Brown had held that racially segregated public schools were unconstitutional. Gray believed that the same constitutional reasoning applied to public buses. If the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited segregated schools, it should prohibit segregated seating on public transit as well. He needed a case that would give a federal court the opportunity to say so.
To bring a constitutional challenge in federal court, Gray needed plaintiffs — women who had been subjected to the unconstitutional bus segregation and who were willing to put their names on a federal lawsuit. He identified five women initially: Aurelia Browder, Claudette Colvin, Susie McDonald, Mary Louise Smith, and Jeanetta Reese.
Each of them had been arrested or subjected to discrimination on Montgomery’s buses. Together, they represented a range of ages, backgrounds, and circumstances. The lead plaintiff’s name — the person the case would be named for — was Aurelia Browder, not Colvin. The naming was a legal and strategic choice; Browder’s name appeared first alphabetically after Reese withdrew, and the case became Browder v. Gayle, naming as its defendant W.A. Gayle, the mayor of Montgomery.
## The Plaintiffs
Aurelia Browder was the lead plaintiff. She had been arrested on April 19, 1955, approximately six weeks after Colvin, for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus. She was a homemaker, wife, and mother. She remained committed to the case through the years of litigation that followed. The fact that the landmark case ending bus segregation in Montgomery is named for Browder rather than Colvin or Parks is a piece of the historical record that does not always receive the attention it deserves.