Parks offered what Colvin, in the leadership’s assessment, did not: she was an adult, married, employed, composed, with a public presence in the community that made her a credible and sympathetic figure for the press and the public. She had the profile the leadership had been looking for when they evaluated Colvin and decided not to proceed.
The Montgomery bus boycott was organized and launched within days of Parks’s arrest. The boycott was a sustained collective action — 381 days during which Black Montgomerians refused to use the city buses, walked to work and to church and to the market, organized carpools, and absorbed the economic and social pressure that the white community brought to bear. It was one of the defining organized actions of the civil rights movement, and Rosa Parks was its public symbol.
Claudette Colvin was not invited to walk with the marchers at the front of the public story.
## The Federal Strategy: Browder v. Gayle
While the bus boycott was ongoing, Fred Gray — the young Black attorney who served as one of the primary legal strategists for the Montgomery civil rights community — was developing a parallel strategy in the federal courts.
Gray understood something that the public narrative of the boycott tended to obscure: the boycott, as powerful as it was as a community action and as a public statement, was not itself going to change the law. The law would be changed through the courts. And the most effective route to changing the law was not through the state courts of Alabama, where the deck was stacked, but through the federal district courts, which had jurisdiction over constitutional questions and which operated within a national legal framework that included Brown v. Board of Education, decided by the Supreme Court in 1954.