Alito's and Bush's sin of omission, honoring Rosa Parks and MLK
Tue Jan 17, 2006 at 10:02:21 AM PDT
President Bush said on Monday, MLK and Rosa Parks "roused the dozing conscience of a complacent nation."
Martin Luther King Jr worked with Parks in Montgomery, you remember, to stop the practice of separate rows on buses for black and white riders.
But
Bush forgot to tell us this. It was the
"activist" Warren Court that ordered an end to separate seats on buses in the winter of 1956 —
fully one year after Rosa Parks' arrest in Alabama.
We praise MLK.
Alito even visited Rosa Parks' casket as she was lying in state on the day he was nominated, October 31. For all the homage paid to Rosa, neither Bush nor Alito in their remarks that day —or since— paid notice to the role of the Supreme Court in the Rosa Parks story.
Would a Justice Samuel Alito have ruled in her favor in 1956? Does he rule for the underdog? [Note: This is a SCOTUS diary cleverly disguised as an MLK-Parks diary.]
Not mentioned by either man that day: The Supreme Court in 1956 had Rosa Parks' back.
Separate seat ordinances for white and "colored" in Alabama
ended when the "activist" Warren
Court (
yes, that's the Court that Alito has decried)
struck down the practice as illegal. That was 382 days after Rosa Parks' arrest.
December 20, 1956.
A year earlier, Martin Luther King Jr launched a resistance movement from his church when he pushed the residents of Montgomery to boycott the city bus system in defiance of Rosa Parks' arrest and her court appearance Dec. 5, 1955. 8 weeks later, an incensed mob firebombed Dr. King's home on January 30.
But, you see, the Supreme Court spoke up for Rosa Parks.
It is this unspoken bit of history that gets under my skin when I remember back to the moment Sam Alito paid tribute to Rosa Parks lying in state at the Capitol rotunda. Would a Judge Alito have upended "states rights" the way the Warren Court did? I regard his visit to the rotunda that day as expedient political stagecraft if you weigh it against Alito's unsympathetic, unyielding, parsimonious judicial approach to discrimination cases.
 | | | Samuel Alito stands with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist near Rosa Parks' casket in the Capitol Rotunda. October 31, 2005 |
If you look at the the history of the 1950s, you'll see the challenges by Rosa Parks and 4 other women set in motion a yearlong rancorous legal battle that wound its way to the US Supreme Court.
The federal case was Browder v. Gayle, named for plaintiff Aurelia Browder and for the defendant, Montgomery's mayor WA Gayle. (Rosa Parks was in the state, not federal, court system.) In the federal case, Rosa's arrest record and her fingerprints record were used as buttressing evidence.
As the boycott continued the white community fought back with terrorism and harassment. The car-pool drivers were arrested for picking up hitchhikers. African-Americans waiting on street corners for a ride were arrested for loitering.
On January 30, 1956 Dr. King's home was bombed. His wife and their baby daughter escaped without injury. When Dr. King arrived home he found an angry mob waiting. . . .
The boycott continued for over a year. It eventually took the United States Supreme Court to end the boycott. On November 13, 1956 the Court declared that Alabama's state and local laws requiring segregation on buses were illegal.
Federal injunctions to enforce the Supreme Court order were served on the city and bus company on
December 20.
The first activist court to rule the city's segregation code unlawful was a US district court in June.
In November the US Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision to strike down the Montgomery law because it deprived "Negro citizens" of 14th amendment equal protection and due process.
The boycott lasted 381 days, and in that period, many blacks were harassed and arrested on flimsy charges.
Finally, on Nov. 13, 1956, in the case of Browder vs. Gayle, the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed segregation on the city's buses. The court order arrived in Montgomery on Dec. 20; the boycott ended the next day.
More on the court case and testimony can be found here.
In my view --
| | Rosa Parks did not end bus segregation; she took a stand. The Supreme Court put a stop to it when it struck down the law.
An activist court bucked the local legislators and the majority citizenry of the state to end segregation. |
Postscript. Even after this ruling, more bus seat segregation battles, similar to Montgomery's, had to be continually fought for other locales — in the courtroom.
It is so hard to imagine that Bush's second appointee, Sam Alito, would measure up to the best judicial legacy moments of the last 50 years.
Sigh. Another Anti–anti-discrimination Justice. [The link is to a diary about the anti–anti-discrimination legal thinking of John Roberts and Bill Rehnquist.]
Now we have to worry about the "dozing consciences" of 100 US senators.
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