Women’s History / American History

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Do You Know Claudete Colvin, Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald and Mary Louise Smith? Read more about these true pioneers here.

Colvin’s stand was part of a long history of African-American resistance, as acts of resistance on segregated transportation had been going on for more than century. Frederick Douglass was kicked out of a whites-only train car in 1841. The 1854 arrest of schoolteacher Elizabeth Jennings — who was defended in court by future U.S. President Chester A. Arthur — led to the desegregation of NYC streetcar service.

Reflecting on the Women of Browder v. Gayle - Women at the Center
Aurelia S. Browder, 37 years old;  Claudette Colvin, 16 years old;  and Mary Louise Smith, 19 years old; and Susie McDonald, 77 years old. Credit: http://womenatthecenter.nyhistory.org/reflecting-on-the-women-of-browder-v-gayle/ 

Colvin and Smith started to look like suitable plaintiffs when “no man is willing to be on the case,” says Theoharis. So, exactly two months after Parks was arrested, four women — Colvin, Browder, Smith and Susie McDonald, 77 — signed on to be plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle. The lawsuit was filed directly in federal court so that it wouldn’t get stalled in the state system (as had happened to the case of Viola White, who had done what Rosa Parks did a decade earlier). Representing the women were Fred D. Gray and Charles D. Langford, who had consulted with future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and Robert L. Carter, who argued Brown v. Board of Education before the U.S. Supreme Court.

And sure enough, in June 1956, a federal three-judge panel affirmed what Colvin already knew: that the racially segregated buses were unconstitutional, violating the Equal Protection Clause in the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Browder v. Gayle decision in November and denied re-hearings on Dec. 17. Read the entire article in Time.  

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