'She was a fighter': Lillie Mae Bradford honored at service

In a way, Lillie Mae Bradford started it all.

On the list of black women who claimed their civil rights while seated on a bus, she is one of the first known to do so and perhaps the first to do so in Montgomery where Rosa Parks would spark a movement four years later through the same action.

Bradford did not get the same recognition as Parks, or even Claudette Colvin, but she also did not refuse to move from the white section of the bus for any particular movement or organization. She did it for herself, a 22-year-old black woman tired of a white Montgomery bus driver erroneously charging her too much money for her bus tickets.

Bradford was arrested, charged and released on bond in 1951. Her name was never a chapter in the book on civil rights, but she spent the rest of her life in the Ridgecrest neighborhood of Montgomery raising a family who knew they were more free because of Bradford’s actions.

Bradford died in her sleep on March 14 and her family celebrated her homegoing – not funeral – at Phillips-Riley Chapel on Wednesday.

“When you go to a funeral, you go to mourn the loss,” Bradford’s nephew, pastor Gary Bradford, said at the service. “When you go to a homegoing, you go to celebrate the gain. Knowing Lillie Mae, she doesn’t want anybody to be sad.”

Bradford’s nephews, nieces and friends stepped to the podium and used many of the same words to describe Bradford: courageous, full of life, motherly, and “a little feisty.”

“She was a fighter in every sense of the word,” Gary Bradford said.

You’d have to be a fighter to do what she did, especially considering when she did it, historian Richard Bailey said at the funeral.

“We’re talking about 1951 in Montgomery. Not even the Bus Boycott period which was tough in itself. She could not depend on help from anybody,” said Bailey, who added that most prominent civil rights attorneys were not in Montgomery at the time.

It was May that year when Bradford decided to stand up for herself. And yet, like many other blacks in Montgomery that day, her day began at the back of the bus.

According to archived stories from the Montgomery Advertiser, Bradford had purchased her transfer slip but watched as the bus driver incorrectly punched the ticket, a costly and frequently recurring error if it was indeed an error.

Bradford decided she had had enough.

"I had promised myself that one day I was going to defend my rights. If I wasn't going to defend my rights that day, I never would," Bradford said in 2007.

Bradford walked to the front of the bus and asked the driver for a refund or a correct transfer. After the driver told her twice to get to the back of the bus, Bradford had a seat at the front.

Police arrested Bradford and held her for what was called disorderly conduct until her neighbor bailed her out.

“She wasn’t part of any movement, and that makes it more outstanding,” Bailey said. “It wasn’t planned. It was spontaneous. She wasn’t part of any organization. She was out there depending on principle and courage to take a stand against Jim Crow seating.”

Bradford's great-niece Latoya Bradford said she appreciates her great aunt's legacy and the rights Bradford helped win for her.

"It means the world to me," Latoya said. "It means she has left a mark for me to follow. She left a great impression on me. Her legacy lives on through her family."

Bradford was proud of both her stand and the civil rights movement that would follow later, but her arrest followed her throughout her life and kept her from getting several jobs, she said. 

The city of Montgomery is currently working on a posthumous pardon for Bradford, city attorney Kim Fehl confirmed Wednesday.

Bradford’s family remembered her as a moral compass and a constant teacher whose lessons might not be understood until you were in a position to understand them.

Gary Bradford said that was the case on his aunt’s last day alive.

“She got up like she normally does. She ate and then told Mama (Gary’s mother, Bradford's sister) to wake her up at a certain time. She never woke up,” Gary Bradford said. “But before she went to sleep, she told my mama, ‘Thank you for all that you do.’ What we didn’t know at the time was she was teaching us another lesson to not take for granted what you have, because anything can be taken at any moment.”

Bradford will be interred at Greenwood Serenity Memorial Gardens.