November 13, 1956: A Big Blow Against Segregation
Fifty years ago today, the nine justices of the United States Supreme Court struck down a local ordinance in Montgomery, Alabama, that mandated segregated seating on municipal buses. Affirming the earlier decision of a panel of three Circuit Court of Appeals judges, the justices effectively overturned the famous 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision allowing for “separate but equal” accommodations in public conveyances. Browder v. Gayle, the new ruling, signaled the successful end of the nearly year-long Montgomery bus boycott and ushered in a new era in civil rights activism.
The story of the Montgomery bus boycott has become legendary. On December 1, 1955, a black seamstress named Rosa Parks refused to yield her seat on a city bus to a white man. She was arrested and booked on charges of violating the city’s segregation ordinance. The black citizens of Montgomery then banded together and began a 381-day boycott of the city’s public-transit system. And during that boycott a previously unknown Baptist preacher named Martin Luther King, Jr., rose to national prominence at the age of 27.
Over the past decade or so, scholars have unearthed a fair amount of new information about the boycott. They have confirmed that the standard story about Rosa Parks—that she was an elderly black woman who was simply exhausted after a long day of work and didn’t want to stand up during her bus ride home—is wrong. At the time of her arrest, she was only 42 and was a veteran of the civil rights struggle.
Parks had become politically aware in the 1930s, when the Scottsboro Boys were contesting their wrongful convictions on rape charges in the Alabama state court system. She was a longtime member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and had served as the secretary of her local chapter. Twelve years before the event that launched the boycott, she had been ejected from a city bus—by the very same bus driver—for entering by the front door. Earlier in 1955 she had attended a workshop on nonviolent resistance at the Highlander Folk School, a famous training ground for labor and civil rights activists. She was a close confidant of Clifford and Virginia Durr, two white progressives with ties to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black (Virginia’s brother-in-law) and other prominent New Dealers (Clifford had served in the Roosevelt administration). In short, Parks was a committed and sophisticated civil rights activist. She knew exactly what she was doing when she refused to give up her seat.
Moreover, the notion that Martin Luther King, Jr., started the bus boycott is equally wrong. For several months, Jo Ann Robinson and other members of the Women’s Political Council in Montgomery had been searching for someone to test the city’s segregation ordinances. Emboldened by the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education a year earlier, which struck down school segregation nationwide, they were determined to see desegregation spread to other realms like public conveyances. Just four days after the Brown decision, a year and a half before Parks was arrested, Robinson served notice to city officials that she was planning a bus boycott.
By the time of Parks’s arrest, the Women’s Political Council had considered, but decided against, enlisting two other young women to get arrested as test cases. Both of them turned out to have checkered personal backgrounds and so were considered less likely to garner sympathetic press.
On December 1, as word of Parks’s arrest spread through town, Robinson and her associates prepared thousands of pieces of literature calling for a protest meeting and boycott. It was they, not the ministers, who got the wheels in motion. It was black women, not men, who were the driving force behind the mass action. Ultimately King was tapped to head the ad-hoc Montgomery Improvement Association. That was because he was new in town and better-known ministers were unwilling to stick their necks out.
Even as Montgomery’s black citizens pooled their resources and stayed off the buses, a team of lawyers began challenging the municipal segregation law in the courts. They figured that this doubled their chance of success. Either the bus company and the city would cave under economic pressure, or the federal judiciary would issue a sweeping, nationwide order barring discrimination in public conveyances.
By late 1956, with ridership down by 65 percent and the bus company on the verge of bankruptcy, it looked like the first strategy might well succeed before the second had time to work. But that fall the liberal Fifth Circuit Court ruled that Montgomery’s segregated-bus law violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s due-process and equal-protection clauses. The Supreme Court’s 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which allowed for “separate but equal” facilities in intrastate travel, had been grounded in an earlier decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Court that separate public schools were permissible. The appellate court reversed that reasoning: Separate-but-equal schooling had been made unconstitutional by the Fourteenth Amendment (which was enacted after the Massachusetts decision); therefore Plessy, which took its life from the Massachusetts case, was also inoperative. The entire house of cards had fallen.
On November 13 the Supreme Court upheld the Fifth Circuit’s ruling, and on December 21 Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks symbolically drew the boycott to a close by riding unchallenged at the front of city buses.
Court decisions are only as powerful as their enforcement. “We assumed that Brownwas self-executing,” Thurgood Marshall, the lawyer who argued the Brown case on behalf of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, later wrote. “The law had been announced, and people would have to obey it. Wasn’t that how things worked in America, even in white America?” Of course, that wasn’t how things worked in America. It took years before Southern states began complying with Brown in any meaningful way.
In the immediate aftermath of the decision, officials in several states declared their intention to defy the court, and as Jason Sokol explains in his recent book There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975, compliance with federal civil rights statutes and court decisions was often spotty. But in Montgomery and elsewhere, segregated public conveyances soon gave way to integrated ones. Not everyone was impressed. Thurgood Marshall remained deeply skeptical of mass protests and still believed that civil rights battles must be won in the courtroom. “All that walking for nothing,” he said in November 1956. “They might as well have waited for the Court decision.
Most black Montgomery residents disagreed. “We got our heads up now,” said a black janitor, “and we won’t ever bow down again—no sir—except before God.”