The community’s experience of the bus system was shaped by this variability — by the uncertainty of not knowing, when boarding, whether this particular driver would be the one who made this particular trip a confrontation. The unpredictability was itself a form of control. It kept Black passengers in a state of managed anxiety that was part of what segregation was designed to produce.
## The Fourteenth Amendment’s Long Journey
The constitutional provision at the center of Browder v. Gayle — the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment — had a history that ran from the Civil War through nearly a century of judicial interpretation before it was applied in the way Colvin had intuitively argued it should be.
The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, in the Reconstruction period that followed the Civil War, as one of three amendments designed to address the legal status of formerly enslaved Black Americans. It prohibited states from denying any person within their jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws — a provision designed specifically to prevent Southern states from re-creating slavery through the legal system.
For the first three decades after ratification, the Fourteenth Amendment was interpreted narrowly by the Supreme Court in ways that limited its reach. The Civil Rights Cases of 1883 held that the Amendment prohibited only governmental discrimination, not private discrimination — a holding that allowed private businesses to discriminate racially without constitutional constraint. Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 went further, holding that state-enforced racial separation did not violate the Equal Protection Clause as long as the separate facilities were nominally equal.