Jeanetta Reese’s withdrawal from Browder v. Gayle after receiving threats illustrates the pressure that the lawsuit’s participants were under. Reese’s situation was not unique; it was an instance of a general pattern of intimidation directed at anyone who challenged the racial order in Montgomery. The threats worked, at least in her case. She withdrew, then falsely claimed she had never agreed to participate — the false claim itself an indication of how frightened she was of what her agreement might cost her.
The four women who stayed in the case — Browder, Colvin, McDonald, Smith — were doing so in an environment where one of the five original plaintiffs had been frightened out of participation by threats. They knew this. They stayed anyway.
## Fred Gray’s Disbarment Threat
The attempt to disbar Fred Gray following Jeanetta Reese’s withdrawal from the case was one of the more specific legal attacks on the boycott and lawsuit leadership.
Reese, after withdrawing, claimed that Gray had enrolled her as a plaintiff without her consent. If this claim had been accepted, it would have constituted professional misconduct by Gray — filing a lawsuit on behalf of a client who had not authorized it. The Alabama State Bar received a complaint based on Reese’s claim.
The disbarment attempt failed. Gray was able to demonstrate that Reese had, in fact, agreed to be a plaintiff, and the bar dismissed the complaint. But the attempt itself was a signal of how the white community’s legal and political establishment viewed the lawsuit and how it intended to respond to the lawyers who were mounting it.