Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice

This case was the first major lawsuit to challenge segregation on a constitutional basis, and succeeded in making school segregation illegal. Lawyer Fred Gray was inspired to formulate the Browder v. Gayle case after the success of Brown v. Board of Education.

The Montgomery bus boycott is often credited with sparking the large-scale civil rights movement, but it was not the first time that Black people protested by refusing to ride city buses. In 1953, a housekeeper named Martha White sparked a boycott in Baton Rouge, Louisiana when she was kicked off a bus for sitting in a seat reserved for white passengers. The Baton Rouge boycott inspired the organizers of the Montgomery boycott.

In the context of Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice, having “good hair” meant having hair that was naturally straight, or could be straightened to appear more “white.” Students at Booker T. Washington would often put themselves down for their “bad” hair. Claudette speculated that Rosa Parks’s straight hair was a factor in her being chosen as the face of the bus boycott. When Claudette chose to rebel by putting her hair in braids, she symbolically showed that she did not want to emulate the white community, and that she was proud of her natural hair.

Shortly after the Civil War, Southern states and cities began enacting harsh segregation rules that came to be known as the Jim Crow Laws. “Jim Crow” was a slur used to refer to Black men at the time. Laws varied from place to place, and Alabama had some of the strictest and most far-reaching rules. During Claudette’s youth, Jim Crow laws dictated nearly everything about Black people’s lives.

Court cases like Brown v. Board of Education and Browder v. Gayle succeeded in overturning specific segregation laws, but did not end the practice outright, nor persuade all Southern leaders to follow the new rules. Many schools remained segregated until the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s. In some cases, segregation remained well into the 21st century. One school district in Mississippi remained almost entirely segregated until 2016, the rules kept in place by a complex system of residency requirements. Regardless of legality, segregation remains a major topic within Southern politics to this day.

The KKK, an organized group of white supremacists, was responsible for much of the racial violence carried out in the American South in the first half of the 20th century. As seen in Claudette Colvin, the threat of KKK retaliation kept many Black people from resisting oppression.

Mass meetings, public gatherings that any concerned citizen could attend, were the backbone of the civil rights movement. Without widespread access to modern media to organize acts of resistance, activists relied on these regular meetings to inform the public of the latest actions that civil rights leaders proposed, and hear speeches that kept them inspired even in the face of possible defeat. In Claudette Colvin, mass meetings largely contributed to the bus boycotts’ success.

Claudette and the four other witnesses in the Browder v. Gayle case acted as plaintiffs; meaning they acted on behalf of the people bringing the case to court. This was a significant contrast to most court cases involving Southern Black citizens, as they were typically tasked with defending themselves to a court system primed to trust white accusers.

This is the court case that legitimized Jim Crow Laws, and the one that Judge Lynne used as the basis for his negative ruling in the Browder v. Gayle case. Plessy v. Ferguson revolved around a racially diverse man, Homer Plessy, who was arrested for boarding a white train car in New Orleans in 1892, an act he carried out intentionally to challenge segregation laws. Plessy lost the case, and the loss ultimately led to the long-standing rule that “separate but equal” accommodations for white and Black citizens were federally legal. The “equal” portion of this ruling was ignored for many years.