She and her son Raymond moved in with Velma while Colvin looked for work. "I thought he would stop and shout and then drive on. March 2 was named Claudette Colvin Day in Montgomery. A second son, Randy, born in 1960, gave her four grandchildren, who are all deeply proud of their grandmothers heroism. And I just kept blabbing things out, and I never stopped. This led to a few articles and profiles by others in subsequent years. I felt the hand of Harriet Tubman pushing down on one shoulder and Sojourner Truth pushing down on the other. "[22] Colvin was handcuffed, arrested, and forcibly removed from the bus. New York, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, This page was last edited on 1 March 2023, at 23:25. With funding from church donations and activities organized by the chapter, Colvin had her day in court. 05 September 1939 - Court trial. 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." [6][7] It is now widely accepted that Colvin was not accredited by civil rights campaigners at the time due to her circumstances. By the time she got home, her parents already knew. It was going to be a long night on Dixie Drive. Members of the community acted as lookouts, while Colvin's father sat up all night with a shotgun, in case the Ku Klux Klan turned up. "There was no assault", Price said. "If it had been for an old lady, I would have got up, but it wasn't. Colvin and her friends were sitting in a row a little more than half way down the bus - two were on the right side of the bus and two on the left - and a white passenger was standing in the aisle between them. [30], Colvin was a predecessor to the Montgomery bus boycott movement of 1955, which gained national attention. Claudette Colvin was born Claudette Austin in Montgomery, Alabama, on September 5, 1939, to Mary Jane Gadson and C. P. Austin. Either way, he had violated the South's deeply ingrained taboo on interracial sex - Alabama only voted to legalise interracial marriage last month (the state held a referendum at the same time as the ballot for the US presidency), and then only by a 60-40 majority. [23] She was bailed out by her minister, who told her that she had brought the revolution to Montgomery. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR). Martin Luther King Jr., had been seeking to stir the outrage of African Americans and sympathetic whites into civic action. Unable to find work in Montgomery, Colvin moved to New York in 1958, while her son Raymond remained behind with family. She relied on the city's buses to get to and from school because her family did not own a car. asked one. 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. They just didn't want to know me. Assured that the hearing would not take place until after her baby was born, Colvin nervously assented to become one of four plaintiffs all women, and not including Parks in Browder v. Gayle. Phillip Hoose. For all her bravado, Colvin was shocked by the extremity of what happened next. "When I told my mother I was pregnant, I thought she was going to have a heart attack. She works the night shift and sleeps "when the sleep falls on her" during the day. She refused, saying, "It's my constitutional right to sit here as much as that lady. Mothers expressed concern about permitting their children on the buses. "I wasn't with it at all. [2][13] Not long after, in September 1952, Colvin started attending Booker T. Washington High School. After her arrest and late appearance in the court hearing, she was more or less forgotten. I was glued to my seat. Colvin says that after Supreme Court made its decision, things slowly began to change. As in 2023, Claudette Colvin's age is 83 years. And, like Parks, the local black establishment started to rally support nationwide for her cause. "Y'all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats," he said. Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page. It is a rare, and poor, civil rights book that covers the Montgomery bus boycott and does not mention Claudette Colvin. "Well, I'm going to have you arrested," he replied. Somehow, as Mrs. [citation needed]. "So did the teachers, too. Her timing was superb. "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. Moreover, she was not the first person to take a stand by keeping her seat and challenging the system. Black people were allowed to occupy those seats so long as white people didn't need them. Best Known For: Claudette Colvin is an activist who was a pioneer in the civil rights movement in Alabama during the 1950s. After her arrest and release to the custody of her pastor and great-aunt, the bright, opinionated Colvin insisted to everyone within earshot that she wanted to contest the charges. 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. In the south, male ministers made up the overwhelming . "So I went and I testified about the system and I was saying that the system treated us unfairly and I used some of the language that they used when we got taken off the bus.". Colvin's sister, Gloria Laster, said. Colvin was one of four plaintiffs in the first federal court case filed by civil rights attorney Fred Gray on February 1, 1956, as Browder v. Gayle, to challenge bus segregation in the city. [30] Claudette began a job in 1969 as a nurse's aide in a nursing home in Manhattan. That left Colvin. The full enormity of what she had done was only just beginning to dawn on her. 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." "The white people were always seated at the front of the bus and the black people were seated at the back of the bus. The legal case turned on the testimony of four plaintiffs, one of whom was Claudette Colvin. 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. The decision in the 1956 case, which had been filed by Fred Gray and Charles D. Langford on behalf of the aforementioned African American women, ruled that Montgomery's segregated bus system was unconstitutional. Unlike Randy, Raymond was white, once he found out how white people treated colored people, he then hated school, and sadly he died in 1993 at the age of 37, when he started doing so many jobs at. As well as the predictable teenage fantasy of "marrying a baseball player", she also had strong political convictions. It wasn't a bad area, but it had a reputation." "I waited for about three hours until my mother arrived with my pastor to bail me out. 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. That's what they usually did.". ", Everyone, including Colvin, agreed that it was news of her pregnancy that ultimately persuaded the local black hierarchy to abandon her as a cause clbre. I was glad that an adult had finally stood up to the system, but I felt left out.. "Never. She said she felt as if she was "getting [her] Christmas in January rather than the 25th. The United States District Court ruled the state of Alabama and Montgomery's bus segregation laws were unconstitutional. 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 . 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. I heard about the court decision on the news, Colvin recalled. [43] The judge ordered that the juvenile record be expunged and destroyed in December 2021, stating that Colvin's refusal had "been recognized as a courageous act on her behalf and on behalf of a community of affected people". I was glued to my seat," she later told Newsweek. [4][18] Colvin said, "But I made a personal statement, too, one that [Parks] didn't make and probably couldn't have made. 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. "When ED Nixon and the Women's Political Council of Montgomery recognised that you could be that hero, you met the challenge and changed our lives forever. A second son, Randy, born in 1960, gave her four grandchildren, who are all deeply proud of their grandmother's heroism. She still has one - a handwritten note from William Harris in Sacramento. "The light-skinned girls always thought they were better looking," says 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. 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. They'd call her a bad girl, and her case wouldn't have a chance."[6][8]. Another factor was that before long Colvin became pregnant. Claudette Colvin was born on September 5, 1939, in Montgomery, Alabama. ", Nonetheless, the shock waves of her defiance had reverberated throughout Montgomery and beyond. I started protecting my crotch. "But according to [the commissioner], she was the first person ever to enter a plea of not guilty to such a charge.". Montgomery was not home to the first bus boycott any more than Colvin was the first person to challenge segregation. She prayed furiously as they sped out, with the cop leering over her, guessing at her bra size. "New York is a completely different culture to Montgomery, Alabama. he asked. When Colvin moved to New York many years later to become a nurse, she didn't tell many people about the part she played in the civil rights movement. It was a case of 'bourgey' blacks looking down on the working-class blacks. She resisted bus segregation nine months before Rosa Parks, . "When I was in the ninth grade, all the police cars came to get Jeremiah," says Colvin. In 1960, she gave birth to her second son, Randy. "We just sat there and waited for it all to happen," says Gloria Hardin, who was on the bus, too. [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. [9] When they took Claudette in, the Colvins lived in Pine Level, a small country town in Montgomery County, the same town where Rosa Parks grew up. Why has Claudette Colvin been denied her place in history? Claudette Colvin was the first person arrested by the police in Montgomery, AL for refusing to give up her bus seat. 9. Raymond Colvin died in 1993 in New York of a heart attack, aged 37. In July 2014, Claudette Colvin's story was documented in a television episode of Drunk History (Montgomery, AL (Season 2, Episode 1)). King Hill, Montgomery, is the sepia South. And that person, it transpired, would be Rosa Parks. Born on September 5 #12. Virgo Civil Rights Leader #2. One incident in particular preoccupied her at the time - the plight of her schoolmate, Jeremiah Reeves. 45.148.121.138 The churches, buses and schools were all segregated and you couldn't even go into the same restaurants," Claudette Colvin says. The case, organized and filed in federal court by civil rights attorney Fred Gray, challenged city bus segregation in Montgomery as unconstitutional. When Claudette Colvin's high school in Montgomery, Alabama, observed Negro History Week in 1955, the 15-year-old had no way of knowing how the stories of Black freedom fighters would soon impact . [4], "The bus was getting crowded, and I remember the bus driver looking through the rearview mirror asking her [Colvin] to get up for the white woman, which she didn't," said Annie Larkins Price, a classmate of Colvin. In August that year, a 14-year-old boy called Emmet Till had said, "Bye, baby", to a woman at a store in nearby Mississippi, and was fished out of the nearby Tallahatchie river a few days later, dead with a bullet in his skull, his eye gouged out and one side of his forehead crushed. However, not one has bothered to interview her. "It's interesting that Claudette Colvin was not in the group, and rarely, if ever, rode a bus again in Montgomery," wrote Frank Sikora, an Alabama-based academic and author. On Thursday, December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old black seamstress, boarded a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, after a hard day's work, took a seat and headed for home. "[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. The majority of customers on the bus system were African American, but they were discriminated against by its custom of segregated seating. ", The upshot was that Colvin was left in an incredibly vulnerable position. She also had become pregnant and they thought an unwed mother would attract too much negative attention in a public legal battle. [2] Price testified for Colvin, who was tried in juvenile court. "Are you going to stand up?" James Edward "Jungle Jim" Colvin, 69, of Juliette, Georgia, passed away on Saturday, February 25, 2023. [51], National Museum of African American History and Culture, "Power Dynamics of a Segregated City: Class, Gender, and Claudette Colvin's Struggle for Equality", "Before Rosa Parks, Claudette Colvin Stayed in Her Bus Seat", "From Footnote to Fame in Civil Rights History", "Before Rosa Parks, A Teenager Defied Segregation On An Alabama Bus", "Chapter 1 (excerpt): 'Up From Pine Level', "#ThrowbackThursday: The girl who acted before Rosa Parks", "Claudette Colvin: an unsung hero in the Montgomery Bus Boycott", "The Origins of the Montgomery Bus Boycott", "A Forgotten Contribution: Before Rosa Parks, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat on the bus", "Claudette Colvin: First to keep her seat", "Claudette Colvin | Americans Who Tell The Truth", "Claudette Colvin: the woman who refused to give up her bus seat nine months before Rosa Parks", "2 other bus boycott heroes praise Parks' acclaim", "This once-forgotten civil rights hero deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom", "Chairman Crowley Honors Civil Rights Pioneer Claudette Colvin", "The Other Rosa Parks: Now 73, Claudette Colvin Was First to Refuse Giving Up Seat on Montgomery Bus", "Claudette Colvin Seeks Greater Recognition For Role In Making Civil Rights History", "Weekend: Civil rights heroine Claudette Colvin", "Claudette Colvin honored by Montgomery council", "Alabama unveils statue of civil rights icon Rosa Parks", "Rosa Parks statue unveiled in Alabama on anniversary of her refusal to give up seat", "She refused to move bus seats months before Rosa Parks. Parks was, too. Nor was Colvin the last to be passed over. Colvin was also very dark-skinned, which put her at the bottom of the social pile within the black community - in the pigmentocracy of the South at the time, and even today, while whites discriminated against blacks on grounds of skin colour, the black community discriminated against each other in terms of skin shade. Colvin has said, "Young people think Rosa Parks just sat down on a bus and ended segregation, but that wasn't the case at all. 1956- Colvin was one of four Black women who served as plaintiffs in a federal court suit 1956- Had her child, his name was Raymond 1957- People were bombing black churches 1957- Congress approved the Civil Rights Act of 1957 She shops with her workmates and watches action movies on video. "She lived in a little shack. "She was a victim of both the forces of history and the forces of destiny," said King, in a quote now displayed in the civil rights museum in Atlanta. ", Rosa Parks is a heroine to the US civil rights movement. "[37], In 2000, Troy State University opened a Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery to honor the town's place in civil rights history. She worked there for 35 years, retiring in 2004. He was . Some people questioned if the father was a white male. You have to take a stand and say, 'This is not right.'. She was arrested and became one of four plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, which ruled that Montgomery's segregated bus system was unconstitutional. But people in King Hill do not remember Colvin as that type of girl, and the accusation irritates Colvin to this day. Today their boycott, modelled on the one in Montgomery, is largely forgotten - but it was a milestone in achieving equality. Colvin was a kid. Her rhythm is simple and lifestyle frugal. That was worse than stealing, you know, talking back to a white person. "I make up stories to convince them to stay in bed." That summer she became pregnant by a much older man. "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. Two policemen boarded the bus and asked Colvin why she wouldn't give up her seat. But Colvin told the driver she had paid her fare and that it was her constitutional right to remain where she was. "[21] Colvin recalled, "History kept me stuck to my seat. Then, they will reflect on a time when they took a stand on an important issue. Angry protests erupt over Greek rail disaster, Explosive found in check-in luggage at US airport, 1894 shipwreck confirms tale of treacherous lifeboat. I didn't want to discuss it with them," she says. "[35], I dont think theres room for many more icons. Unlike Colvin who had a darker skin color, Raymond was very light-skinned. A 15-year-old high school student at the time, Colvin got fed up and refused to move even before Parks. . She refused to name the father or have anything to do with him. 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