Vice President Kamala Harris would not be born for another six years when, in 1958, the Supreme Court of the United States issued one of the first of a series of decisions at the heart of the civil rights movement, the case of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People v. Alabama.
The NAACP , a New York nonprofit corporation, had taken the lead in fighting for the civil rights of black people in Alabama, specifically in support of its chapter in Montgomery, along with other local groups (Women’s Political Council) and leaders (the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ralph Abernathy), to end the Jim Crow segregation of public buses there.
In May 1956, a three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama ruled Alabama’s law and local ordinances requiring segregation of public transportation unconstitutional. In November, the Supreme Court summarily affirmed that holding, citing Brown v. Board of Education .
Stung by its defeat at the hands of the NAACP, which not only aided in the Montgomery bus boycott, but also provided legal counsel locally and in federal court to challenge racially segregated public transportation, Alabama targeted the NAACP.