Claudette Colvin is a pioneer of the African-American civil rights movement.
On March 2, 1955, she was the first person arrested for resisting bus segregation in
Montgomery, Alabama, preceding the better publicized Rosa Parks incident by nine months.
Colvin was among the five women originally included in the federal court case, filed
on February 1, 1956 as Browder v. Gayle, and testified before the three-judge panel that
heard the case in the United States District Court.
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, which upheld their ruling on December
17, 1956.
She was the last witness to testify and was considered the "star" witness.
Three days later, the Supreme Court issued an order to Montgomery and the state to end
bus segregation in Alabama.
For a long time, Montgomery's black leaders did not publicize Colvin's pioneering effort
because she was a teenager and became pregnant while unmarried.
Given the social norms of the time and her youth, the NAACP leaders worried about using
her to represent their movement.
Early life Colvin was born September 5, 1939, the daughter
of C.P.
Colvin and Mary Anne Colvin, and grew up in one of the poorer neighborhoods of Montgomery,
Alabama.
In 1943, at 4 years old, she had received her first impression on the struggles of segregation.
She was at a retail store with her mother when a couple of white boys entered, and they
asked her to touch hands and compare them.
Her mother saw this, slapped her in the face, and said that she was not allowed to touch
them.
In 1955 Colvin was a student at the segregated Booker T. Washington High School in the city.
She even said she had high aspirations of being President one day.
Colvin was a member of the NAACP Youth Council and was actively learning about the civil
rights movement in school.
Bus incident She was returning home from school on March
2, 1955 when she got on a Capital Heights bus downtown.
She relied on the city's buses to get to and from school, because her parents did not own
a car.
She was sitting about two seats from the emergency exit in the colored section.
If the bus became so crowded that all the "white seats" in front were filled and a white
person was standing, the African Americans were supposed to leave these seats and move
to the back and stand if needed.
When a white woman got on the bus and was standing, bus driver Robert W. Cleere commanded
Colvin, her friend Ruth Hamilton, and another black passenger to get up and move to the
back.
When Colvin refused, she allegedly became hysterical, balled her fists in the air, and
she was removed from the bus and arrested by two police officers named Thomas J. Ward
and Paul Headley.
This was nine months before secretary Rosa Parks was famously arrested for the same offense.
When Colvin refused to get up, she was thinking about a school paper that she had written
that day.
It was about the local custom that prevented blacks from using the dressing rooms and trying
on clothing in department stores.
She said in a later interview that "We couldn't try on clothes," Colvin says.
"You had to take a brown paper bag and draw a diagram of your foot ... and take it to
the store.”
"The bus was getting crowded and I remember the bus driver looking through the rear view
mirror asking her to get up for the white woman, which she didn't," said Annie Larkins
Price, a classmate of Colvin's.
"She had been yelling 'It's my constitutional right'.
She decided on that day that she wasn't going to move."
Colvin was handcuffed, arrested and forcibly removed from the bus.
She shouted that her constitutional rights were being violated.
Price testified for Colvin in the juvenile court case.
Colvin was convicted of disturbing the peace, violating the segregation law, and assault.
"There was no assault," Price said.
Court trial
Colvin was also one of four women plaintiffs in the court case Browder v. Gayle.
This trial determined that bus segregation in Montgomery, Alabama was unconstitutional.
During the trial, Colvin described her arrest:
"I kept saying, 'He has no civil right...
this is my constitutional right...
you have no right to do this.'
And I just kept blabbing things out, and I never stopped.
That was worse than stealing, you know, talking back to a white person."
The case was appealed by state and local officials to the United States Supreme Court.
On November 13, 1956, the case was heard by the Supreme Court who affirmed the District
Court's ruling.
In December, the Supreme Court declined to reconsider and on December 20, 1956, it ordered
Montgomery and Alabama to end bus segregation in the state.
Personal life In December 1955, Colvin gave birth to a son,
Raymond.
He was so light-skinned that people frequently said she had a baby by a white man.
Colvin left Montgomery for New York in 1958, because she had difficulty finding and keeping
work after the notoriety of the federal court case overturning bus segregation.
Colvin said after her actions on the bus she was branded as a troublemaker by those in
her community and had to drop out of college.
In New York, the young Colvin and Raymond first lived with her older sister, Velma Colvin.
She got a job as a nurse’s aide in a nursing home in Manhattan, where she worked for 35
years.
She retired in 2004.
Colvin never married.
While living in New York, she had a second son, who became an accountant in Atlanta,
married and had his own family.
Raymond Colvin died in 1993 at age 37 in New York.
Legacy Although Colvin did have a "spark" that may
have ignited the Montgomery Bus Boycott movement, she rarely told her story once she moved to
New York City.
Conversation in the black community focused on black enterprise by this time rather than
on integration issues.
NPR's Margot Adler said that black organizations felt that Rosa Parks made a better test case
for integration because she was an adult, and she had the right hair and look to make
her appear as middle class.
In 2005, Colvin told the Montgomery Advertiser that she would not have changed her decision
to remain seated.
"I feel very, very proud of what I did.
I do feel like what I did was a spark and it caught on."
"I'm not disappointed," Colvin said.
"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."
Colvin has often said that she is not angry she did not get the recognition she deserved,
but instead disappointed.
She said she felt as if she was "getting her Christmas in January rather than the 25th."
In popular culture Rita Dove, a U.S. poet laureate, included
"Claudette Colvin Goes to Work," in her book of collected poetry, On the Bus with Rosa
Parks.
Dove referred to Colvin in her magazine article, "The Torchbearer Rosa Parks."
The folk singer John McCutcheon set the poem to music, sang and recorded "Claudette Colvin
Goes to Work," with Rita Dove speaking one line, on his CD Mightier than the Sword.
Awele Makeba wrote, directed and starred in a one-woman drama, Rage Is Not A 1-Day Thing!,
in which she relates the story of the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott through the eyes of
Colvin following her arrest.
Phillip Hoose's biography, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice, won the 2009 National
Book Award for Young People’s Literature.
In "Red Team III," an episode in HBO's The Newsroom, Will McAvoy references Colvin.
Colvin's story is told in a 2014 episode of Drunk History on Comedy Central.
Quotes "It's my constitutional right to sit here
as much as that lady.
I paid my fare, it's my constitutional right," Colvin said as she was getting arrested by
the two police officers on the bus.
"I knew then and I know now that, when it comes to justice, there is no easy way to
get it.
You can't sugarcoat it.
You have to take a stand and say, 'This is not right.'"
"I felt like Sojourner Truth was pushing down on one shoulder and Harriet Tubman was pushing
down on the other—saying, 'Sit down girl!'
I was glued to my seat," Colvin later told Newsweek in an interview as to how she was
feeling when she stayed in her seat on the bus.
See also List of civil rights leaders
Montgomery Bus Boycott Mary Louise Smith
Aurelia Browder Irene Morgan
Edgar Nixon References
Further reading Phillip Hoose.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Claudette Colvin, Twice Toward Justice..
ISBN 0-374-31322-9.
Taylor Branch.
New York, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, Parting The Waters - American in the King Years 1954-63..
ISBN 0-671-68742-5.
External links The Other Rosa Parks
She Had A Dream Daybreak of Freedom: The Montgomery Bus Boycott
Daybreak of Freedom: The Montgomery Bus Boycott "BROWDER v. GAYLE: The Women Before Rosa Parks",
Tolerance Vanessa de la Torre, "In The Shadow of Rosa
Parks: 'Unsung Hero' Of Civil Rights Movement Speaks Out", The Cardinal Inquirer, January
20, 2005 "She Would Not Be Moved", The Guardian
"An asterisk, not a star, of black history", Pulsejournal