"He asked us both to get up. She turns, watches, wipes, feeds and washes the elderly patients and offers them a gentle, consoling word when they become disoriented. Most Americans, even in Montgomery, have never heard of her. Parks became one of Time Magazine's 100 most important people of the 20th century . She was fingerprinted, denied a phone call and locked into a cell. [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". The majority of customers on the bus system were African American, but they were discriminated against by its custom of segregated seating. But what I do remember is when they asked me to stick my arms out the window and that's when they handcuffed me," Colvin says. Nine months before Parks's arrest, a 15-year-old girl, Claudette Colvin, was thrown off a bus in the same town and in almost identical circumstances. Parkss protest helped spark the Montgomery bus boycott, which black leaders sought to supplement with a federal civil suit challenging the constitutionality of Montgomerys bus laws. Some people questioned if the father was a white male. It is this that incenses Patton. 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. "It is the second time since the Claudette Colvin case that a Negro woman has been arrested for the same thing.". She spent the next decade going back and forth like a yo-yo between the two cities, she said. This made her very scared that they would sexually assault her because this happened frequently. This occurred nine months before the 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.[3]. "I was really afraid, because you just didn't know what white people might do at that time," says Colvin. As civil rights attorney Fred Gray put it, Claudette gave all of us moral courage. A 15-year-old high school student at the time, Colvin got fed up and refused to move even before Parks. So he turned on the black men sitting behind her. The court, however, ruled against her and put her on probation. "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. She was forcibly removed from the bus and arrested by the two policemen, Thomas J. The court declared her a ward of the state and remanded her to the custody of her family. We used to have a lot of juke joints up there, and maybe men would drink too much and get into a fight. It was believed that a venomous snake would die if placed in a vessel made of sapphire. Nixon referred to her as a "lovely, stupid woman"; ministers would greet her at church functions, with irony, "Well, if it isn't the superstar." ", They took her to City Hall, where she was charged with misconduct, resisting arrest and violating the city segregation laws. "Oh God," wailed one black woman at the back. She prayed furiously as they sped out, with the cop leering over her, guessing at her bra size. "I wasn't with it at all. Colvin's son Raymond died in 1993. In 1956, Colvin gave birth to a son, Raymond. Others say it is because she was a foul-mouthed tearaway. In this respect, the civil rights movement in Montgomery moved fast. [15], In 1955, Colvin was a student at the segregated Booker T. Washington High School in the city. Fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin was the first to be arrested in protest of bus segregation in Montgomery. "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. Claudette Colvin is an activist who was a pioneer in the civil rights movement in Alabama during the 1950s. [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. Taylor Branch. Name: Claudette Colvin Birth Year: 1939 Birth date: September 5, 1939 Birth State: Alabama Birth City: Montgomery Birth Country: United States Gender: Female Best Known For: Claudette Colvin is. After her minister paid her bail, she went home where she and her family stayed up all night out of concern for possible retaliation. "Ms Parks was quiet and very gentle and very soft-spoken, but she would always say we should fight for our freedom.". 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." [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. You had to take a brown paper bag and draw a diagram of your foot and take it to the store". Raymond Colvin died in 1993 in New York of a heart attack at age 37. Nor was Colvin the last to be passed over. "I was really afraid, because you just didn't know what white people might do at that time," Colvin later said. Or purchase a subscription for unlimited access to real news you can count on. The discussions in the black community began to focus on black enterprise rather than integration, although national civil rights legislation did not pass until 1964 and 1965. "I wasn't frightened but disappointed and angry because I knew I was sitting in the right seat.". Parks's arrest sparked a chain reaction that started the bus boycott that launched the civil rights movement that transformed the apartheid of America's southern states from a local idiosyncrasy to an international scandal. She has literally become a footnote in history. ", Nonetheless, the shock waves of her defiance had reverberated throughout Montgomery and beyond. [16], Through the trial Colvin was represented by Fred Gray, a lawyer for the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), which was organizing civil rights actions. Similarly, Rosa Parks left Montgomery for Detroit in 1957. "However, the black leadership in Montgomery at the time thought that we should wait. 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 was not your tired feet, but your strength of character and resolve that inspired us." 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. After her refusal to give up her seat, Colvin was arrested on several charges, including violating the city's segregation laws. "[35], I dont think theres room for many more icons. Let the people know Rosa Parks was the right person for the boycott. "They did think I was nutty and crazy.". "She ain't got to do nothing but stay black and die," retorted a black passenger. "I never swore when I was young," she says. 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. "I recited Edgar Allan Poe, Annabel Lee, the characters in Midsummer Night's Dream, the Lord's Prayer and the 23rd Psalm." When the trial was held, Colvin pleaded innocent but was found guilty and released on indefinite probation in her parents' care. [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". "The news travelled fast," wrote Robinson. [4], "The bus was getting crowded, and I remember the bus driver looking through the rearview mirror asking her [Colvin] to get up for the white woman, which she didn't," said Annie Larkins Price, a classmate of Colvin. She now works as a nurses' aide at an old people's home in downtown Manhattan. The record of her arrest and adjudication of delinquency was expunged by the district court in 2021, with the support of the district attorney for the county in which the charges were brought more than 66 years before. Black people were allowed to occupy those seats so long as white people didn't need them. ", 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. Blake persisted. Ms. Colvin in New York on Feb. 5, 2009. Click to reveal "She had been yelling, 'It's my constitutional right!'. By the time she got home, her parents already knew. [11][12], Two days before Colvin's 13th birthday, Delphine died of polio. She told me to let Rosa be the one: white people aren't going to bother Rosa, they like her". Her voice is soft and high, almost shrill. ", "I wanted to go north and liberate my people," explains Colvin. [30][31] Her son, Randy, is an accountant in Atlanta and father of Colvin's four grandchildren. Best Known For: Claudette Colvin is an activist who was a pioneer in the civil rights movement in Alabama during the 1950s. Colvin gave birth to Raymond, a son. "We had unpaved streets and outside toilets. "Middle-class blacks looked down on King Hill," says Colvin today. Eclipsed by Parks, her act of defiance was largely ignored for many years. In his Pulitzer prize-winning account of the civil rights years, Parting The Waters, Taylor Branch wrote: "Even if Montgomery Negroes were willing to rally behind an unwed, pregnant teenager - which they were not - her circumstances would make her an extremely vulnerable standard bearer. 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. "They'd call her a bad girl, and her case wouldn't have a chance. By then I didnt have much time for celebrating anyway. Born in Alabama #33. [2] Price testified for Colvin, who was tried in juvenile court. Her rhythm is simple and lifestyle frugal. He was born on March 3, 1931, in Mound City, S.D., the son of Alfred Gunderson and Verna Johnson Gunderson. She needed support. [48], 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. "When I told my mother I was pregnant, I thought she was going to have a heart attack. Moreover, she was not the first person to take a stand by keeping her seat and challenging the system. You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked. Claudette Colvin in 2009. In the south, male ministers made up the overwhelming . But somewhere en route they mislaid the truth. [39] Later, Rev. ", 'Facts speak only when the historian calls on them," wrote the historian EH Carr in his landmark work, What Is History? [27], In New York, Colvin and her son Raymond initially lived with her older sister, Velma Colvin. But people in King Hill do not remember Colvin as that type of girl, and the accusation irritates Colvin to this day. "She had remained calm all during the days of her waiting period and during the trial," wrote Robinson. A sanitation worker, Mr Harris, got up, gave her his seat and got off the bus. Anything to detach herself from the horror of reality. She earned mostly As in her classes and aspired to become president one day. Colvin has remained unmarried all her life. .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. State and local officials appealed the case to the United States Supreme Court. [2] Colvin and her sister referred to the Colvins as their parents and took their last name. The driver looked at the women in his mirror. As an adult, she worked as a nurse's assistant in New . Then, they will reflect on a time when they took a stand on an important issue. 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. "She gave me the feeling that I was the Moses that God had sent to Pharaoh," said Fred Gray, the lawyer who went on to represent her. "[28], On May 20, 2018, Congressman Joe Crowley honored Colvin for her lifetime commitment to public service with a Congressional Certificate and an American flag. "I felt like Sojourner Truth was pushing down on one shoulder and Harriet Tubman was pushing down on the othersaying, 'Sit down girl!' [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. Yet months before her arrest on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, a 15-year-old girl was charged with the same 'crime'. [24] She was convicted on all three charges in juvenile court. [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. She was detained on March 2, 1955, in . She and her son Raymond moved in with Velma while Colvin looked for work. She says she expected some abuse from the driver, but nothing more. I was crying," she says. The once-quiet student was branded a troublemaker by some, and she had to drop out of college. In March 1955, nine months before Rosa Parks defied segregation laws by refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin did exactly the same thing. This led to a few articles and profiles by others in subsequent years. "So I told him I was not going to get up, either. Two years later, Colvin moved to New York City, where she had her second son, Randy, and worked as a nurse's aide at a Manhattan nursing home. In high school, she had high ambitions of political activity. "In a few hours, every Negro youngster on the streets discussed Colvin's arrest. "[20], Browder v. Gayle made its way through the courts. Instead of being taken to a juvenile detention centre, Colvin was taken to an adult jail and put in a small cell with nothing in it but a broken sink and a cot without a mattress. For many years, Montgomery's black leaders did not publicize Colvin's pioneering effort. But, as she recalls her teenage years after the arrest and the pregnancy, she hovers between resentment, sadness and bewilderment at the way she was treated. 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. I paid my fare, it's my constitutional right." A poor, single, pregnant, black, teenage mother who had both taken on the white establishment and fallen foul of the black one. BBC World Service. [16] On March 2, 1955, she was returning home from school. Officers were called to the scene and Colvin was forcefully taken off of the bus and . I started protecting my crotch. March 2 was named Claudette Colvin Day in Montgomery. I didn't get up, because I didn't feel like I was breaking the law. Colvin was a kid. So he said, 'If you are not going to get up, I will get a policeman.'" Today, she sits in a diner in the Bronx, her pudding-basin haircut framing a soft face with a distant smile. Broken-down cars sit outside tumble-down houses. She worked there for 35 years until her . Almost nine months after Colvins bus protest, she heard news reports that Parks, a 42-year-old seamstress, had likewise been arrested for a bus seating protest. She sat down in the front of the bus and refused to move on her own will when asked. All Rights Reserved. The woman alleged rape; Reeves insisted it was consensual. She also had become pregnant and they thought an unwed mother would attract too much negative attention in a public legal battle. "We walked downtown and my friends and I saw the bus and decided to get on, it was right across the road from Dr Martin Luther King's church," Colvin says. Joseph Rembert said, "If nobody did anything for Claudette Colvin in the past why don't we do something for her right now?" I was glued to my seat. Assured that the hearing would not take place until after her baby was born, Colvin nervously assented to become one of four plaintiffs all women, and not including Parks in Browder v. Gayle. "I respect my elders, but I don't respect what they did to Colvin," she says. We may earn commission from links on this page, but we only recommend products we back. Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page. Keep supporting great journalism by turning off your ad blocker. I probably would've examined a dozen more before I got there if Rosa Parks hadn't come along before I found the right one. After her arrest and release to the custody of her pastor and great-aunt, the bright, opinionated Colvin insisted to everyone within earshot that she wanted to contest the charges. The other three moved, but another black woman, Ruth Hamilton, who was pregnant, got on and sat next to Colvin. Colvin later moved to New York City and worked as a nurse's aide. The churches, buses and schools were all segregated and you couldn't even go into the same restaurants," Claudette Colvin says. One incident in particular preoccupied her at the time - the plight of her schoolmate, Jeremiah Reeves. But Colvin told the driver she had paid her fare and that it was her constitutional right to remain where she was. ", To complicate matters, a pregnant black woman, Mrs Hamilton, got on and sat next to Colvin. Until recently, none of her workmates knew anything of her pioneering role in the civil rights movement. The full enormity of what she had done was only just beginning to dawn on her. Like Colvin, Parks was commuting home and was seated in the "coloured section" of the bus. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. [20] In a later interview, she said: "We couldn't try on clothes. It is a letter Colvin knew nothing about. Members of the community acted as lookouts, while Colvin's father sat up all night with a shotgun, in case the Ku Klux Klan turned up. '", 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. asked one. [44], Former US Poet Laureate Rita Dove memorialized Colvin in her poem "Claudette Colvin Goes To Work",[45] 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. In 1955, at age 15, Claudette Colvin . ", "If the white press got ahold of that information, they would have [had] a field day," said Rosa Parks. "If it had been for an old lady, I would have got up, but it wasn't. When Colvin moved to New York many years later to become a nurse, she didn't tell many people about the part she played in the civil rights movement. "She was not the first person to be arrested for violation of the bus seating ordinance," said J Mills Thornton, an author and academic. 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