Brown v. Board of Education overturned Plessy as applied to public schools in 1954. Browder v. Gayle extended the overturning to public transit in 1956. The constitutional architecture of legally enforced racial separation in public life was being dismantled, and the individuals whose names were on the cases doing that dismantling included Claudette Colvin.
## Montgomery Today
The city of Montgomery, Alabama, has a complicated relationship with its civil rights history — as do many American cities whose public spaces were the arenas in which the movement’s defining confrontations occurred.
The 2019 installation of granite markers for the four Browder v. Gayle plaintiffs alongside the Rosa Parks statue represented a formal civic acknowledgment of a history that the city had not always been eager to emphasize. The presence of the markers in downtown Montgomery — in the capital city of Alabama, which had been the first capital of the Confederacy and the site of some of the civil rights movement’s most significant confrontations — is a statement about how the city now chooses to present its history.
The Rosa Parks Museum, also in Montgomery, documents the boycott and its context. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum, both opened in 2018, address a broader history of racial violence and injustice in America, with specific attention to Alabama. The civic landscape of Montgomery now includes multiple physical acknowledgments of the history that was made there.
Claudette Colvin, in the years between the installation of the granite markers in 2019 and her death in January 2026, lived in Texas rather than in Montgomery. The city that had been the site of her arrest, her juvenile case, her testimony in federal court, and the legal revolution she had contributed to was represented in her later life by a granite marker with her name on it, not by a physical presence in the city.