Lillie Mae Bradford

By Teri Greene
Montgomery Advertiser

Fed up with the way she was being treated, Lillie Mae Bradford sat at the front of the bus in May 1951 and was arrested. (Rainier Ehrhardt, Special to the Advertiser)

Lillie Mae Bradford had just finished her shift as a custodian at Pineview Manor on Dalraida Road that warm day in May 1951 when she boarded a city bus to take her home.

She paid her fare, got her transfer slip and went to the back of the bus, only to realize that the bus driver had punched her transfer slip incorrectly.

There were many other days when that had happened before and each time, Bradford kept it to herself and ended up paying more money because of the driver's mistake.

But that day, Bradford, who was 23 at the time, decided she had had enough.

"We were never allowed to say anything to the bus driver," said Bradford, who is 76 now. "But that day, I said to myself 'If you don't defend your right today, you never will.' So I walked up to the bus driver and tried to talk to him about the transfer."

The bus driver simply wouldn't listen.

He told her several times to go sit down in the back of the bus.

Bradford didn't give up. She took a seat in the front of the bus behind the driver and continued to ask him if he would change her transfer.

"He drove the bus down the Atlanta Highway to Wares Ferry Road, and he got out to make a phone call," she said. "I knew what he was doing."

A few minutes later, the driver climbed back onto the bus and drove to the corner of Madison Avenue and Union Street and a Montgomery police officer was waiting for her.

"The officer took me to the police station, fingerprinted me and took my picture," she said. "They put me in a holding cell for disorderly conduct, and I stayed there for several hours until my neighbor bailed me out."

Bradford said being arrested for sitting in the front of the bus was degrading and humiliating, but looking back today, she says she knew one day she'd be arrested.

"I was tired of all the injustice," she said. "It had been going on for many, many years. I remembered riding the bus with my mother when I was a little girl and we had to sit in the back."

During the three years that passed from the time she was arrested to the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, Bradford said nothing changed.

"I still rode the bus, even after I was arrested," she said.

Then the boycott happened, and Bradford stopped taking the bus.

"The boycott was something I was very happy to see happen," she said. "It was something that had to happen. I was so tired of being treated as a second-class citizen."

Bradford said she had been living for that day.

"I knew from that point forward that things would change," she said. And change it did.