The bus froze. After training, she landed a job as a nurses aide in a Catholic hospital in Manhattan. She now works as a nurses' aide at an old people's home in downtown Manhattan. [49], The Little-Known Heroes: Claudette Colvin, a children's picture book by Kaushay and Spencer Ford, was published in 2021. [43] 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". It was her individual courage that triggered the collective display of defiance that turned a previously unknown 26-year-old preacher, Martin Luther King, into a household name. In high school, she had high ambitions of political activity. "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. While Parks has been heralded as a civil rights heroine, Colvin's story has received little notice. He contacted Montgomery Councilmen Charles Jinright and Tracy Larkin, and in 2017, the Council passed a resolution for a proclamation honoring Colvin. [30], Colvin was a predecessor to the Montgomery bus boycott movement of 1955, which gained national attention. "For nobody can doubt the boundless outreach of her integrity. "When I was in the ninth grade, all the police cars came to get Jeremiah," says Colvin. . Most Popular #5576. Your IP: [5] Colvin did not receive the same attention as Parks for a number of reasons: she did not have "good hair", she was not fair-skinned, she was a teenager, she was pregnant. 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. Respectfully and faithfully yours. Councilman Larkin's sister was on the bus in 1955 when Colvin was arrested. Most Americans, even in Montgomery, have never heard of her. In the 2010s, Larkin arranged for a street to be named after Colvin. Mothers expressed concern about permitting their children on the buses. Colvin gave birth to Raymond, a son. "So I told him I was not going to get up either. [Mrs. Hamilton] said she was not going to get up and that she had paid her fare and that she didn't feel like standing," recalls Colvin. Reeves was a teenage grocery delivery boy who was found having sex with a white woman. The driver kept on going but stopped when he reached a junction where a police squad car was waiting. None of them spoke to me; they didn't see if I was okay. Colvin left Montgomery for New York City in 1958,[6] because she had difficulty finding and keeping work following her participation in the federal court case that overturned bus segregation. This movement took place in the United States. In 1955, when she was 15, she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white womannine months before Rosa Parks's refusal in Montgomery sparked a bus boycott. "He asked us both to get up. On March 2, 1955, Colvin was riding home on a city bus after school when a bus driver told her to give up her seat to a white passenger. Growing up in one of Montgomery's poorer neighborhoods, Colvin studied hard in school. Claudette Colvin in 2009. "I was scared and it was really, really frightening, it was like those Western movies where they put the bandit in the jail cell and you could hear the keys. Four years later, they executed him. [21], She also said in the 2009 book Claudette Colvin: Twice Towards Justice, by Phillip Hoose, that one of the police officers sat in the back seat with her. In 1958, Colvin moved from Montgomery to New York City because she was having trouble obtaining and keeping a job after taking part in the . The action you just performed triggered the security solution. She turns, watches, wipes, feeds and washes the elderly patients and offers them a gentle, consoling word when they become disoriented. Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. Site contains certain content that is owned A&E Television Networks, LLC. It was going to be a long night on Dixie Drive. "Middle-class blacks looked down on King Hill," says Colvin today. That's what they usually did.". "When ED Nixon and the Women's Political Council of Montgomery recognised that you could be that hero, you met the challenge and changed our lives forever. NPR's Margot Adler has said that black organizations believed that Rosa Parks would be a better figure for a test case for integration because she was an adult, had a job, and had a middle-class appearance. Like Colvin, Parks was commuting home and was seated in the "coloured section" of the bus. In 1960, she gave birth to her second son, Randy. '", The atmosphere on the bus became very tense. Claudette Colvin (born September 5, 1939) is a retired American nurse aide who was a pioneer of the 1950s civil rights movement. Months before Rosa Parks became the mother of the modern civil rights movement by refusing to move to the back of a segregated Alabama bus, Black teenager Claudette Colvin did the same. For months, Montgomerys NAACP chapter had been looking for a court case to test the constitutionality of the bus laws. "[4][5] Colvin's case was dropped by civil rights campaigners because Colvin was unmarried and pregnant during the proceedings. Like Parks, she, too, pleaded not guilty to. She relied on the city's buses to get to and from school because her family did not own a car. Or purchase a subscription for unlimited access to real news you can count on. One month later, the Supreme Court affirmed the order to Montgomery and the state of Alabama to end bus segregation. The story of Colvins courage might have been forgotten forever had not Frank Sikora, a Birmingham newspaper reporter assigned in 1975 to write a retrospective of the bus boycott, remembered that there had been a girl arrested before Parks. "They'd call her a bad girl, and her case wouldn't have a chance. Why has Claudette Colvin been denied her place in history? Colvin later moved to New York City and worked as a nurse's aide. By the time she got home, her parents already knew. Now 76 and retired, Colvin deserves her place in history. She prayed furiously as they sped out, with the cop leering over her, guessing at her bra size. I say it felt as though Harriet Tubman's hands were pushing me down on one shoulder and Sojourner Truth's hands were pushing me down on the other shoulder. [16][19], When Colvin refused to get up, she was thinking about a school paper she had written that day about the local customs that prohibited blacks from using the dressing rooms in order to try on clothes in department stores. At the time, black leaders, including the Rev. For all her bravado, Colvin was shocked by the extremity of what happened next. "I wasn't with it at all. [24], Colvin's moment of activism was not solitary or random. Colvin was the first person to be arrested for challenging Montgomery's bus segregation policies, so her story made a few local papers - but nine months later, the same act of defiance by Rosa Parks was reported all over the world. The bus driver had the authority to assign the seats, so when more white passengers got on the bus, he asked for the seats.". 05 September 1939 - Court trial. Colvin says Parks had the right image to become the face of resistance to segregation because of her previous work with the NAACP. ", When the boycott was over and the African-American community had emerged victorious, King, Nixon and Parks appeared for the cameras. "[citation needed], The police officers who took her to the station made sexual comments about her body and took turns guessing her bra size throughout the ride. Letters of support came from as far afield as Oregon and California. Civil Rights Leader #7. The policeman grabbed her and took her to a patrolman's car in which his colleagues were waiting. I think that history only has room enough for certainyou know, how many icons can you choose? She concentrated her mind on things she had been learning at school. "However, the black leadership in Montgomery at the time thought that we should wait. But it is also a rare and excellent one that gives her more than a passing, dismissive mention. "We just sat there and waited for it all to happen," says Gloria Hardin, who was on the bus, too. The boycott was very effective but the city still resisted complying with protesters' demands - an end to the policy preventing the hiring of black bus drivers and the introduction of first-come first-seated rule. [15], In 1955, Colvin was a student at the segregated Booker T. Washington High School in the city. And, from there, the short distance to sanctity: they called her "Saint Rosa", "an angel walking", "a heaven-sent messenger". But the very spirit and independence of mind that had inspired Parks to challenge segregation started to pose a threat to Montgomery's black male hierarchy, which had started to believe, and then resent, their own spin. As more white passengers got on, the driver asked black people to give up their seats. It was this dark, clever, angry young woman who boarded the Highland Avenue bus on Friday, March 2, 1955, opposite Martin Luther King's church on Dexter Avenue, Montgomery. He was born on March 3, 1931, in Mound City, S.D., the son of Alfred Gunderson and Verna Johnson Gunderson. ", 'Facts speak only when the historian calls on them," wrote the historian EH Carr in his landmark work, What Is History? "He wanted me to give up my seat for a white person and I would have done it for an elderly person but this was a young white woman. Colvin went to her job instead. "She had been yelling, 'It's my constitutional right!'. The baby was fair-skinned just like his dad and people accused her of having a white baby. Claudette Colvin gave birth to a son named Raymond in the same year 1955. Broken-down cars sit outside tumble-down houses. The legal case turned on the testimony of four plaintiffs, one of whom was Claudette Colvin. 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 is he who decides which facts to give the floor and in what order or context. . Claudette Colvin is a civil rights activist who, before .css-47aoac{-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-decoration-thickness:0.0625rem;text-decoration-color:inherit;text-underline-offset:0.25rem;color:#A00000;-webkit-transition:all 0.3s ease-in-out;transition:all 0.3s ease-in-out;}.css-47aoac:hover{color:#595959;text-decoration-color:border-link-body-hover;}Rosa Parks, refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. I was thinking, Hey, I did that months ago, Colvin recalled. Reverend Ralph Abernathy, who played a key role as King's right-hand man throughout the civil rights years, referred to her as a "tool" of the movement. She sat in the colored section about two seats away from an emergency exit, in a Capitol Heights bus. However, some white passengers still refused to sit near a black person. I had been kicked out of school, and I had a 3-month-old baby.. The NMAAHC has a section dedicated to Rosa Parks, which Colvin does not want taken away, but her family's goal is to get the historical record right, and for officials to include Colvin's part of history. The young Ms. Colvin was portrayed by actress Mariah Iman Wilson. The leaders in the Civil Rights Movement tried to keep up appearances and make the "most appealing" protesters the most seen. "He said he wanted the people to know about the 15-year-old, because really, if I had not made the first cry for freedom, there wouldn't have been a Rosa Parks, and after Rosa Parks, there wouldn't have been a Dr King. History had me glued to the seat.. Jeanetta Reese later resigned from the case. Colvin says that after Supreme Court made its decision, things slowly began to change. She works the night shift and sleeps "when the sleep falls on her" during the day. It was an exchange later credited with changing the racial landscape of America. "I make up stories to convince them to stay in bed." One white woman defended Colvin to the police; another said that, if she got away with this, "they will take over". CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST, 81, BIRMINGHAM, AL. In the south, male ministers made up the overwhelming majority of leaders. Sapphire was once thought to guard against evil and poisoning. ", "They never thought much of us, so there was no way they were going to run with us," says Hardin. asked one. Smith was arrested in October 1955, but was also not considered an appropriate candidate for a broader campaign - ED Nixon claimed that her father was a drunkard; Smith insists he was teetotal. But she rarely told her story after moving to New York City. A 15-year-old high school student at the time, Colvin got fed up and refused to move even before Parks. In 1955, nine months before Rosa Parks' famous act of defiance, Claudette Colvin, a Black high school student in Montgomery, Alabama, was arrested after refusing to give up her seat on a public . Colvins feisty testimony was instrumental in the shocking success of the suit, which ended segregated seating on Montgomerys buses. Two policemen boarded the bus and asked Colvin why she wouldn't give up her seat. ", If that were not enough, the son, Raymond, to whom she would give birth in December, emerged light-skinned: "He came out looking kind of yellow, and then I was ostracised because I wouldn't say who the father was and they thought it was a white man. [39], 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 four plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, including Colvin[40][41][42], In 2021 Colvin applied to the family court in Montgomery County, Alabama to have her juvenile record expunged. "Oh God," wailed one black woman at the back. "She lived in a little shack. Betty Shabbaz, the widow of Malcolm X, was one of them. [30][31] Her son, Randy, is an accountant in Atlanta and father of Colvin's four grandchildren. (Julie Jacobson/Associated Press). She has literally become a footnote in history. He was so light-skinned (like his father) that people frequently said she had a baby by a white man. Telephones rang. I was afraid they might rape me. She resisted bus segregation nine months before Rosa Parks, . Complexity, with all its nuances and shaded realities, is a messy business. The policeman arrived, displaying two of the characteristics for which white Southern men had become renowned: gentility and racism. Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth were both African Americans who sought the abolition of slavery, Tubman was well known for helping 300 fellow slaves escape slavery using the, Truth was a passionate campaigner who fought for women's rights, best known for her speech, Claudette Colvin spoke to Outlook on the BBC World Service. [2] She was also a member of the NAACP Youth Council, where she formed a close relationship with her mentor, Rosa Parks. "So did the teachers, too. She herself didn't talk about it much, but she spoke recently to the BBC. New York, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, This page was last edited on 1 March 2023, at 23:25. This much we know. "She was a bookworm," says Gloria Hardin, who went to school with Colvin and who still lives in King Hill. .css-m6thd4{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;display:block;margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;font-family:Gilroy,Helvetica,Arial,Sans-serif;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.2;font-weight:bold;color:#323232;text-transform:capitalize;}@media (any-hover: hover){.css-m6thd4:hover{color:link-hover;}}How the Greensboro Four Began the Sit-In Movement, Biography: You Need to Know: Bayard Rustin, Biography: You Need to Know: Sylvia Rivera, Biography: You Need to Know: Dorothy Pittman Hughes, 10 Influential Asian American and Pacific Islander Activists. Eclipsed by Parks, her act of defiance was largely ignored for many years. [28] Colvin stated she was branded a troublemaker by many in her community. "New York is a completely different culture to Montgomery, Alabama. She gave birth to a fair-skin child named Raymond in the year 1956 whose skin tone was similar to her partner. "He asked us both to get up. It is a rare, and poor, civil rights book that covers the Montgomery bus boycott and does not mention Claudette Colvin. [27] During the court case, Colvin described her arrest: "I kept saying, 'He has no civil right this is my constitutional right you have no right to do this.' Yet months before her arrest on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, a 15-year-old girl was charged with the same 'crime'. I felt inspired by these women because my teacher taught us about them in so much detail," she says. [23] She was bailed out by her minister, who told her that she had brought the revolution to Montgomery. Officers were called to the scene and Colvin was forcefully taken off of the bus and . [16] Referring to the segregation on the bus and the white woman: "She couldn't sit in the same row as us because that would mean we were as good as her". 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. If she had not done what she did, I am not sure that we would have been able to mount the support for Mrs. We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites. "I was really afraid, because you just didn't know what white people might do at that time," Colvin later said. She says she expected some abuse from the driver, but nothing more. "So I told him I was not going to get up, either. She retired in 2004. Until recently, none of her workmates knew anything of her pioneering role in the civil rights movement. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People briefly considered using Colvin's case to challenge the segregation laws, but they decided against it because of her age. The once-quiet student was branded a troublemaker by some, and she had to drop out of college. "I didn't know if they were crazy, if they were going to take me to a Klan meeting. Colvin was not invited officially for the formal dedication of the museum, which opened to the public in September 2016. They never came and discussed it with my parents. 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. Rosa Parks was thrown off the bus on a Thursday; by Friday, activists were distributing leaflets that highlighted her arrest as one of many, including those of Colvin and Mary Louise Smith: "Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown in jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down," they read. I can still vividly hear the click of those keys. [16], Through the trial Colvin was represented by Fred Gray, a lawyer for the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), which was organizing civil rights actions. Much of the writing on civil rights history in Montgomery has focused on the arrest of Parks, another woman who refused to give up her seat on the bus, nine months after Colvin. "There was no assault", Price said. The other three moved, but another black woman, Ruth Hamilton, who was pregnant, got on and sat next to Colvin. Colvin felt compelled to stand her ground. "I never swore when I was young," she says. Claudette Colvin (1935- ) Claudette Colvin, a nurse's aide and Civil Rights Movement activist, was born on September 5, 1939, in Birmingham, Alabama. She was born on September 5, 1939. 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." Then, they will reflect on a time when they took a stand on an important issue. Colvin. Either way, he had violated the South's deeply ingrained taboo on interracial sex - Alabama only voted to legalise interracial marriage last month (the state held a referendum at the same time as the ballot for the US presidency), and then only by a 60-40 majority. The lighter you were, it was generally thought, the better; the closer your skin tone was to caramel, the closer you were perceived to be to whatever power structure prevailed, and the more likely you were to attract suspicion from those of a darker hue. Despite her personal challenges, Colvin became one of the four plaintiffs in the Browder v. Gayle case, along with Aurelia S. Browder, Susie McDonald and Mary Louise Smith (Jeanatta Reese, who was initially named a plaintiff in the case, withdrew early on due to outside pressure). However, her story is often silenced. ", Rosa Parks is a heroine to the US civil rights movement. But she rarely told her story after moving to New York City. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. At 82, her arrest is expunged", "Claudette Colvin's juvenile record has been expunged, 66 years after she was arrested for refusing to give her bus seat to a White person", "John McCutcheon sings Rita Dove's 'Claudette Colvin', Drunk History' Montgomery, AL (TV Episode 2014), "The Newsroom - Will McAvoy On Historical Hypotheticals", "Report: Biopic about civil rights pioneer Claudette Colvin in the works", The Other Rosa Parks (Colvin interview with, Vanessa de la Torre, "In The Shadow of Rosa Parks: 'Unsung Hero' of Civil Rights Movement Speaks Out", "An asterisk, not a star, of black history", Let us Look at Jim Crow for the Criminal he is - Rosa Parks' bus stand and the long history of bus resistance, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Claudette_Colvin&oldid=1142354716. They forced her into the back of a squad car, one officer jumping in after her. It is the historian who has decided for his own reasons that Caesar's crossing of that petty stream, the Rubicon, is a fact of history, whereas the crossing of the Rubicon by millions of other people before or since interests nobody at all.". Taylor Branch. "But according to [the commissioner], she was the first person ever to enter a plea of not guilty to such a charge.". The organisation didn't want a teenager in the role, she says. Instead of being celebrated as Rosa Parks would be just nine months later, fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin found herself shunned by her . ", A personal tragedy for her was seen as a political liability by the town's civil rights leaders. On 2 March 1955, Colvin and her friends finished their classes and were let out of school early. "We learned about negro spirituals and recited poems but my social studies teachers went into more detail," she says. 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. She also had become pregnant and they thought an unwed mother would attract too much negative attention in a public legal battle. "I was more defiant and then they knocked my books out of my lap and one of them grabbed my arm. I didn't want to discuss it with them," she says. Two more kicks soon followed. ", To complicate matters, a pregnant black woman, Mrs Hamilton, got on and sat next to Colvin. On Thursday, December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old black seamstress, boarded a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, after a hard day's work, took a seat and headed for home. 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