Parks and Colvin did not compete. Parks’s case moved through the state court system as a parallel track to the federal lawsuit in which Colvin participated. They were different legal vehicles serving different strategic purposes. The bus boycott was the collective action that Parks became the symbol of; Browder v. Gayle was the federal constitutional challenge that Colvin and the other plaintiffs were part of. Both were necessary to the outcome.
The characterization of Parks as simply a more convenient or more respectable substitute for Colvin, imposed by cynical leadership, is too simple. It is true that the leadership’s assessment of who could effectively represent the challenge drew on respectability politics that were sometimes unjust to Colvin specifically and to working-class, dark-skinned, unmarried Black women more generally. It is also true that Parks was a genuinely appropriate public representative of the movement because of her own organizing history and character, not merely because she looked better on the cover of a newspaper.
What Colvin deserves is not for Parks to be diminished but for her own contribution to be accurately recognized and credited.
## The Other Women of Browder
Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, and Mary Louise Smith have not received the historical attention that their participation in the landmark federal case warrants. The case is named Browder v. Gayle, not Colvin v. Gayle, but Browder’s name recognition is not significantly greater than Colvin’s in the general public’s knowledge of civil rights history.
Browder was a homemaker in Montgomery who had been arrested in April 1955 and who agreed to put her name on a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of bus segregation. She was the lead plaintiff because of the alphabetical ordering of names after Reese withdrew. The courage required to put one’s name on such a lawsuit in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1956 — when white community retaliation was a real and documented possibility — should not be minimized.