The Right to Move: How Black Women Fought Segregation on America’s Streets, Rails, and Buses
From an 1854 New York streetcar to a 1956 Supreme Court ruling, the long legal and personal battle for freedom of movement in America
Claudette Colvin’s passing, January 13, 2026, invites us not only to remember her story, but those of countless other Black women who stood up for what’s right… and put their safety, dignity, and futures on the line. Indeed, her story is part of a much longer and deeper history that stretches across centuries and cities, courtrooms and buses, and that consistently asks one vital question: Who has the right to move freely in America?
At just 15 years old, Colvin refused to give up her seat on a segregated Montgomery, Alabama bus in March 1955. That act is often remembered as a “before Rosa Parks” footnote. But Colvin’s real historical contributions are something more than that. She didn’t just challenge segregation on a bus. She helped dismantle it in court.
Yet Colvin was not alone, and she wasn’t necessarily the first. She stood on the shoulders of Black women who challenged segregated transportation in carriages, in streetcars, on trains, and on buses. Their protests were not always loud. Their victories were not always celebrated. But together, they built a legal and moral argument for freedom of movement that reshaped American public life.
In July 1854, nearly a century before Montgomery’s bus boycott, a young Black schoolteacher named Elizabeth Jennings Graham tried to board a streetcar in New York City. The conductor told her to get off. When she refused, she was forcibly removed.
Jennings and her family did not let the incident fade into silence. They sued the streetcar company. Their lawyer? An up-and-coming young attorney named Chester A. Arthur, who would later become president of the United States. With his assistance, Jennings won her case.
Jennings’ case helped push New York toward desegregating its streetcars. It established an early legal precedent: public transportation could be a battlefield for civil rights. Just as important, it proved that the fight over who could sit where (and who could ride at all) was not just a Southern story. It was a national one.
Decades later, in 1884, journalist and activist Ida B. Wells was forcibly removed from a first-class train car in Tennessee. She sued the railroad and initially won, only to see the decision overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court.
Yet, Wells turned that loss into purpose. She made it part of her broader work exposing racial violence, segregation, and the ways Black women’s bodies were policed in public spaces. For Wells, mobility was tied to dignity and safety. To be denied a seat was to be denied full citizenship.
By the early 1950s, the battle over segregated transportation had moved squarely into the heart of the Jim Crow South. In 1954, Sarah Mae Fleming, a Black woman in Columbia, South Carolina, was arrested when she refused to give up her seat on a city bus. In response, Fleming sued, and her case made its way through the courts, contributing to federal court rulings that challenged bus segregation in South Carolina.
Fleming’s case had no national boycott, or global headlines. Hers was a legal victory, not a theatrical one. Still, it demonstrated that the law could be used to chip away at segregation. It was an important lesson. And civil rights attorneys were paying close attention.
And then came Montgomery. In December 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus. Her arrest sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a 381-day mass protest that brought international attention to the struggle for civil rights.
Parks became a symbol of quiet dignity and collective power. The boycott showed what coordinated community action could achieve. But while the boycott unfolded in the streets, another battle was being prepared in the courts.
If you’d like to learn about the legal case that actually ended bus segregation, and the Black women whose names history nearly forgot, consider becoming a paid subscriber to read the next part of this post.
