Claudette Colvin (born September 5, 1939) is a pioneer of the African American Civil Rights Movement.
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| In 1955, at age 15, she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on the bus | Public Domain |
On March 2, 1955, she was the first person arrested for resisting bus segregation in Montgomery, Alabama, preceding the more publicized Rosa Parks incident by nine months.
For a long time, Montgomery's black leaders did not publicize Colvin's pioneering effort because she was a teenager who was pregnant and unmarried. Given the social norms of the time and her youth, the NAACP leaders worried about using her to represent their boycott.
Early Life
Colvin was born September 5, 1939 and was adopted by C. P. Colvin and Mary Anne Colvin, and grew up in one of the poorer neighbourhoods of Montgomery, Alabama. In 1943, at four years old, she had received her first impression on the struggles of segregation. She was at a retail store with her mother when a couple of white boys entered. They asked her to touch hands and compare them. Her mother saw this, slapped her face, and said that she was not allowed to touch them.
Bus Incident
In 1955, Colvin was a student at the segregated Booker T. Washington High School in the city. She relied on the city's buses to get to and from school, because her parents did not own a car. She said that she aspired to be President one day. Colvin was a member of the NAACP Youth Council, and had been actively learning about the Civil Rights Movement in school. Colvin was returning home from school on March 2, 1955, and got on a Capital Heights bus downtown. She was sitting about two seats from the emergency exit in the coloured section.
If the bus became so crowded that all the so-called "white seats" in front were filled and a white person was standing, the African Americans were supposed to leave these seats and move to the back and stand, if needed. When a white woman got on the bus and was left standing, bus driver Robert W. Cleere commanded Colvin and three other black women in the row to move to the back. The other three moved, but a pregnant black woman, Ruth Hamilton, got on and sat next to Colvin.
"And so as the bus proceeded on downtown, more white people got on the bus," she says. "Eventually the bus got full capacity, and a young white lady was standing near the four of us. She was expecting me to get up."
The driver looked at them through his mirror. "He asked us both to get up. [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. "So I told him I was not going to get up, either. So he said, 'If you are not going to get up, I will get a policeman.'" The police arrived and convinced a black man sitting behind the two women to move so that Mrs. Hamilton could move back, but Colvin continued to refuse. She was forcibly removed from the bus and arrested by the two policemen, Thomas J. Ward and Paul Headley. This was eight months before NAACP Secretary Rosa Parks was famously arrested for the same offense.
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| credit: AZ Quotes |
When Colvin refused to get up, she was thinking about a school paper that she had written that day about the local custom that prevented blacks from using the dressing rooms and trying on clothing in department stores. She said in a later interview: "We couldn't try on clothes. You had to take a brown paper bag and draw a diagram of your foot ... and take it to the store.”
"The bus was getting crowded and I remember the bus driver looking through the rear view mirror asking her to get up for the white woman, which she didn't," said Annie Larkins Price, a classmate of Colvin's. "She had been yelling 'It's my constitutional right'. She decided on that day that she wasn't going to move." Colvin was handcuffed, arrested and forcibly removed from the bus. She shouted that her constitutional rights were being violated. Price testified for Colvin in the juvenile court case. Colvin was convicted of disturbing the peace, violating the segregation law, and assault
"…as a teenager, I kept thinking, Why don’t the adults around here just say something? Say it so that they know we don’t accept segregation? I knew then and I know now that, when it comes to justice, there is no easy way to get it. You can’t sugarcoat it. You have to take a stand and say, 'This is not right.' And I did."
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