- Claudette Colvin
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Claudette Colvin 
Claudette Colvin during a press conference on May 20, 2007Born September 5, 1939
Alabama, U.S.Residence The Bronx, New York City Occupation civil rights activist and nurse Claudette Colvin (born September 5, 1939) is a pioneer of the African-American civil rights movement. She was the first person to resist bus segregation in Montgomery, Alabama, preceding the better known Rosa Parks incident by nine months. The court case stemming from her refusal to give up her seat on the bus, decided by the U.S. District Court, ended bus segregation in Alabama.
Montgomery's black leaders did not publicize Colvin's pioneering effort for long because she was a teenager and became pregnant while unmarried. The NAACP leaders worried about using her to represent their movement, given the social norms of the time.[1][2]
Contents
Biography
Colvin lived in Montgomery, Alabama.[3] In 1955, at the age of 15, she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white person, in violation of local law.[1] Her arrest preceded that of Rosa Parks by nine months.
Bus incident
In 1955 Colvin was a student at Booker T. Washington High School in Montgomery.[4] She was returning from school on March 2, 1955 when she got on a Capital Heights bus downtown (at the same place Parks boarded another bus nine months later). Colvin's family owned a car, but she relied on the city's buses to get to school.[citation needed]
She sat in the section where, if a white person was standing, the blacks would have to get up and move to the back. When a white woman got on the bus and was standing, the bus driver, Robert W. Cleere, ordered Colvin and two other black passengers to get up and change seats. When Colvin refused, she was removed from the bus and arrested by two police officers.[5]
When she refused to get up, she was still thinking about a school paper that she had written that day. It was about the prohibition against blacks' trying on clothing in department stores. They were prohibited from using the dressing rooms.[6]
"The bus was getting crowded and I remember the bus driver looking through the rear view mirror asking her to get up out of her seat, which she didn't," said a classmate at the time, Annie Larkins Price. "She had been yelling it's my constitutional right. She decided on that day that she wasn't going to move."[7] Colvin was handcuffed, arrested and forcibly removed from the bus. She shouted that her constitutional rights were being violated.[5] "Price testified on Colvin's behalf in the juvenile court case, where Colvin was convicted of violating the segregation law and assault."[7] "There was no assault," Price said.[7]
Court trial
On May 11, 1956, Colvin, along with three other women, testified in a Montgomery federal court hearing about her actions on the bus in a case called Browder v. Gayle. During the trial, Claudette 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."[6] "The case was fought all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court (which declared bus segregation unconstitutional in December 1956). Attorneys decided not to use Colvin in the lawsuit because they wanted to build a case that clearly challenged the legality of bus segregation. Colvin had been charged with disorderly conduct."[8]
Personal life
In 1956, Colvin gave birth to a son, Raymond, who was so light-skinned (like his father) that people frequently accused her of having had a white baby. Colvin "left Montgomery for New York in 1958[9] because she had difficulty finding and keeping work after her arrest, just as Parks had left for Detroit in 1957."[8] She "retired in 2004 after 35 years as a nurse’s aide at a Manhattan nursing home."[1] Colvin never married.[1] "The son she had in Montgomery died at age 37; a second son is an accountant in Atlanta."[1] In New York Claudette moved in with her sister Velma Colvin.
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, [she said]. I do feel like what I did was a spark and it caught on."[10] "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."[8]
In popular culture
- The former U.S. poet laureate Rita Dove published a poem, "Claudette Colvin Goes to Work", in her 1999 poetry collection On the Bus with Rosa Parks (W.W. Norton). Rita Dove also referred to Claudette Colvin in her magazine article "The Torchbearer Rosa Parks" [11]
- The folk singer John McCutcheon set it to music, sang and recorded it, with Rita Dove speaking one line, on his CD Mightier than the Sword (2006).
- The storyteller-actress Awele Makeba wrote, directed and starred in a one-woman drama, Rage Is Not A 1-Day Thing!, in which Makeba relates the story of the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott through the eyes of Colvin following her arrest.[12]
- Phillip Hoose won the 2009 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature for his biography, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice.[1]
See also
- Montgomery Bus Boycott
- Mary Louise Smith
- Irene Morgan
- Rosa Parks
- Martin Luther King Jr.
References
- ^ a b c d e f Brookes Barnes (November 25, 2009). "From Footnote to Fame in Civil Rights History". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/26/books/26colvin.html?_r=1&hp. Retrieved 2009-11-26. "But there was another woman, named Claudette Colvin, who refused to be treated like a substandard citizen on one of those Montgomery buses—and she did it nine months before Mrs. Parks. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made his political debut fighting her arrest. Moreover, she was the star witness in the legal case that eventually forced bus desegregation."
- ^ "Her circumstances would make her an extremely vulnerable standard-bearer" ISBN 0671687425 p. 123
- ^ http://www.montgomeryboycott.com/bio_colvin.htm
- ^ "Claudette Colvin: an unsung hero in the Montgomery Bus Boycott". JET (FindArticles). 2005-02-28. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1355/is_9_107/ai_n11834082/. Retrieved 2009-11-27.
- ^ a b Gray, Eliza (2009-03-02). "A Forgotten Contribution: Before Rosa Parks, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat on the bus". Newsweek. http://www.newsweek.com/id/187325/?gt1=43002. Retrieved 2009-11-26. "On March 2, 1955, nine months before Parks famously refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., a skinny, 15-year-old schoolgirl was yanked by both wrists and dragged off a very similar bus."[dead link]
- ^ a b Brinkley, Douglas (2000). Rosa Parks. Viking. ISBN 9780670891603.
- ^ a b c Dawkins, Amanda (2005-02-07). "'Unsung hero' of boycott paved way for Parks.". The Huntsville Times. p. 6B.
- ^ a b c Spratling, Cassandra (2005-11-16). "2 other bus boycott heroes praise Parks' acclaim". Chicago Tribune. p. 2.
- ^ Younge, Gary (2000-12-16). "She would not be moved: Rosa Parks is a heroine to the US civil rights movement. Yet months before her arrest on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, a 15-year-old girl was charged with the same 'crime'. Why has Claudette Colvin been denied her place in history?". The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2000/dec/16/weekend7.weekend12.
- ^ Kitchen, Sebastian (2005-02-04). "Colvin helped light flame of civil rights.". Montgomery Advertiser. p. 1.
- ^ TIME, June 14, 1999
- ^ "Storyteller presents tale of Montgomery Bus Boycott". GVNow (Grand Valley State University). 2003-01-28. http://www.gvsu.edu/gvnow/index.htm?articleId=B74F96BD-EB96-FE41-A3DB59A8BCB75068&archiveDate=01-Feb-09. Retrieved 2009-11-27.
Further reading
- Phillip Hoose. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR), Claudette Colvin, Twice Toward Justice. (2009). ISBN 0374313229.
- Taylor Branch. New York, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, Parting The Waters - American in the King Years 1954-63. (1988). ISBN 0671687425.
External links
- She Had A Dream
- Daybreak of Freedom: The Montgomery Bus Boycott (Preface)
- Daybreak of Freedom: The Montgomery Bus Boycott (Excerpt)
- BROWDER v. GAYLE: The Women Before Rosa Parks. Tolerance.org
- "In The Shadow of Rosa Parks: 'Unsung Hero' Of Civil Rights Movement Speaks Out" by Vanessa de la Torre, The Cardinal Inquirer, January 20, 2005
- She Would Not Be Moved (Article) Guardian.
- An asterisk, not a star, of black history. Pulsejournal.com
Categories:- African Americans' rights activists
- American child activists
- Youth activists
- People from Montgomery, Alabama
- 1939 births
- Living people
- African American history of Alabama
- 20th-century African-American activists
- African American female activists
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