The defendants appealed. The case went to the Supreme Court of the United States.
## November 1956: The Supreme Court
The city of Montgomery and the state of Alabama appealed the Browder v. Gayle ruling to the Supreme Court. They argued that the three-judge panel had extended Brown too far, that the reasoning applicable to schools did not automatically apply to transit, and that the states retained authority over public accommodations within their borders.
The Supreme Court was not persuaded. On November 13, 1956, the Court summarily affirmed the district court’s ruling — affirming it without a full briefing and oral argument, which indicated that the justices found the lower court’s reasoning so clearly correct that extended additional procedure was unnecessary. The bus segregation statutes were unconstitutional.
The affirmance, combined with the procedural steps that followed, brought the segregation of Montgomery’s buses to an end. The city received official written notice of the ruling from federal marshals on December 20, 1956. The Montgomery bus boycott, which had been running for 381 days, was called off. Black Montgomerians returned to the city’s buses, this time to a system that was legally required to offer them equal treatment.
The constitutional victory was real and significant. It was also only a beginning; the legal end of bus segregation in Montgomery did not instantaneously change the social environment in which Black residents lived, worked, and moved through the city.
## What Colvin Was Doing During the Boycott
The 381 days of the Montgomery bus boycott were a period of sustained collective sacrifice for Black Montgomerians. They walked miles in the heat and rain. They organized carpools. They stood at pickup points before dawn and after dark. They absorbed economic pressure as white employers threatened workers who participated in the boycott. They endured harassment, arrests of their leaders, and the bombing of Martin Luther King Jr.’s house in January 1956.