Today, we're going to talk about Claudette Colvin.
Guess what? In Montgomery, Alabama in 1955,
a young black woman became the first person who was arrested
for not giving up her seat to a white lady on the bus.
That young woman's name is Claudette Colvin.
Claudette Colvin is a 15-year-old
bespectacled teenager.
Uh-oh, let me say it. Bespectacled teenager.
It's a hard word. Bespectacled.
She takes the bus home from school,
so her friends are like,
"Hurray, we're having a fun trip to home.
Uh-oh, white lady."
A white lady gets on the bus. The white lady is like,
"Hey, you guys have to move because I'm white."
Claudette's friends leave but Claudette stays and is like,
"You know what? I paid my fare the same
as this white lady paid her fare,"
so Claudette's like, "... you. I'm ... sitting. Have a seat."
White lady's like, "I will not have a seat."
The bus driver's like, "I'm going to get the cops."
The cops are like, "Move."
Claudette's like, "I shall not be moved,"
and they dragged her off the bus.
The only thing she knows to do is to go,
"It's my constitutional right."
They're like, "It's 1955, and we don't have to do ...
so ..." Claudette's like, "... 1955.
I'm sorry I burped, but I'm not sorry."
Wait, what?
I was just saying like ...
The N.A.A.C.P. is flooded with letters
saying Claudette Colvin is so brave.
She's wonderful, and the person who reads these letters,
the Secretary of the N.A.A.C.P., Rosa Parks, Rosa Parks
goes to Claudette Colvin's house and is like,
"Claudette, you're the ..." Claudette's like, " I ... know.
I'm the one who got my ass dragged to jail."
That's when they really connected and become friends,
so whenever she's at an N.A.A.C.P. meeting,
she spends the night at Rosa Parks' house.
Rosa Parks is like, "You know what, you're great."
Claudette Colvin was like, "You're great."
They really connect.
Time passes and E.D. Nixon,
the president of their local chapter of their N.A.A.C.P.
is like, "We need to start a bus boycott,
and this bus boycott will start a revolution.
We should use Claudette Colvin's arrest
as a reason to boycott the buses.
People will get behind her," but then they were like,
"Oh, but not white people because she has darker skin,
and we can't have a 15-year-old
as the face of the anti-segregation movement."
"But we can have Rosa Parks as the face of this movement,"
so, it's at that time that Rosa Parks sits down
in the white section of the bus and gets taken off to jail,
but she had to act like, "Oh, I was just tired.
Aren't I not threatening white people?"
Then, white people were like, "Oh, she's just tired.
We're eating this up."
Our story starts in Arkansas.
Little Rock, to be specific. It's 1957.
The Supreme Court has just ruled in the case of Brown
versus the Board of Education that separate is not equal,
so their local NAACP went out to the black community
and found nine kids to go to Central High School,
the premier high school in Little Rock, Arkansas.
These kids are like, "We are the Little Rock Nine.
We are fucking nine visions of black excellence.
We will go to school, and we'll change the world.
It'll be great."
Then, the governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus,
finds out that these kids are planning to integrate,
and this bitch, Orval Fartbus ...
You can fart all you want on the Fartbus.
Anyway, Orval Fartbus was like, "Hey, if these kids integrate,
the streets will run red with blood."
Orval Fartbus is a bitch,
so, then, the kids show up to school
on September 4th, 1957, the first day of school.
The senior in the group of the Little Rock Nine
is Ernest Green, and he is like, "Oh, my gosh.
There is an ass load of angry white people."
This angry white mob was like,
"We don't like you. You need to go away.
We are going to beat you up and hang you from a tree."
This is not funny.
Meanwhile, on the other side of school,
Elizabeth Eckford, the ninth of the Little Rock Nine is like,
"Oh, fuck. I'm here all by myself.
Oh, my God, there's a huge mob of white people.
This is terrifying."
They're yelling, and they have signs,
and they're shouting shit.
They are like, "Hey, you're white.
I mean, I'm white and you're black,
so that means I don't like you."
She gathers herself, and this girl is G'd up,
fucking face is stone cold and walking through these people
who want to pick her up and break her in two,
just walking through like a G,
and she sees the Arkansas National Guard.
"They must be here to help me," she thinks.
She quickens her pace, and she goes,
"Hey, these white people are trying to kill me.
Please save me." They blocked her entrance.
They are letting other white students in, and she's like,
"What is the deal? You are the National fucking Guard.
If anybody needs to be guarded, it's me here now."
She leaves school. She sits down at the bus stop,
and the white people are surrounding her,
and they're like, "Uh, we don't like you.
You are poopy."
She waits several minutes for the bus. The bus pulls up,
and she's like, "Thank God, I can finally get out of here.
This isn't the last I will see of you but also fucking fuck.
Can I just get a fucking education?"
Dr. King is using the 16th Street Baptist Church
to try to organize protests. Martin Luther King came in like,
"For real though, it's time for us to do something,"
and the adults were like,
"Listen, it's not that we don't agree with you
but at the end of the day,
I still have to put food on table
and pay the rent in this hoe,
and I don't want them burning crosses on my lawn
or any shit like that so ..."
like, "Bitch, it's not fucking safe. We can't do this."
Dr. King was like, "If we can't enact change in Birmingham,
we can't do it anywhere.
Who can join in the protest and get arrested with us?"
He was wort of shocked to see Gwendolyn Sanders
and her sisters get up and say, "You know what, we'll do it.
We will do something about this,"
and then more and more kids stood up to volunteer.
They decided to mobilize, so that's exactly what they did.
They went back to school like,
"Listen, we know you all is sick of the racism
and there's something we can actually do about it."
On May 2nd, the protest went down.
Administrators started locking the doors
to keep them from getting out,
and kids would just straight up jump out the window like,
"Bitch, you're not going to keep us here."
Over 1,000 kids left school to go to Kelly Ingram Park
to protest, but then Bull Connor,
head of the Birmingham Police Department was like,
"Okay, well, all those black asses can go to jail."
They started carting these kids off by the dozens,
and over 1,000 kids were arrested on that first day,
which is insane.
After a few days of protests,
the Birmingham Jail were totally overcrowded,
and so as more kids are arrested,
others come back out to take up their place,
but on May 5th, that was when shit got really real.
Bull Connor was looking at hundreds of black kids
standing up to his bullshit.
He's like, "Let's bring out the hoses."
These are high-pressure, knock you the fuck out water hoses,
but the kids realized there's strength in numbers,
and togetherness matters, so those kids linked hands
and said, "Not today, bitch. Not today."
Bull Connor decides, "Oh, okay. Release the K9 units
so that the dogs can ... these kids up. Excuse me."
At this point, there were news crews
there that caught the entire situation on camera,
and these are now some of the most infamous shots
of the Civil Rights Movement.
After people saw children on international TV
being sprayed with hoses and attacked by dogs,
a mind shift occurred, and after eight solid days of protests,
President Kennedy felt motivated to come out and say,
"You know what, I didn't want to say it before
because of the southern white voters but them mother ...
are racists, so it's time to just be real.
The shit that you are going out here
and doing to people in my name is not the ... okay."
Man, I love drinking. How come I don't do this more?
Anyway, who was I talking about? The kids.
Yeah, yeah.
After the success of the Birmingham
Children's March, Dr. King decided to ride that momentum,
and he gave his I have a Dream speech.
Bull Connor was fired, and the Civil Rights Act
was passed within a year of all that,
so it was monumental that Gwendolyn Sanders
and these kids were willing to say, "This is not a ...
game, and you won't treat us and our people this way
because we're here and this is what's going on,
and it's time for us to stand up too."
I don't have to worry about that sort of thing
the way those kids even did or their parents even did.
I don't take that for granted.
Cheers to the kids.