This is the specific situation Claudette Colvin was in on March 2, 1955. She had studied the Constitution. She understood — in the way a fifteen-year-old can understand a principle she has engaged with seriously in a classroom — that the Equal Protection Clause was supposed to mean that the law treated people equally regardless of race. She understood that the bus seating rules violated this principle. She told the police officers who came to remove her from the bus that she had a constitutional right to stay where she was.
She was correct in the most technically precise sense: the law, as the Constitution required it to be, did not permit the bus segregation. The problem was that the law, as it was actually enforced by the city of Montgomery and the state of Alabama, very much did permit it. The gap between the Constitution’s requirements and the law’s actual implementation was the gap that civil rights litigation was designed to close — and it was the gap that Colvin was standing in on March 2, 1955.
The assertion of a right in the gap between what the law is supposed to require and what it actually enforces is one of the most difficult forms of civic courage. It offers no immediate protection. The police do not accept the constitutional argument as a reason not to make the arrest. The courts — at least the first courts to hear the case — do not accept it as a reason to acquit. The legal system, at its lower levels, reflects the law as it is enforced, not the law as it is theoretically required to be.