In December of 1955, Rosa Parks defied a Montgomery, Ala. city ordinance that required colored passengers to relinquish their seats to white passengers if needed. The bus driver called the police, had her arrested, and a legal firestorm began to sweep the nation. Parks was asked why she didn’t give up her seat, to which she responded, “I would have to know for once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen.”
E. D. Nixon, a lawyer with the NAACP, and Clifford Durr served as Parks’s legal counsel and helped to publicize the Montgomery Bus Boycott that ensued immediately after Parks’s arrest. The boycott lasted a total of 381 days, which had devastating economic consequences for company who operated the busses. Jobs were lost, and the segregationists began retaliation. They began bombing and burning houses, and terrorizing the boycotters. Nixon’s house was bombed along with many other civil rights activists.
The boycott quickly gained national attention and civil rights leaders saw an opportunity for a federal lawsuit that would challenge state segregation laws. Because Parks’s case was technically a criminal case and would take longer to litigate, Nixon and Durr selected other similar cases on which to base their plaint. After consulting with attorneys such as Thurgood Marshall, they found four women with similar complaints from a year earlier and filed suit. In February of 1956, Browder v. Gayle was filed in the U.S. District Court, and in June of 1956 they ruled that Montgomery’s segregation laws were unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court followed up with this decision, without certiorari, by issuing their court order, making it illegal for any state to segregate based on race.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR US:
Besides the obvious civil rights implications that this case had, it catapulted a prominent civil rights leader into national acclaim.
One of the houses the segregationists bombed belonged to a 26-year-old man named Martin Luther King, Jr. Upon hearing of Parks’s case, he devoted his efforts to fighting for her civil rights, which led to his arrest. The overwhelming victory of Browder v. Gayle followed up by an order from the Supreme Court vindicated his efforts, solidified his cause, and gained him the means to take the national stage.
