November 13, 1956

Browder v. Gayle

Supreme Court summarily affirms the ruling against Montgomery bus segregation

The case remembered as Browder v. Gayle reached the Supreme Court with the names reversed — and was disposed of in a terse per curiam order.

A motion granted, 13 November 1956

In the appeal captioned Gayle v. Browder — Montgomery's mayor and the other defendants were the ones appealing — the Supreme Court granted the motion to affirm and summarily affirmed the federal district court's judgment on 13 November 1956.

There was no long signed merits opinion. The brief per curiam disposition cited Brown v. Board of Education and other post-Brown desegregation decisions, and is reported at 352 U.S. 903.

That left standing the district court's holding, reached 2–1, that Alabama statutes and Montgomery ordinances requiring racial segregation on the city's buses violated the Fourteenth Amendment's due-process and equal-protection clauses.

Four women's claims

The constitutional class action rested on the experiences of four Black Montgomery riders: Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith. Fred Gray and Charles D. Langford brought the case directly in federal court.

Rosa Parks was not a plaintiff. Her state case was deliberately kept separate while her criminal appeal was pending.

Susie McDonald was repeatedly ordered by drivers to move, but a recent reconstruction of the court record in the American Journal of Legal History finds she was never arrested.

Five more weeks of segregated buses

The 13 November action did not put integrated buses on Montgomery's streets. Implementation waited on rehearing petitions and service of the mandate.

Rehearing was denied on 17 December, the mandate reached Montgomery on 20 December, and integrated riding began on 21 December.

The judgment also reached less far than it is often said to: it concerned state and municipal enforcement of segregation on Montgomery's intrastate buses, not all public transportation nationwide.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 6 sources not yet audited

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →

What the sources leave uncertain

Sources variously call December 20 or December 21 the boycott’s end. December 20 is associated with receipt of the mandate and the formal decision to end the protest; December 21 was the first day riders returned to integrated buses.
The lower-court case was Browder v. Gayle; because Gayle and the other defendants appealed, the Supreme Court caption is Gayle v. Browder.