97 pages • 3 hours read
Phillip HooseClaudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice
Nonfiction | Biography | YA | Published in 2009A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Part 2, Chapters 9-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2, Chapter 9 Summary: “Browder v. Gayle”
May 11, 1956 was the day of the Browder v. Gayle hearing. By this point, the bus boycott had been going on for almost half a year, and was still going strong despite 100 prominent Black activists—including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Fred Gray, Jo Ann Robinson, E. D. Nixon, and Pastor Johnson—being indicted for inciting an illegal protest. The charges did little to quell the movement, and all eyes were on the new case which had the potential to give the boycotters a resounding victory. The case was officially called Browder v. Gayle, Browder being the plaintiff with the name that came first alphabetically, and Gayle being the mayor of Montgomery. Claudette dressed in her best clothes and handed Raymond over to Mama Sweetie, who had moved from Pine Level a few years earlier. Along with her father, she made her way to the packed courthouse to give her statement alongside four other plaintiffs, all of whom were women.
The presiding judges were Richard Rives, Seyborn Lynne, and Frank Johnson—a recently appointed judge who would go on to make several instrumental rulings in civil rights cases. Gray had carefully arranged his case, and asked Claudette to be the last to give her testimony since her case was the most dramatic and she was the only one with previous court experience. The first witness was 37-year-old Aurelia Browder, a widowed mother of 6. She was followed by 77-year-old Susie McDonald, and then Mary Louise Smith, the fellow teenager who had been arrested shortly after Claudette. All were chosen because Gray believed they would be confident and unintimidated by the white lawyers and judges.
Every plaintiff spoke about how bus segregation had affected them personally, before the lawyer for the defense, Walter Knabe, asked them questions. Knabe used a similar tactic for each witness; he attempted to get them to state that the entire boycott was a plot by a dangerous outsider, Dr. King, and that Black people had been content with the bus rules prior to King’s rapid rise to prominence. Every plaintiff insisted that King had nothing to do with their desire for change, and that the bus boycotts were the culmination of years of building resentment, spurred on by acts of violence and constant harsh, humiliating treatment.
As Claudette took the stand and began to recount the details of her arrest, there was an obvious emotional response from the audience. One woman broke down in tears and had to excuse herself from the courtroom. Claudette remembers the testimony being the easy part. After it was over, she looked Knabe in the eye and prepared to answer his questions. Knabe became increasingly frustrated as he repeatedly tried to get Claudette to say she was influenced by Dr. King. When this did not work, he switched to claiming that Gray’s influence had led her to be anti-segregation. Claudette insisted that her beliefs were her own, and that she had held them all her life. After all, she was arrested before she ever met King or Gray.
The second half of the trial brought Mayor Gayle and some city officials as witnesses for the defense. They maintained that segregation was necessary to avoid violence breaking out across the city. The trial ended with Judge Rives questioning city commissioner Clyde Sellers; his last question was “Can you command one man surrender his constitutional rights—if they are his constitutional rights—to prevent another man from committing a crime?” (89). Sellers could not come up with an answer, and with that, the decision was left up to the judges.
Claudette met Mary Louise for the first time during a recess, when Robinson took the two teenagers out to lunch. She remembers feeling happy that another teenager had made the same stand that she had. When the trial ended, people crowded around Claudette, hailing her as the star of the show. She returned home and called her friends and family, who praised her courage.
Part 2, Chapter 10 Summary: “Rage in Montgomery”
The judges deliberated Browder v. Gayle for less than 10 minutes before ruling 2-1 in favor of the plaintiffs, rendering bus segregation illegal not only in Montgomery but in Alabama as a whole. Judge Lynne was the dissenting voice; he believed that the Supreme Court had ruled segregation legal in the Plessy v. Ferguson case, which would therefore require lower courts to rule the same way.
After the court announced the ruling, Mayor Gayle immediately committed to taking the case to the Supreme Court. The activists celebrated, despite knowing that the boycott would have to continue until the Supreme Court could hear the case. The white opposition continued to threaten the boycott with both physical violence and legal action. Dr. King was convicted of starting an illegal boycott by the same judge who had taken on Claudette’s appeal. The White Citizen’s Council brought a case against the MIA, claiming they were running an “unlicensed transportation system.” This case was heard in November, once again with the same judge as Claudette and King’s cases, whom the activists knew would rule in the city’s favor. Midway through the trial, though, several white leaders left the courtroom in a rush. The boycotters soon found out why: The Supreme Court had just upheld Browder v. Gayle, making bus segregation illegal in Alabama once and for all.
The boycotts continued until Supreme Court officials arrived in Montgomery to ensure that the new law was followed. This took five weeks, far longer than the boycotters had expected. By the time the federal marshals got to Montgomery and Mayor Gayle finally conceded, the boycott had been going for 381 days. The next day, five Black leaders symbolically boarded a morning bus. The driver welcomed them with a smile. Claudette was not invited to be among them, nor were any of the other Browder v. Gayle plaintiffs. The bus segregation ban sparked a wave of violence in Montgomery. Several Black churches were bombed, as well as the houses of two prominent pastors. Bus passengers were assaulted, including Rosa Jordan, who was shot in the legs by a sniper who managed to hit her as she sat on the bus. Claudette’s father, knowing their family could be the next victims, kept his shotgun close at all times.
Claudette was coming to terms with young motherhood and the loss of her dream of becoming a lawyer. She felt abandoned by civil rights lawyers as she struggled to afford her and her son’s basic needs. No one from the movement had spoken to her since Browder v. Gayle, and her neighbors looked down on her as an unwed mother with a light-skinned baby. Claudette longed to tell the truth about Raymond’s birth, that she had been manipulated by an adult man, but she was sworn to secrecy. She struggled to keep a job, often being fired when businesses found out who she was. She hesitated to take a maid or nanny job in a white home; she did not want to be alone with anyone who might be a KKK member. Claudette remembers one small beacon of light in her difficult life, one of the few times her achievements would be recognized by a major Black leader. Her cousin Velma attended Reverend Ralph Abernathy’s church. The pastor invited the family to a reception at his house, with a few other guests including Dr. and Mrs. King. As Claudette handed out ice cream with Mrs. Abernathy, Dr. King remarked that she was very brave, and encouraged her to return to school. Although the conversation was short and did not help her in any physical way, she was happy that such a prominent man understood what she had done.
Part 2, Chapters 9-10 Analysis
Like the bus boycotts, the Browder v. Gayle trial was planned carefully for months to ensure that it had the best possibility of working. Lawyer Fred Gray considered a list of possible witnesses to find those who would be the most sympathetic in court and least likely to cave under the pressure of facing white judges and defendants. Claudette saw the case as her second chance to make a difference, but she was acutely aware that it would not usher her into a leading role in the movement. In many ways, Claudette sacrificed her own life for the cause, as she was unable to stay in Montgomery after the trial.
The word “plaintiff” acts as an important symbol for the Black participants in the Browder v. Gayle trial. Black people in the South were accustomed to the legal system working against them. In almost every case involving Black people, they were defendants, and regardless of their crimes or guilt, they were given whatever punishment the judge or jury felt like serving. To most Black residents, it was impossible to view the legal system as anything that could be used to make a fair, legally guided ruling. As a lawyer, Gray knew that the Alabama courts and federal courts were different things in theory, since the federal courts were not tasked with upholding segregation laws, and were not inherently racist to the same extreme degree. He was still worried, though, since the federal judges in Alabama were still white Alabama residents, and could easily let their own prejudices influence their ruling.
The city’s meager defense reveals the cracks beginning to show within the segregationist status quo in Montgomery, especially after the bus boycotts began. The only thing holding up their way of life, at least on a legal basis, was their seemingly genuine belief that Black people actually liked segregation as much as they did, and that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the sole driving force behind the dissent that had suddenly become visible. Hoose shows this by outlining, question by question, how Claudette and Aurelia were interrogated by the city’s lawyer. He essentially asks the same thing over and over, attempting to make one of them slip up and admit they were under Dr. King’s spell. As each of the women confidently responded that they formed their views on their own, the defense slowly crumbled, and the true foundation of segregation was revealed. White officials did not want to create a “separate but equal” world, and they probably did not truly believe that ending segregation would lead to anarchy. They specifically wanted to uphold white supremacy and their domination of Black people. Their sense of innate superiority and ability to use Black people for their own gains had been slowly slipping since the end of the Civil War, and they would do anything they could to preserve their power.
Claudette’s stunning testimony, given last so it would have the greatest impact on the courtroom, shows that civil rights leaders may have made a mistake in assuming she was not fit for a leading role. She remains confident and serious throughout the trial, looking the white lawyer directly in the eye and deftly answering all of his questions in a way that made him look almost foolish for asking them. By the end of the book, the reader is left to wonder what kind of impact Claudette may have continued to have if she had not been stereotyped as a rebellious teenager, then cast aside after having a baby. Her disappointment is evident throughout the final chapter, as Rosa Parks rises and she herself becomes poor, desperate, and only remembered in ways that harm her. She is happy to be recognized by Dr. King at a party, but as the civil rights movement became a historical moment, her achievements were almost never highlighted. The publication of Claudette Colvin marked one of the first times that Claudette’s story was treated as a central moment in the bus boycott.
