Claudette Colvin (14 page)
Authors: Phillip Hoose
C
LAUDETTE:
When I got back to Montgomery, of course I stayed off the buses. Mostly I rode with my mom in a used Plymouth Dad bought for her. She needed it, because she worked way up out of town in a place the car pool didn't go to.
Q. P. Colvin, Claudette's dad, bought a car for the family during the boycott
Dad was very frugal. He saved enough to buy a TV set, too, so we could keep up with the boycott. We'd watch the news every night. The boycott was always the headlineâit was the biggest story in the South. I also read Jo Ann Robinson's editorials in a little newsletter that came every month.
The people Mom worked for were sympathetic to the boycott. The first sign of this was they didn't fire Mom when they found out I was arrested. They weren't rich; they were just average people. They paid my mom three dollars a day and bus fare. The lady used to bring her home after work on the days when Mom didn't drive.
The boycott was relatively easy for people on King Hill because we already had our own community transportation system in place. We were isolatedâjust three little streets on top of a hill on the edge of town. We had no stores up there, so we had to go through white neighborhoods to shop downtown. To get off the Hill, three or four people would pitch in to pay someone
a quarter to drive them to and from work. They'd drop the maids off house by house because everybody was going in the same direction.
My family duties increased during the boycott. Mom was gone a lot, because she used her car to drive people places. We didn't donate our Plymouth to the boycott because Mom needed it to get out of town for work, but since we had a car people were constantly coming around to say, “Mary Ann, can you take me and a couple of others to this place or that?” Dad didn't drive and I didn't have a license yet, so I did more cooking and cleaning and shopping and laundry while Mom drove. I had several cousins who drove taxis, and they'd come and take me to town when I wanted. A lot of people volunteered their cars for the boycott and dipped into their savings to buy gasoline during that time. Everyone pulled together.
WHITE SUPPORT OF THE BOYCOTT
Not all white Montgomerians opposed the boycott, and not all favored racial segregation. A small but determined minority of white citizens assisted the car pool, drove their black employees to and from work, and sometimes donated money to the boycott. Among the best known were Robert Graetz, the pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church, and Clifford Durr, a lawyer who assisted Fred Gray in his legal cases. His wife, Virginia Durr, also provided support in many ways.
A few whites dared to express their support publicly. Juliette Morgan, a librarian, wrote in a letter to the editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, “It is hard . . . not to be moved with admiration at the quiet dignity, discipline, and dedication with which the Negroes have conducted their boycott.”
The death threats began immediately, by phone and mail. They increased month by month. People hurled stones at Morgan's picture window and sprinted up to ring her doorbell again and again in the dead of night, shattering her sleep. She lost many friends. About a year after her letter was published, Juliette Morgan took her own life.
I went to the mass meetings when they were at churches on the other side of town, where people wouldn't recognize me. I went to a lot of them, more than once a month. I heard Dr. King speak, and felt the people rally around him. Those speeches he made just brought out everything you wanted to say to a white person. People were kicking you when you were down every day, and his words made you feel stronger. I sat in the back, far away from the speechmakers, wearing big shirts to cover my growing stomach. The leaders sure weren't going to invite a pregnant teenager up onstage during a mass meeting. It bothered me to be shunned, but I was an unwed pregnant girl and I knew how people were. People who recognized me would ask, “Who's the father?” I'd answer, “None of your business.”
B
Y LATE
J
ANUARY
,
the City Lines bus company was losing $3,200 a day. They had been forced to lay off drivers and shut down several bus routes just to stay in business. Inspired at mass meetings by the testimony of elderly people who walked great distances and poor families who donated money for gasoline, protesters kept walking and vowed to do so until justice came. Many who owned cars continued to offer them to the car pool and volunteer as drivers. Thousands used the car pool each day, and thousands more walked to work and school and the downtown stores.
Montgomery motorcycle police keep a close eye on a downtown parking lot, one of the many busy transfer points for the MIA car pool
In desperation, Mayor W. A. “Tacky” Gayle turned up the heat. Police were instructed to crack down on drivers, stopping them and questioning them at every opportunity. Dr. King was arrested on January 26 for going thirty miles per hour in a twenty-five-mile-an-hour zone. He spent a night in jail for the first time in his life. Three days later someone hurled a bomb through his front window, causing extensive damage but injuring no one in his family. At a mass meeting he said, “If I am stopped, this movement will not stop, because God is with this movement.”
SEPARATE BUT EQUAL?
In 1896, in a famous court case known as
Plessy v. Ferguson
, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the state of Louisiana could racially segregate its buses, streetcars, and trains without violating the U.S. Constitution as long as the separate sections of compartments were “equal.”
Separate but equal became the legal basis for segregation throughout the South. But the idea that the schools, parks, hotels, restaurants, and sections of buses and trains were “equal” was a sham. In 1900, $15.41 was spent on each white child in the public schools versus $1.50 per black student. The ratio was the same forty years later.
It was this ideaâseparate but equalâthat the Supreme Court justices struck down in
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka
in 1954. The justices wrote, “We conclude, unanimously, that in the field of public education the doctrine of âseparate but equal' has no place.” But did it still have a place in transportation? Sixty years after
Plessy v. Ferguson
, Fred Gray and the other lawyers were fashioning a lawsuit to insist that the answer was no.
The attacks continued. In early February a stick of dynamite landed on E. D. Nixon's front lawn. About that time Jo Ann Robinson's picture window was shattered by a huge rock, which her neighbors said had been thrown by a policeman. Days later two men dressed in full police uniform walked into the carport beside Robinson's house and scattered acid over her Chrysler sedan. According to neighbors, when they were finished, the pair calmly walked to their squad car and drove away. The substance burned holes the size of silver dollars through the vehicle's top, fenders, and hood. Neighbors told Robinson what they saw but were too frightened to make an official report of the crime.
With violence mounting and negotiations stalled, protesters asked one another how this would end. While everyone longed and prayed for success, many held private doubtsâit was hard to imagine that whites would ever give up control.
Fred Gray thought he saw the way outâit was the same path he had envisioned from the day he heard of Claudette's arrest. Why not go to court and sue the city of Montgomery and the state of Alabama, arguing that if segregated schools were unconstitutionalâas the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in
Brown v. Board of Education
âthen
weren't segregated buses? Instead of politely asking for modest reforms in seating patterns and more courteous behavior from the drivers, why not try to obliterate the segregation laws in court? If judges agreed, the city would have to give up. Once the buses were integrated, there would be no
need
for a bus boycott.
Gray, like the NAACP lawyers in New York who were closely following the boycott, was tired of playing defense. He wanted to mount a legal attack on behalf of
all
black riders as a class-action suit, not just to defend protesters who got arrested and charged as criminals one by one. Success would depend on putting the right case in front of the right judges in the right courtroom.
Since judges representing the state of Alabama and the city of Montgomery court systems were all but certain to be hostile, the lawyers knew that their only chance was to argue their case in a federal court, where judges might listen with an open mind to an antisegregation suit offered by black lawyers.
Any lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a state law was supposed to be heard by a panel of three judges in a federal courtâthat was the rule. Whether federal judges based in Alabama would actually follow it and hear the case was the big question. If they did, the suit would still be heard and decided in Alabama, but the judges would represent the
United States
government, not the state of Alabama or the city of Montgomery.
The Montgomery Improvement Association voted to let Gray go ahead with the lawsuitâthe “second front,” as it came to be calledâand raise money to pay for it. Gray went to New York to huddle over legal strategies with NAACP lawyers, then returned to Montgomery and filed the suit in the federal building. To his delight, the suit was accepted as a constitutional challenge to state law and assigned to a threejudge federal panel.
Next Gray began to look for plaintiffsâthose people whose names would appear on the lawsuit and who would testify in court. The idea was to put on the witness stand black passengers who would testify to how Jim Crow had made their lives miserable while they were just trying to get from place to place.
Courage would be their number one requirement. They would be placing their lives in grave danger, and the lives of those they lived with. From their seat in a tiny witness box in a packed courtroom, plaintiffs would face aggressive white lawyers firing
questions at them as white judges looked on. Fred Gray knew well that all their lives black people had been taught to defer to whites. Somehow these plaintiffs would have to find the steel to speak freely and the composure to think clearly while seated in a pressure chamber. And they would need to have a good story to tell.
The lawyers ruled out Rosa Parks. Her case was still being appealed, and they wanted the new federal lawsuit to be independent of any existing criminal case. Besides, Mrs. Parks had been arrested for disturbing the peace, not for breaking the segregation law. The MIA members proposed many candidates, and Gray interviewed the most promising. In the end, he whittled the list down to five names. All were women. This was because more women than men rode the buses, and because Gray and his colleagues wanted to protect the jobs of men, who were typically regarded as the breadwinners in families. All five women Gray selected had been bullied and insulted and cheated on buses, and all were still angry about it. It may have been a short list, but Gray thought it was a good one.
Ironically, the only one of the five who had previously appeared in court on a bus case was the youngest. But she had gone through the most. She had been tested by fire. Claudette Colvin had been on Fred Gray's short list from the moment he conceived the suit. He picked up the phone and dialed a familiar King Hill number.
