery Improvement Association had told them to. She stared him in the eye and confidently said, “Because we were treated wrong, dirty, and nasty.”[16] The city tried to argue that segregation was necessary to maintain law and order. Without it, there would be violence, they said.
