Lillie Mae Bradford

Lillie Mae Bradford (October 1, 1928 – March 14, 2017) was an American civil rights activist who, four years before Rosa Parks's more publicized action, performed an act of civil disobedience on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, for which she was arrested, on a charge of disorderly conduct.

Bradford's arrest, 1951

On May 11, 1951, Bradford saw that the bus driver had punched her ticket for the wrong price, apparently "a costly and frequently recurring error if it was indeed an error". Bradford asked to be charged the correct price, and after being told twice to return to the back of the bus, she sat down in the front.

She was held by police for disorderly conduct until a neighbor bailed her out. The arrest followed her throughout her life; she said it had prevented her several times from getting jobs she applied for. In 2006, she commented, There was always a box that said: Do you have a criminal record?' she recalled. 'I went for federal clerk positions, and I would pass the tests, but I wouldn't get the job. That's when I came to the conclusion that it was because I had a police record.

Aftermath: pardon and Rosa Parks Act On April 3, 2006, a proposal by Thad McClammy (a Democratic member of the Alabama House of Representatives) to offer a formal pardon to civil rights activists was expected to appear before the Alabama Senate. There was some resistance to it: some activists did not want to be pardoned since, they said, they never committed any crimes to begin with. In 2007, when similar legislation in Tennessee was making it through the legislature, Bradford's arrest was invoked again: "Bradford, a retired school custodian, knows that having her record cleared now won't have any real effect, but she wants to apply for a pardon certificate anyway. 'I want to have it removed, frame it, and put it on the wall,' Bradford said. 'It will show I was arrested fighting for my rights.

Later life and death Bradford lived in the Ridgecrest neighborhood of Montgomery with her sister Helen, she was buried at Montgomery's Greenwood Serenity Memorial Gardens, on March 22.