If she had not done what she did, I am not sure that we would have been able to mount the support for Mrs. In this lesson, students will learn about Claudette Colvin, a 15-year-old who stood up for equal rights in 1955. Sapphire was once thought to guard against evil and poisoning. She told me to let Rosa be the one: white people aren't going to bother Rosa, they like her". 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. 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. Colvin felt compelled to stand her ground. [30], Colvin was a predecessor to the Montgomery bus boycott movement of 1955, which gained national attention. Associated With. [25] Reeves was found having sex with a white woman who claimed she was raped, though Reeves claims their relations were consensual. For Colvin, the entire episode was traumatic: "Nowadays, you'd call it statutory rape, but back then it was just the kind of thing that happened," she says, describing the conditions under which she conceived. [34], Colvin has often said she is not angry that she did not get more recognition; rather, she is disappointed. The full enormity of what she had done was only just beginning to dawn on her. Check below for more deets about Claudette Colvin. 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. "If it had been for an old lady, I would have got up, but it wasn't. So we choose the facts to fit the narrative we want to hear. Raymond Colvin died in 1993 in New York of a heart attack, aged 37. 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. And I just kept blabbing things out, and I never stopped. The court, however, ruled against her and put her on probation. If the bus became so crowded that all the "white seats" in the front of the bus were filled until white people were standing, any African Americans were supposed to get up from nearby seats to make room for whites, move further to the back, and stand in the aisle if there were no free seats in that section. To sustain the boycott, communities organised carpools and the Montgomery's African-American taxi drivers charged only 10 cents - the same price as bus fare - for fellow African Americans. People often make death hoaxes of well-known personalities to get public attention and views. They had threatened to throw her out of the Booker T Washington school for wearing her hair in plaits. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. While her role in the fight to end segregation in Montgomery may not be widely recognized, Colvin helped advance civil rights efforts in the city. [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. Black people were allowed to occupy those seats so long as white people didn't need them. "I was more defiant and then they knocked my books out of my lap and one of them grabbed my arm. 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. [46], Young adult book Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice, by Phillip Hoose, was published in 2009 and won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature. She dreamed of becoming the President of the United States. However, not one has bothered to interview her. "I make up stories to convince them to stay in bed." She was played by Mariah Iman Wilson. She appreciated, but never embraced, King's strategy of nonviolent resistance, remains a keen supporter of Malcolm X and was constantly frustrated by sexism in the movement. In this respect, the civil rights movement in Montgomery moved fast. [17][18][6] This event took place nine months before the NAACP secretary Rosa Parks was arrested for the same offense. [37], "All we want is the truth, why does history fail to get it right?" She prayed furiously as they sped out, with the cop leering over her, guessing at her bra size. Clubs called special meetings and discussed the event with some degree of alarm. [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. She spent the next decade going back and forth like a yo-yo between the two cities, she said. It was a case of 'bourgey' blacks looking down on the working-class blacks. "I do feel like what I did was a spark and it caught on. 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. After her minister paid her bail, she went home where she and her family stayed up all night out of concern for possible retaliation. Biography and associated logos are trademarks of A+E Networksprotected in the US and other countries around the globe. Rembert said, "I know people have heard her name before, but I just thought we should have a day to celebrate her." Gary Younge investigates, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning. Two years earlier, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, African-Americans launched an effective bus boycott after drivers refused to honour an integrated seating policy, which was settled in an unsatisfactory fudge. Claudette Colvin, Who Was Arrested for Refusing to Give Up Her Bus Seat in 1955, Is Fighting to Clear Her Record The civil rights pioneer pushed back against segregation nine months before Rosa. "I told Mrs Parks, as I had told other leaders in Montgomery, that I thought the Claudette Colvin arrest was a good test case to end segregation on the buses," says Fred Gray, Parks's lawyer. After Colvin was released from prison, there were fears that her home would be attacked. Most of the people didn't have problems with us sitting on the bus, most New Yorkers cared about economic problems. "She lived in a little shack. 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. On the night of Parks' arrest, the Women's Political Council (WPC), a group of black women working for civil rights, began circulating flyers calling for a boycott of the bus system. [2] Colvin and her sister referred to the Colvins as their parents and took their last name. However, her story is often silenced. I was crying," she says. "[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. 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. My mother knew I was disappointed with the system and all the injustice we were receiving and she said to me: 'Well, Claudette, you finally did it.'". Claudette Colvin, a civil rights pioneer who in March 1955, at the age of 15, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a White person on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus, is seeking to get her . He was so light-skinned (like his father) that people frequently said she had a baby by a white man. Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page. Three of the students had got up reluctantly and I remained sitting next to the window," she says. Claudette Colvin was the first person arrested by the police in Montgomery, AL for refusing to give up her bus seat. "I had almost a life history of being rebellious against being mistreated against my colour," she said. One incident in particular preoccupied her at the time - the plight of her schoolmate, Jeremiah Reeves. "The news travelled fast," wrote Robinson. The Supreme Court summarily affirmed the District Court decision on November 13, 1956. He was executed for his alleged crimes. Roy White, who was in charge of most of the project, asked Colvin if she would like to appear in a video to tell her story, but Colvin refused. Colvin gave birth to Raymond, a son. A group of black civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King, Jr., was organized to discuss Colvin's arrest with the police commissioner. While Parks has been heralded as a civil rights heroine, Colvin's story has received little notice. While this does not happen by conspiracy, it is often facilitated by collusion. She fell out of history altogether. I felt like Sojourner Truth was pushing down on one shoulder and Harriet Tubman was pushing down on the othersaying, 'Sit down girl!' But she rarely told her story after moving to New York City. This led to a few articles and profiles by others in subsequent years. Nor was Colvin the last to be passed over. Colvin went to her job instead. I was glad that an adult had finally stood up to the system, but I felt left out.. The Montgomery bus boycott was then called off after a few months. Her casting as the prim, ageing, guileless seamstress with her hair in a bun who just happened to be in the wrong place at the right time denied her track record of militancy and feminism. - Claudette Colvin On March 2, 1955, an impassioned teenager, fed up with the daily injustices of Jim Crow segregation, refused to give her seat to a white woman on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. In this small, elevated patch of town, black people sit out on wooden porches and watch an impoverished world go by. "There was no assault", Price said. All Rights Reserved. Cloudflare Ray ID: 7a1897c67fea0e3a She gave birth to a fair-skin child named Raymond in the year 1956 whose skin tone was similar to her partner. Sikora telephoned a startled Colvin and wrote an article about her. Why has Claudette Colvin been denied her place in history? But, unlike Parks, Colvin never made it into the civil rights hall of fame. She turns, watches, wipes, feeds and washes the elderly patients and offers them a gentle, consoling word when they become disoriented. 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. None of them spoke to me; they didn't see if I was okay. [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. 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. As more white passengers got on, the driver asked black people to give up their seats. The majority of customers on the bus system were African American, but they were discriminated against by its custom of segregated seating. But Colvin told the driver she had paid her fare and that it was her constitutional right to remain where she was. "Whenever people ask me: 'Why didn't you get up when the bus driver asked you?' Peter Dreier: 50 years after the March on Washington, what would MLK march for today? But there were two things about Colvin's stand on that March day that made it significant. 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