Who is Claudette Colvin?

There are many people who do not know who Claudette Colvin is or what she did to make her powerful mark on history. Before Mrs. Parks there was Ms. Colvin. She was young in age but she knew how to stand her ground.

On March 2, 1955 nine months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger there was a fifteen year old young girl who did the same. Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. She was dragged off a bus and thrown into the back seat of a police car and carried off to jail.

Claudette Colvin was born on September 5, 1939. When this incident transpired she was a student at Booker T. Washington High School in Montgomery. She was going home from school. Four white people boarded the bus and she and three others were asked to move to the back of the bus. Claudette refused.

This was a very sensitive issue to Claudette. She had wrote a paper in school that day on colored people not being able to try on clothes in the white department stores. She was only fifteen but she knew that this conduct violated her constitutional rights. This was what Claudette yelled as she was removed from the bus.

Activist became very interest in Colvins' case. They were looking for a case to challenge the segregation or the Jim Crow Laws in court. The community hired lawyers to defend her and continued to raise money for her defense. Martin Luther King Jr. and other black leaders spoke on her behalf but she was still convicted. During this time there was also talk of a bus boycott. The black community was aware they made up a large portion of the passengers and knew that a boycott would be their most strategic plan.

Colvin was a minor and some of the leaders was not sure if they could win the case with her. She was also from the poor side of town and some of the middle class lawyers thought it would be a gamble. Colvin became pregnant when she was allegedly rapped by an older married man. It was decided that Colvin would not be able to withstand the stress of cross-examination. The leaders decided that they would not have a chance of winning the case, so they decided not to invest anymore money or time into the case. Colvin was sentenced to probation and a boycott was not created from this event.

Colvin is a retired nursing home nurse residing in New York City. She is not bitter about the incident but want people to know the story behind the Civil Rights Movement.

Years later Colvin told the Montgomery Advertiser, that she would not have changed her decision to remain seated. "I feel proud of what I did. I do feel like what I did was a spark and it caught on... I'm not disappointed," she 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.