The three charges addressed different aspects of what had happened on the bus. The disturbing-the-peace charge treated her refusal to comply as a disruption of public order. The segregation charge directly addressed her failure to move when ordered under the racial seating requirements. The battery and assault charge reflected the physical dimension of the arrest — a characterization of the interaction with police that Colvin would have experienced differently from the officers’ account.
She appeared in juvenile court. The proceedings were before a juvenile judge because of her age. The court found her delinquent on all three charges. She was fined ten dollars and placed on probation.
Her attorneys appealed. On May 6, 1955, the appeal produced a partial result: the disturbing-the-peace charge and the segregation violation were dropped. The assault conviction was upheld. The surviving conviction meant that the case could not be cleanly used to challenge the segregation ordinance directly — the charge on which the constitutional argument was sharpest had been dismissed, while the conviction that survived was the more personal and less strategically useful one.
This outcome complicated the plan to use Colvin as a test case for the constitutionality of bus segregation. The legal vehicle she represented had been damaged in transit.
## Respectability Politics and the Decision
The legal complications of Colvin’s case were not the only reason that Montgomery’s civil rights leadership decided not to build their primary public strategy around her.
The other reasons were social, and they were the product of a strategic calculation that has been debated in the decades since. The leaders of the Montgomery NAACP and affiliated organizations believed that the test case for bus segregation needed to be made by a person who could withstand the scrutiny that the white press and the white legal system would apply to them. They believed that any vulnerability in the plaintiff’s personal life or social standing would be exploited to undermine the constitutional argument.