Claudette Colvin is an activist who was a pioneer in the civil rights movement in Alabama during the 1950s. 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. 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. In a letter published shortly before Shabbaz's death, she wrote to Parks with both praise and perspective: "'Standing up' was not even being the first to protest that indignity. "When I told my mother I was pregnant, I thought she was going to have a heart attack. If she had not done what she did, I am not sure that we would have been able to mount the support for Mrs. "Nobody slept at home because we thought there would be some retaliation," says Colvin. [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. Colvin could not attend the proclamation due to health concerns. And, like the pregnant Mrs Hamilton, many African-Americans refused to tolerate the indignity of the South's racist laws in silence. As more white passengers got on, the driver asked black people to give up their seats. [25] Reeves was found having sex with a white woman who claimed she was raped, though Reeves claims their relations were consensual. Claudette Colvin (born September 5, 1939) is a retired American nurse aide who was a pioneer of the 1950s civil rights movement. New York, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, This page was last edited on 1 March 2023, at 23:25. 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. So he said, 'If you are not going to get up, I will get a policeman. Daryl Bailey, the District Attorney for the county, supported her motion, stating: "Her actions back in March of 1955 were conscientious, not criminal; inspired, not illegal; they should have led to praise and not prosecution". ", 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. She had sons named Raymond and Randy. "Whenever people ask me: 'Why didn't you get up when the bus driver asked you?' It was an exchange later credited with changing the racial landscape of America. Fifty years have passed since campaigners overturned a ban on ethnic minorities working on buses in one British city. She was born on September 5, 1939. Black people were allowed to occupy those seats so long as white people didn't need them. "Always studying and using long words.". "I was more defiant and then they knocked my books out of my lap and one of them grabbed my arm. ", Not so Colvin. In 1969, years after moving to NYC, she acquired a job working as a Nurse's aide at a Nursing home. Claudette Colvin's birth flower is Aster/Myosotis. The driver wanted all of them to move to the back and stand so that the white passenger could sit. 83 Year Old #3. When a white woman who got on the bus was left standing in the front, the bus driver, Robert W. Cleere, commanded Colvin and three other black women in her row to move to the back. Much of the writing on civil rights history in Montgomery has focused on the arrest of Parks, another woman who refused to give up her seat on the bus, nine months after Colvin. The law at the time designated seats for black passengers at the back and for whites at the front, but left the middle as a murky no man's land. Her voice is soft and high, almost shrill. In this small, elevated patch of town, black people sit out on wooden porches and watch an impoverished world go by. "It bothered some that there was an unruly, tomboy quality to Colvin, including a propensity for curse words and immature outbursts," writes Douglas Brinkly, who recently completed a biography of Parks. The policeman arrived, displaying two of the characteristics for which white Southern men had become renowned: gentility and racism. Despite the light sentence, Colvin could not escape the court of public opinion. The bus went three stops before several white passengers got on. Claudette Colvin gave birth to a son named Raymond in the same year 1955. 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 . "They lectured us about Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth and we were taught about an opera singer called Marian Anderson who wasn't allowed to sing at Constitutional Hall just because she was black, so she sang at Lincoln Memorial instead.". In 1956, Colvin gave birth to a son, Raymond. It was not your tired feet, but your strength of character and resolve that inspired us." She spent the next decade going back and forth like a yo-yo between the two cities, she said. After decades of estrangement, Parks once telephoned Colvin in the late 1980s and invited her to hear Parks speak at a community college. Another factor was that before long Colvin became pregnant. This led to a few articles and profiles by others in subsequent years. "She was an A student, quiet, well-mannered, neat, clean, intelligent, pretty, and deeply religious," writes Jo Ann Robinson in her authoritative book, The Montgomery Bus Boycott And The Women Who Started It. Claudette Colvin, 81, was a true pioneer in the Civil Rights Movement. Going to a segregated school had one advantage, she found - her teachers gave her a good grounding in black history. While this does not happen by conspiracy, it is often facilitated by collusion. 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]. Telephones rang. She resisted bus segregation nine months before Rosa Parks, . Until recently, none of her workmates knew anything of her pioneering role in the civil rights movement. A second son, Randy, born in 1960, gave her four grandchildren, who are all deeply proud of their grandmother's heroism. She has literally become a footnote in history. Others say it is because she was a foul-mouthed tearaway. "But according to [the commissioner], she was the first person ever to enter a plea of not guilty to such a charge.". Keep supporting great journalism by turning off your ad blocker. That summer she became pregnant by a much older man. [37], "All we want is the truth, why does history fail to get it right?" [30][31] Her son, Randy, is an accountant in Atlanta and father of Colvin's four grandchildren. The problem arose because all the seats on the bus were taken. The other three moved, but another black woman, Ruth Hamilton, who was pregnant, got on and sat next to Colvin. On June 13, 1956, the judges determined that the state and local laws requiring bus segregation in Alabama were unconstitutional. Parks was, too. Claudette Colvin became a teenage mother in 1956 when she gave birth to a boy named Raymond. "He said he wanted the people to know about the 15-year-old, because really, if I had not made the first cry for freedom, there wouldn't have been a Rosa Parks, and after Rosa Parks, there wouldn't have been a Dr King. "We learned about negro spirituals and recited poems but my social studies teachers went into more detail," she says. [2] She was also a member of the NAACP Youth Council, where she formed a close relationship with her mentor, Rosa Parks. Sapphire was once thought to guard against evil and poisoning. She herself didn't talk about it much, but she spoke recently to the BBC. 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. The woman alleged rape; Reeves insisted it was consensual. ", A personal tragedy for her was seen as a political liability by the town's civil rights leaders. "The NAACP had come back to me and my mother said: 'Claudette, they must really need you, because they rejected you because you had a child out of wedlock,'" Colvin says. Colvin was initially charged with disturbing the peace, violating the segregation laws, and battering and assaulting a police officer. A 15-year-old high school student at the time, Colvin got fed up and refused to move even before Parks. She prayed furiously as they sped out, with the cop leering over her, guessing at her bra size. [16], Through the trial Colvin was represented by Fred Gray, a lawyer for the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), which was organizing civil rights actions. First, it came less than a year after the US supreme court had outlawed the "separate but equal" policy that had provided the legal basis for racial segregation - what had been custom and practice in the South for generations was now against federal law and could be challenged in the courts. Colvin felt compelled to stand her ground. I paid my fare, it's my constitutional right." We may earn commission from links on this page, but we only recommend products we back. Tour: Black America and the burden of the perfect victim. People often make death hoaxes of well-known personalities to get public attention and views. Ms. Colvin in New York on Feb. 5, 2009. Like Parks, she, too, pleaded not guilty to. This much we know. "We didn't know what was going to happen, but we knew something would happen. The driver, James Blake, turned around and ordered the black passengers to go to the back of the bus, so that the whites could take their places. Colvin. They forced her into the back of a squad car, one officer jumping in after her. "I recited Edgar Allan Poe, Annabel Lee, the characters in Midsummer Night's Dream, the Lord's Prayer and the 23rd Psalm." BBC World Service. Today, she sits in a diner in the Bronx, her pudding-basin haircut framing a soft face with a distant smile. By the time she got home, her parents already knew. It is a letter Colvin knew nothing about. All I could do is cry. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. "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. [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. Those who are aware of these distortions in the civil rights story are few. I was afraid they might rape me. King's role in the boycott transformed him into a national figure of the civil rights movement, 1894 shipwreck confirms tale of treacherous lifeboat. "Had it not been for Claudette Colvin, Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, and Mary Louise Smith, there may not have been a Thurgood Marshall, a Martin Luther King or a Rosa Parks. "[38], Colvin's role has not gone completely unrecognized. 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. One month later, the Supreme Court declined to reconsider, and on December 20, 1956, the court ordered Montgomery and the state of Alabama to end bus segregation permanently. But go to King Hill and mention her name, and the first thing they will tell you is that she was the first. A poor, single, pregnant, black, teenage mother who had both taken on the white establishment and fallen foul of the black one. "Never. Claudette Colvin and her guardians relocated to Montgomery when . In the nine months between her arrest and that of Parks, another young black woman, Mary Louise Smith, suffered a similar fate. She relied on the city's buses to get to and from school because her family did not own a car. But Colvin told the driver she had paid her fare and that it was her constitutional right to remain where she was. It reads: "The wonderful thing which you have just done makes me feel like a craven coward. Like Colvin, Parks refused, and was arrested and fined. "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. She now works as a nurses' aide at an old people's home in downtown Manhattan. The driver caught a glimpse of them through his mirror. "Are you going to stand up?" So, Colvin and her younger sister, Delphine, were taken in by their great aunt and uncle, Mary Anne and Q. P. Colvin whose daughter, Velma Colvin, had already moved out. She deserves our attention, our gratitude and a warm, bright spotlight all her own. Raymond Colvin, age 62, a resident of Ft. Deposit, AL, died April 13, 2013. "She had been yelling, 'It's my constitutional right!'. 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." But attorney Gray found it all but impossible to find riders who would potentially risk their lives by attaching their names as plaintiffs. Though he didn't say it, nobody was going to say that about the then heavily pregnant Colvin. It was March 2, 1955 and fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin was taking the bus in order to get home after her day of attending classes. But there were two things about Colvin's stand on that March day that made it significant. Aster is known as a talisman of love and an enduring symbol of elegance. Officers were called to the scene and Colvin was forcefully taken off of the bus and . Moreover, she was not the first person to take a stand by keeping her seat and challenging the system. I say it felt as though Harriet Tubman's hands were pushing me down on one shoulder and Sojourner Truth's hands were pushing me down on the other shoulder. "They put him on death row." Performance & security by Cloudflare. During her pregnancy, she was abandoned by civil rights leaders. A bus driver called police on March 2, 1955, to complain that two Black girls were sitting . State and local officials appealed the case to the United States Supreme Court. In high school, she had high ambitions of political activity. "It is the second time since the Claudette Colvin case that a Negro woman has been arrested for the same thing.". Colvins feisty testimony was instrumental in the shocking success of the suit, which ended segregated seating on Montgomerys buses. "In a few hours, every Negro youngster on the streets discussed Colvin's arrest. The story of Colvins courage might have been forgotten forever had not Frank Sikora, a Birmingham newspaper reporter assigned in 1975 to write a retrospective of the bus boycott, remembered that there had been a girl arrested before Parks. Your IP: Read about our approach to external linking. "She ain't got to do nothing but stay black and die," retorted a black passenger. "He wanted me to give up my seat for a white person and I would have done it for an elderly person but this was a young white woman. How encouraging it would be if more adults had your courage, self-respect and integrity. So, you know, I think you compare history, likemost historians say Columbus discovered America, and it was already populated. As well as the predictable teenage fantasy of "marrying a baseball player", she also had strong political convictions. They never came and discussed it with my parents. The case went to the United States Supreme Court on appeal by the state, and it upheld the district court's ruling on November 13, 1956. ", Some in Montgomery, particularly in King Hill, think the decision was informed by snobbery. Phillip Hoose is author of Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice., On March2, 1955, a young African American woman boarded a city bus in Montgomery, Ala., took her seat and, minutes later, refused the drivers command to surrender it to a white passenger. Claudette Colvin Popularity . "I would sit in the back and no one would even know I was there. I don't know how I got off that bus but the other students said they manhandled me off the bus and put me in the squad car. [15], In 1955, Colvin was a student at the segregated Booker T. Washington High School in the city. Colvins son Raymond died in 1993. The full enormity of what she had done was only just beginning to dawn on her. Rita Dove penned the poem "Claudette Colvin Goes to Work," which later became a song. For many years, Montgomery's black leaders did not publicize Colvin's pioneering effort. This was partially a product of the outward face the NAACP was trying to broadcast and partially a product of the women fearing losing their jobs, which were often in the public school system. 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." Often make death hoaxes of well-known personalities to get public attention and views say it is she... 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