Claudette Colvin

Claudette Colvin (; September 5, 1939 – January 13, 2026) was an American pioneer of the 1950s civil rights movement and nurse aide. On March 2, 1955, she was arrested at the age of 15 in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her seat to a white woman on a crowded, segregated bus. It occurred nine months before the similar, more widely known incident in which Rosa Parks, secretary of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), helped spark the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott.

Colvin was one of four plaintiffs in the first federal court case filed by civil rights attorney Fred Gray on February 1, 1956, as Browder v. Gayle, to challenge bus segregation in the city. In a United States district court, Colvin testified before the three-judge panel that heard the case. On June 13, 1956, the judges determined that the state and local laws requiring bus segregation in Alabama were unconstitutional. The case went to the United States Supreme Court on appeal by the state, which upheld the district court's ruling on November 13, 1956. One month later, the Supreme Court affirmed the order to Montgomery and the state of Alabama to end bus segregation. The Montgomery bus boycott was then called off after a few months. The court subsequently declared all segregation on public transportation unconstitutional.

For many years, Montgomery's black leaders did not publicize Colvin's pioneering effort. She said, "Young people think Rosa Parks just sat down on a bus and ended segregation, but that wasn't the case at all." It is now widely accepted that she was not accredited by civil rights campaigners due to her circumstances. Rosa Parks said, "If the white press got ahold of that information, they would have [had] a field day. They'd call her a bad girl, and her case wouldn't have a chance."

In 2021, the record of Colvin's arrest and adjudication of delinquency was expunged by the district court in the county where the charges against her had been brought more than 66 years earlier.

Early life

Claudette Colvin was born Claudette Austin in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 5, 1939, to Mary Jane Gadson and C. P. Austin. When Austin abandoned the family, Gadson was unable to financially support her children. Colvin and her younger sister, Delphine, were taken in by their great aunt and uncle, Mary Anne and Q. P. Colvin, whose daughter, Velma, had already moved out.

When they took Claudette in, the Colvins lived in Pine Level, a small country town in Montgomery County, the same town where Rosa Parks grew up. When Colvin was eight years old, the Colvins moved to King Hill, a poor black neighborhood in Montgomery where she spent the rest of her childhood.

Two days before Colvin's 13th birthday, Delphine died of polio. Despite being a good student, Colvin had difficulty connecting with her peers in school due to grief.

Bus incident

In 1955, Colvin was a student at the segregated Booker T. Washington High School in the city. She relied on the city's buses to get to and from school because her family did not own a car. The majority of customers on the bus system were African American, but the segregated seating regulations discriminated against them. Colvin was a member of the NAACP Youth Council and had been learning about the civil rights movement in school.

This event took place nine months before the NAACP secretary Rosa Parks was arrested for the same offense. Colvin later said: "My mother told me to be quiet about what I did. She told me: 'Let Rosa be the one. White people aren't going to bother Rosa[,] her skin is lighter than yours and they like her.

When Colvin refused to get up, she was thinking about a school paper she had written that day, about the Jim Crow culture and business policy that prohibited Black people in Montgomery from using the dressing rooms in order to try on clothes in department stores. In a later interview, she said: "We couldn't try on clothes. You had to take a brown paper bag and draw a diagram of your foot ... and take it to the store." Colvin recalled, "History kept me stuck to my seat. I felt the hand of Harriet Tubman pushing down on one shoulder and Sojourner Truth pushing down on the other." Colvin was handcuffed, arrested, and forcibly removed from the bus. She shouted that her constitutional rights were being violated. She was bailed out by her minister, who told her that she had brought the revolution to Montgomery. She was convicted on all three charges in juvenile court, and given a $10 fine. When Colvin's case was appealed to the Montgomery Circuit Court on May 6, 1955, the charges of disturbing the peace and violating the segregation laws were dropped, although her conviction for assaulting a police officer was upheld. Reeves was sentenced to death and executed for raping a white woman when he was 16. Although there is evidence that Reeves, who was the prime suspect in the rapes or attempted rapes of five other white women, was actually guilty, the case drew protests not due to questions about his guilt, but the racial disparities in sentencing. Martin Luther King Jr. noted that the controversy stemmed not from the question of guilt or innocence, but the clear racial disparities in sentencing that were further emphasized by Reeves's young age. The state appealed the decision to the United States Supreme Court, which upheld the lower court's ruling on November 13, 1956. One month later, the Supreme Court affirmed the order for Montgomery and the state of Alabama to end bus segregation. As a result, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which had lasted over a year, was officially called off. The ruling ultimately led to the declaration that all segregation on public transportation was unconstitutional.

Life after activism

Colvin gave birth to a son, Raymond, in March 1956. During the same year Colvin left Montgomery for New York City,

In New York, Colvin and her son Raymond initially lived with her older sister, Velma Colvin. In 1960, she gave birth to her second son, Randy. Claudette began a job in 1969 as a nurse's aide in a nursing home in Manhattan. She worked there for 35 years, retiring in 2004. Raymond Colvin died in 1993 in New York of a heart attack at age 37. Following a stay at Black's Funeral Home in Carthage, Texas, Colvin's funeral would be held in Birmingham, Alabama, and she would be buried in Birmingham's Mount Zion Cemetery.

Colvin was not the only woman of the Civil Rights Movement who was left out of the history books. In the south, male ministers made up the overwhelming majority of leaders. This was partially a product of the outward face the NAACP was trying to broadcast and partially a product of the women fearing losing their jobs, which were often in the public school system.

In 2005, Colvin told the Montgomery Advertiser that she would not have changed her decision to remain seated on the bus: "I feel very, very proud of what I did," she said. "I do feel like what I did was a spark and it caught on." "I'm not disappointed. Let the people know Rosa Parks was the right person for the boycott. But also let them know that the attorneys took four other women to the Supreme Court to challenge the law that led to the end of segregation."

In an interview in 1998 with Paul Hendrickson, Colvin reflected back on her protest and why she did what she did. She stated, "I was done talking about 'good hair' and 'good skin' but not addressing our grievances. I was tired of adults complaining about how badly they were treated and not doing anything about it. I'd had enough of just feeling angry about Jeremiah Reeves [a classmate who had been sentenced to death in 1953 on specious charges that he had sexually assaulted white women]. I was tired of hoping for justice. When the moment came I was ready."

On May 20, 2018, Congressman Joe Crowley honored Colvin for her lifetime commitment to public service with a Congressional Certificate and an American flag.

Recognition

thumb|Colvin at the [[San Francisco Public Library, January 2005.]]

thumb|Colvin speaking at [[Bethany Baptist Church (Newark, New Jersey)|Bethany Baptist Church for Women's History Month, 2014]]

Colvin often said she was not angry that she did not get more recognition; rather, she was disappointed. She said she felt as if she was "getting [her] Christmas in January rather than the 25th".

In 2016, the Smithsonian Institution and its National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) were challenged by Colvin and her family, who asked that Colvin be given a more prominent mention in the history of the civil rights movement. The NMAAHC has a section dedicated to Rosa Parks, which Colvin does not want taken away. Still her family's goal is to get the historical record right, and for officials to include Colvin's part of history. Colvin was not invited officially for the formal dedication of the museum, which opened to the public in September 2016.

"All we want is the truth, why does history fail to get it right?" Colvin's sister, Gloria Laster, said. "Had it not been for Claudette Colvin, Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, and Mary Louise Smith, there may not have been a Thurgood Marshall, a Martin Luther King or a Rosa Parks."

In 2010, the street Colvin lived on when she was a young girl was named Claudette Colvin Drive in her honor. It is located off Upper Wetumpka Road in Montgomery, Alabama.

Reverend Joseph Rembert has said, "If nobody did anything for Claudette Colvin in the past why don't we do something for her right now?" He contacted Montgomery Councilmen Tracy Larkin (whose sister was on the bus in 1955 when Colvin was arrested) and Charles Jinright. In 2017, the Council passed a resolution for a proclamation honoring Colvin. March 2 was named Claudette Colvin Day in Montgomery. Mayor Todd Strange presented the proclamation and, when speaking of Colvin, said, "She was an early foot soldier in our civil rights, and we did not want this opportunity to go by without declaring March 2 as Claudette Colvin Day to thank her for her leadership in the modern day civil rights movement." Rembert said, "I know people have heard her name before, but I just thought we should have a day to celebrate her." Colvin could not attend the proclamation due to health concerns.

In 2019, a statue of Rosa Parks was unveiled in Montgomery, Alabama, and four granite markers were also unveiled near the statue on the same day to honor the four plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, including Colvin.

In 2021, Colvin applied to the family court in Montgomery County, Alabama to have her juvenile record expunged. Daryl Bailey, the District Attorney for the county, supported her motion, stating: "Her actions back in March of 1955 were conscientious, not criminal; inspired, not illegal; they should have led to praise and not prosecution". The judge ordered that the juvenile record be expunged and destroyed in December 2021, stating that Colvin's refusal had "been recognized as a courageous act on her behalf and on behalf of a community of affected people".

Also in 2021, a mural honoring Colvin was unveiled, along Claudette Colvin Drive, in Montgomery, Alabama.

In culture

thumb|Cover of [[Phillip Hoose's Twice Towards Justice]]

Former US Poet Laureate Rita Dove memorialized Colvin in her poem "Claudette Colvin Goes To Work", published in her 1999 book On the Bus with Rosa Parks; folk singer John McCutcheon turned this poem into a song, which was first publicly performed in Charlottesville, Virginia's Paramount Theater in 2006.

Young adult book Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice, by Phillip Hoose, was published in 2009 and won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature. The book, which featured many quotations from Colvin herself about her experiences, was based on 14 extended interviews conducted by Hoose with Colvin over the course of 2007.

A re-enactment of Colvin's resistance is portrayed in a 2014 episode of the comedy TV series Drunk History about Montgomery, Alabama. She was played by Mariah Wilson.

In the second season (2013) of the HBO drama series The Newsroom, the lead character, Will McAvoy (played by Jeff Daniels), uses Colvin's refusal to comply with segregation as an example of how "one thing" can change everything. He remarks that if the ACLU had used her act of civil disobedience, rather than that of Rosa Parks' eight months later, to highlight the injustice of segregation, a young preacher named Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. may never have attracted national attention, and America probably would not have had his voice for the Civil Rights Movement.

The Little-Known Heroes: Claudette Colvin, a children's picture book by Kaushay and Spencer Ford, was published in 2021. In 2022, a biopic of Colvin titled Spark written by Niceole R. Levy and directed by Anthony Mackie was announced, with Saniyya Sidney as Colvin.

References

External links

The Other Rosa Parks (Colvin interview with Democracy Now!)
She had a Dream
Daybreak of Freedom: The Montgomery Bus Boycott (Preface)
Daybreak of Freedom: The Montgomery Bus Boycott (Excerpt)
" Tim Walker, Browder v. Gayle: The Women Before Rosa Parks", Tolerance.org
Vanessa de la Torre, "In The Shadow of Rosa Parks: 'Unsung Hero' of Civil Rights Movement Speaks Out", The Cardinal Inquirer, January 20, 2005
Jim Auchmutey, "An asterisk, not a star, of black history", Pulsejournal, February 7, 2005
Let us Look at Jim Crow for the Criminal he is - Rosa Parks' bus stand and the long history of bus resistance The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, Rosa Parks Biography by Jeanne Theoharis, Say Burgin, and Jessica Murray, City University of New York