Rosa Parks Case Study

Luckily, Rosa Parks' time in jail was served short when Edgar Nixon, president of the Montgomery chapter of the NCAAP and leader of the Pullman Porters Union and her friend Clifford Durr bailed her out of jail the same evening of her arrest. Four days later on Sunday, December 4, 1955, members of the NAACP organized a city-wide bus boycott with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s group, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), and announced their terms on a front-page article in the Montgomery Advertiser. The boycott's effectiveness was brought about with an elaborate carpool system with Parks serving as dispatcher to ensure that every citizen involved in the boycott received transport without using a bus. Though this was a struggle, many involved

The lawsuit would directly challenge state and local laws regarding bus segregation. As useful as Rosa Parks' case was in providing a valid reason for a civil rights uprising, the group decided it wouldn't make the ideal case because of the criminal status of her case. After consultation with two attorneys who regularly worked for the NAACP, Robert Carter and Thurgood Marshall, four cases were chosen and they were all women who had disputes with the Montgomery, Alabama bus system within 1955-1956. Claudette Colvin, Mary Louise Smith, Susie McDonald, and Aurelia Browder all agreed to take part in a civil suit against the city of Montgomery and the mayor of the city, W.A. Gayle was named as the defendant of the

District Court in February of 1956 and the bus boycott was making tremendous strides. The impending trial of Browder v. Gayle was being publicized throughout the entire United States and shined the spotlight on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his mission of bringing civil rights to the attention of the entire country. In June of 1956 a three-judge panel came to a ruling and stated that bus segregation laws in Montgomery "deny and deprive plaintiffs and other Negro citizens similarly situated of the equal protection of the laws and due process of law secured by the Fourteenth Amendment." With the cases' progress, however, came disgusting resistance when groups of segregationists replied to the African American victories with violent rioting and began sniping at predominantly black-used buses, burning black churches, and burning the homes of affluent civil rights activists. Among these homes, both Edgar Nixon's and Martin Luther King Jr.'s homes were destroyed by bombings and black citizens were being arrested for simply being black! Still, the people of Alabama didn't fall short and the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 not only served as a catalyst in bringing about the most forward motion the Civil Rights movement had seen up to that time but also succeeded in bringing together over 17,000 people to work together in a 381-day fight for their