Aurelia Browder, April 29, 1955
Aurelia Browder, a seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, was a widowed mother of six who rode the bus two or three times a day. On April 29, 1955, just two months after the arrest of Claudette Colvin, Browder was told by a bus driver to stand so a white woman could sit down. She refused to move, was arrested, and fined. With the necessity of supporting her family, she continued to ride the buses; however, when the arrest of Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott on December 5, Browder became active in the effort.
The lawyers for Rosa Parks, Fred Gray and Charles Langford, appealed Parks’s conviction for disorderly conduct, but an appeal would take a very long time to work its way through the Alabama court system and may even be perpetually delayed. Gray and Langford, therefore, took another tack. A civil rights case could go directly to the U.S. Circuit Court. On February 1, 1956, they filed a civil rights lawsuit on behalf of four women who had been arrested on buses earlier in the preceding year: Claudette Colvin, Aurelia Browder, Mary Louise Smith, and Susie McDonald. (The names are listed alphabetically, thus Aurelia Browder became the lead defendant in the case now known as Browder v. Gayle. The lead plaintiff was Montgomery mayor W. A. Gayle.) That evening a bomb was thrown at the house of E.D. Nixon, president of the Montgomery NAACP.
The bus boycott continued into June, when the U.S. district court ruled two-to-one that segregation in public transportation was unconstitutional. The decision was appealed, and the Black citizens of Montgomery kept walking for six more months. Finally, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s ruling, and on December 20 the Montgomery City Lines bus company was ordered to desegregate all its buses.
A campaign of retaliatory violence ensued. On December 23 a shotgun was fired into the home of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Integrated buses were shot at. On Christmas Eve a fifteen-year-old Black girl standing at a bus stop was beaten by five white men. Aurelia Browder’s daughter answered the telephone late one evening that week and became hysterical when a voice said, “Your house is going to be blowed sky high.” Her mother, undaunted, grabbed the phone, exclaimed, “Blow it up. I need a new house anyway!” and slammed down the receiver.
In January, Rev. Ralph Abernathy’s church and home were both bombed, as were three other churches and – for the second time – the home of the Rev. Robert Graetz, the white minister of the largely Black Trinity Lutheran Church. A couple of weeks later, Dr. King was woken by something, and so he and Bob Williams, a friend who was with him as a guard, went to Williams’s house. Before dawn a bomb went off near the parsonage, and when someone went there to check on King, twelve sticks of dynamite were found on the porch. Fortunately, the fuse had fizzled out.
The struggle for equality on the buses was not over.