From Claudette Colvin’s expectation to bus desegregation in Browder v Gayle

Abstract In March 1955, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to move from her seat on a Montgomery bus, setting in motion a chain of proceedings that culminated in the Supreme Court’s summary affirmance in Gayle v Browder. This article reconstructs a legal history of rights formation that begins from Colvin’s persistent expectation of equal treatment under the law and traces how that expectation moved through a dense procedural field and complex socialmovement infrastructure before stabilizing as a Fourteenth Amendment right in the desegregation judgment. The article situates this account within rights-consciousness scholarship, treating rights as historically situated, bottom-up constructions, but specifies normative expectations—expectations that resist adaptation to disappointment and are legible in contemporaneous records—as its core unit of analysis. Using arrest records, trial papers, pleadings, hearing transcripts, judicial orders, organizational minutes, correspondence, interviews, and contemporary media reports, it tracks how Colvin’s expectation moved through juvenile proceedings, movement strategy, and federal procedure into a ruling that dismantled Montgomery’s bus-segregation regime and helped shape the constitutional law of public transport, while analysing the legal and procedural mechanics deployed to obstruct desegregation and the strategic choices that overcame them. It concludes by sketching a legal-history method for studying rights formation that keeps grassroots expectations and their procedural trajectories in view, and uses that vantage to clarify how movement strategy, judicial practice, and the emergence of constitutional rights are linked in struggles against racial discrimination in public space. While consistent with accounts that emphasize the interaction of litigation and protest, the article’s central focus is on how grassroots expectations of constitutional right at the ‘bottom’ of a legal order can, in rare but illuminating cases, come to be stabilized at its apex.