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Earl Warren was Chief Justice of the United States in 1955, when Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus.
The US Supreme Court never heard Parks' case, however. Ms. Parks was arrested on a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct on December 1, 1955, jailed overnight, and released the next day on $100 bond. She appeared before judge John B. Scott in Montgomery Municipal Court on December 4, and was fined $10 plus $4 court costs. Although her attorney, Fred Gray, immediately filed an appeal, he realized the Parks' case could be tied up in Alabama state courts for years.
Although Parks' case didn't go to the Supreme Court, her experience mobilized the African-American community to organize a bus boycott, depriving the city of their economic support and attracting a national audience. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., played an important role in organizing and motivating the community.
Meanwhile, attorney Fred Gray and his colleague, E. D. Nixon, consulted with NAACP Legal Defense Fund lawyers Robert Carter and Thurgood Marshall about a plan of action. Both Carter and Marshall had been lead counsel on the cases consolidated into Brown v. Board of Education, (1954). Marshall had argued for Brown's side before the US Supreme Court in 1952 and 1953 (the decision was released in May of 1954), and had succeeded in ending legal segregation in public schools.
The four attorneys decided a strategy similar to the one in Brown would be most appropriate for pursuing the bus segregation issue. Gray approached Aurelia Browder and three other women, Claudette Colvin, Susie McDonald, and Mary Louise Smith, who had also experienced abuse from the Montgomery bus system, and convinced them to become plaintiffs in a federal civil action law suit against the city and Mayor W. A. Gayle.
On February 1, 1956, Fred Gray filed suit in US District Court for the Middle District of Alabama, seeking a permanent injunction against the city's bus segregation policy. On June 4, 1956, the federal three-judge panel reviewing Browder v. Gayle (142 F. Supp. 707 (1956)) declared segregation unconstitutional, citing the decision in Brown had overturned the "separate but equal" doctrine established in Plessy v. Ferguson, (1896).
The city of Montgomery appealed the decision on June 5, but on November 13, 1956, the US Supreme Court denied the city's petition, affirming the District Court ruling, and outlawing racial segregation on buses operating within state boundaries (Congress had long ago desegregated interstate travel under the Constitution's Interstate Commerce Clause).
The Supreme Court decision also brought an end to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which lasted 381 days.
Browder v. Gayle, 352 US 903 (1956) [affirmed without opinion] may have provided the legal impetus for change, but Rosa Parks' courage and dignity catalyzed the national Civil Rights Movement.
For more information about Browder v. Gayle, (1956) and other related cases, see Related Questions and Related Links, below.
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