Dr. Nykia Greene-Young
The story of the protest often begins with the arrest of Rosa Parks. However, long before Parks made her historic stand, young Black women were already resisting bus segregation in Montgomery. In March 1955, fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat. She was handcuffed, arrested, and brutalized by police. Civil rights leaders feared white retaliation against a young Black girl, and her story was pushed to the margins of the movement.
Other Black women, including Aurelia Browder, Mary Louise Smith, and Susie McDonald were also arrested for resisting bus segregation. These women became the plaintiffs in the federal case Browder v. Gayle (1956), the ruling that ultimately struck down bus segregation nationwide. Their names rarely appear in narratives of the movement, or textbooks, and they still do not receive the recognition they deserve. Yet their political labor, strength, and resistance produced the legal victory and policy change whose impact we still live with today.
Many women organized the movement behind the scenes, including Jo Ann Robinson of the Women’s Political Council (WPC). They drafted policy demands and applied political pressure on city officials, while building collective political power. Others used whatever they had at their disposal to sustain the boycott. Georgia Gilmore turned her kitchen into a fundraising hub. Countless Black domestic workers—many still unnamed—along with teachers, mothers, and students, made the 381-day boycott possible.
This extraordinary accomplishment was a policy legacy built by a community of Black women that reshaped American democracy. The boycott served as a catalyst for the most consequential civil rights reforms. Its success helped lay the foundation for federal enforcement of transportation desegregation, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the expansion of Black political organizations and civic participation.
Yet the conditions these women challenged were never fully resolved. Now, seventy years later, we must ask: Where are we? Why are we not further along? And how do we move forward amid a political landscape defined by rollbacks of rights won over the last seven decades? Black women, low-income people and many working-class communities still bear the brunt of transportation inequities, economic exclusion, political disenfranchisement, discrimination, and state surveillance—issues that were central in 1955. These same groups of people disproportionately rely on public transit systems that remain underfunded, unsafe, and disconnected from jobs and economic hubs.
The 70th Anniversary should demand specific, measurable policy action, including:
