Before Rosa Parks deliberately instigated a crisis on the buses of Montgomery, Alabama, there was Claudette Colvin. This story is not meant to discredit or replace Rosa Parks and her courageous efforts, but history needs to remember that Parks was not the first Black woman to refuse to give up her seat on a segregated bus in the South.
Parks was preceded by a younger pioneer.
Colvin was only 15 years old in 1955 when she took a historic and courageous step which makes her story all the more compelling and worthy of remembrance.
Claudette Colvin was a student at the Booker T. Washington (all-Black) High School in Montgomery when she became angry about the treatment of Black people in the downtown area. A classmate of hers, Jeremiah Reeves, had written about it, and she had experienced the humiliations of segregation herself.
Jeremiah Reeves himself had been accused of raping a white woman as a juvenile in 1952 and sentenced to execution which took place when he turned 22.
On March 2, 1955, a full nine months before the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Colvin, who was small for her age, boarded a city bus to travel home at the end of the school day. Colvin was accompanied by a dozen or more classmates and they all sat in the rear section of the bus designated for Black people.
The “white section” filled up quickly and soon a white woman was left standing in the aisle. The driver called out, and the three students sitting in Colvin’s row got up, but Colvin refused. “We’d been studying the Constitution…I knew I had rights” she recalled.
The standing white woman refused to sit across the aisle from her. “If she sat down in the same row as me, it meant I was as good as her,” Colvin noted. The driver yelled out again, “Why are you still sittin’ there?” Colvin recalled. “A white rider yelled from the front, ‘You got to get up!’” A girl named Margaret Johnson, a friend of Claudette’s, answered from the back, “She ain’t got to do nothin’ but stay black and die.”
Colvin recalled the incident 65 years later and reported in an interview that “History had me glued to the seat. It felt as if Harriet Tubman’s hand was pushing me down on the one shoulder, and Sojourner Truth’s hand was pushing me down on the other. Learning about those two women gave me the courage to remain seated that day.”
The bus driver pulled the bus over to the side of the road and waved down the police. As two white police officers forcefully dragged her from the bus, her body went limp. She shouted repeatedly: “It’s my constitutional right.”
In the patrol car, the officers mocked her and made comments about parts of her body. Colvin worried they might try to rape her; she tried to cover herself and put her mind on other things. “I recited Edgar Allan Poe, Annabel Lee, the characters of Midsummer’s Night Dream, the Lord’s Prayer, and the 23rd Psalm.”
Various civil rights activists in Montgomery were outraged by the arrest and began to organize. Rosa Parks, already a seasoned activist, and white ally Virginia Durr began fundraising for young Colvin’s case, and more than one hundred letters and a stack of donations streamed into Parks’ apartment. Parks was hopeful that the young woman’s arrest would embolden other young people to action and spark interest in the NAACP youth meetings. She encouraged Colvin to get active in the youth council which she did.
Colvin’s case went to trial in May. Colvin had been charged with three crimes. The judge strategically dropped two of the charges (for disturbing the peace and breaking the segregation law) but found her guilty on the third for assaulting the officers who arrested her. Since Colvin had only been convicted of assault, appealing her case could not directly challenge the segregation law.
Additionally, because Colvin came from the “wrong side of town” and was considered a rebellious sort of teen, Black civil rights leaders didn’t consider her case would be credible to pursue.
Reflecting on that experience years later, Colvin comments, “They [local civil-rights leaders] wanted someone, I believe, who would be impressive to white people, and be a drawing. You know what I mean? Like the main star. And they didn’t think that a dark-skinned teenager, low-income without a degree, could contribute. It’s like reading an old English novel when you’re the peasant, and you’re not recognized.”
However, several months later when the formal bus boycott began, Colvin was involved. Two months into the boycott, her attorney, Fred Gray, approached her about a civil lawsuit that would become the Browder v Gayle case. The ruling, which was taken to the Supreme Court, found that bus segregation was unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment. Colvin was one of four plaintiffs and testified in court.
Colvin was just 16 when she took the stand, recalling how she batted away the white supremacist attorney, Walter Knabe’s intense questioning.
“Why did you stop riding the buses on 5 December?” he asked her.
“Because we were treated wrong, dirty, and nasty,” she replied.
In June 1956, the decision came that the civil rights effort had won, and Montgomery’s busses would be desegregated along with other public institutions. It was a major victory for Black freedom and dignity in the South, partially won by the testimony of a young teenage Claudette Colvin.
But that isn’t the end of the story.
Colvin continued to struggle for opportunities in Montgomery, still was ostracized by local leaders in the Black community while enduring the racism of the South. She had become pregnant out of wedlock, which further alienated her from many Black leaders in the community. Even Rosa Parks, who befriended Claudette, was concerned about the publicity. She stated, "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.”
She eventually left Montgomery and went to New York and entered nursing, where she served in obscurity for several decades, and her rightful place in the history of the Civil Rights Movement was forgotten.
Over the years, the story of Rosa Parks has been memorialized and made part of the permanent historic record of what happened in Montgomery in the mid-1950s. But starting in the 2000s, Colvin’s family has worked to get her place in that story recognized and told.
As a result of the election of Black people to local city council positions in Montgomery, one of Claudette’s friends from school, who rode with her on that fateful day in 1955, had been elected. In the 2010s her friend proposed that a street in Montgomery be named after Colvin. It passed.
Then, Rev. Joseph Rembert 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 Charles Jinright and Tracy Larkin (Claudette’s schoolmate), and in 2017, the Council passed a resolution for a proclamation honoring Colvin. March 2 was named Claudette Colvin Day in Montgomery.
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. I know people have heard her name before, but I just thought we should have a day to celebrate her." Unfortunately, Claudette was too ill to attend the ceremony.
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".
Claudette Colvin is now 84 and still with us. In 2024, it is fitting and appropriate to recognize her as a key figure in the Montgomery Bus Boycott and give her a proper place in our collective memory of that era.
We honor Claudette Colvin during Black History Month…thank you, Claudette.