Sarah Keys V. Carolina Coach Company - Historical Perspective

Historical Perspective

A major breakthrough in the legal battle for civil rights, Keys v. Carolina Coach Company has generally been eclipsed in historical accounts of the movement by the events which followed it, notably the defiance of Montgomery, Alabama's city bus laws by Rosa Parks and the resultant Montgomery Bus Boycott. Parks' action assumed an importance far beyond the level of a municipal incident, giving rise to a Supreme Court decision banning segregation in travel within the individual states (Browder v. Gayle, 352 US 903 (1956)) and igniting the civil rights campaign which thrust the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. onto the national stage and paved the way for further reforms. The protest movement King led created an environment in which Keys and other desegregation rulings could be implemented. Keys thus represents one critical piece in the complex and multi-faceted fight for civil rights, in which the legal and the activist streams sustained each other and in combination precipitated the dismantling of Jim Crow.