In 2009, the writer Phillip Hoose published a book that told her story in detail for the first time. Click to reveal Video, 1894 shipwreck confirms tale of treacherous lifeboat, Claudette Colvin's interview on Outlook on the BBC World Service, Whiskey fungus forces Jack Daniels to stop construction, Harry and Meghan told to 'vacate' Frogmore Cottage, Rare Jurassic-era bug found at Arkansas Walmart, Havana Syndrome unlikely to have hostile cause - US, India PM Modi urges G20 to overcome divisions, Starbucks illegally fired workers over union - judge, NFL hopeful accused of racing in deadly car crash. Almost nine months after Colvins bus protest, she heard news reports that Parks, a 42-year-old seamstress, had likewise been arrested for a bus seating protest. The leaders in the Civil Rights Movement tried to keep up appearances and make the "most appealing" protesters the most seen. [29], Colvin gave birth to a son, Raymond, in March 1956. We used to have a lot of juke joints up there, and maybe men would drink too much and get into a fight. Going to a segregated school had one advantage, she found - her teachers gave her a good grounding in black history. 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. She shouted that her constitutional rights were being violated. "You got to get up," they shouted. ", Rosa Parks is a heroine to the US civil rights movement. 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. 05 September 1939 - Court trial. I had been kicked out of school, and I had a 3-month-old baby.. Claudette had two sons named Raymond and Randy Colvin, and her first pregnancy was at the age of 16 with a much older man. In the 2010s, Larkin arranged for a street to be named after Colvin. [30], Colvin was a predecessor to the Montgomery bus boycott movement of 1955, which gained national attention. "It is the second time since the Claudette Colvin case that a Negro woman has been arrested for the same thing.". She has literally become a footnote in history. Despite the light sentence, Colvin could not escape the court of public opinion. When Ms Nesbitt, her 10th grade teacher, asked the class to write down what they wanted to be, she unfolded a piece of paper with Colvin's handwriting on it that said: "President of the United States. From "high-yellas" to "coal-coloureds", it is a tension steeped not only in language but in the arts, from Harlem Renaissance novelist Nella Larsen's book, Passing, to Spike Lee's film, School Daze. She withdrew from college, and struggled in the local environment. "I will take you off," said the policeman, then he kicked her. She sat in the colored section about two seats away from an emergency exit, in a Capitol Heights bus. ", 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. In the nine months between her arrest and that of Parks, another young black woman, Mary Louise Smith, suffered a similar fate. Parks," her former attorney, Fred Gray, told Newsweek. I probably would've examined a dozen more before I got there if Rosa Parks hadn't come along before I found the right one. Civil Rights Leader #7. 10. A year later, on 20 December 1956, the US Supreme Court ruled that segregation on the buses must end. "Never. Claudette Colvin : biography. "We walked downtown and my friends and I saw the bus and decided to get on, it was right across the road from Dr Martin Luther King's church," Colvin says. Astrological Sign: Virgo, Article Title: Claudette Colvin Biography, Author: Biography.com Editors, Website Name: The Biography.com website, Url: https://www.biography.com/activists/claudette-colvin, Publisher: A&E; Television Networks, Last Updated: March 26, 2021, Original Published Date: April 2, 2014, I knew then and I know now that, when it comes to justice, there is no easy way to get it. Rosa Parks stated: "If the white press got ahold of that information, they would have [had] a field day. I was afraid they might rape me. She needed support. The driver kept on going but stopped when he reached a junction where a police squad car was waiting. "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. Phillip Hoose also wrote about her in the young adult biography Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice. But go to King Hill and mention her name, and the first thing they will tell you is that she was the first. She also had become pregnant and they thought an unwed mother would attract too much negative attention in a public legal battle. Browder vs Gayle Claudette Colvin, Aurelia S Browder, Susie McDonald, Mary Louise Smith, and Jeanette Reese were plaintiffs in the court case of Browder vs Gayle. In the south, male ministers made up the overwhelming majority of leaders. She worked there for 35 years, retiring in 2004. Rosa Parks was thrown off the bus on a Thursday; by Friday, activists were distributing leaflets that highlighted her arrest as one of many, including those of Colvin and Mary Louise Smith: "Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown in jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down," they read. "However, the black leadership in Montgomery at the time thought that we should wait. In this small, elevated patch of town, black people sit out on wooden porches and watch an impoverished world go by. [2][10] When Colvin was eight years old, the Colvins moved to King Hill, a poor black neighborhood in Montgomery where she spent the rest of her childhood. In 1955, when she was 15, she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white womannine months before Rosa Parks's refusal in Montgomery sparked a bus boycott. He went back to Colvin, now seven months pregnant. Rosa didnt give me enough time to put in for a day off, she recalled. [16] Referring to the segregation on the bus and the white woman: "She couldn't sit in the same row as us because that would mean we were as good as her". Tour: Black America and the burden of the perfect victim. ", When the boycott was over and the African-American community had emerged victorious, King, Nixon and Parks appeared for the cameras. Most Americans, even in Montgomery, have never heard of her. [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. "Claudette gave all of us moral courage. 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]. She relied on the city's buses to get to and from school because her family did not own a car. Claudette Colvin became a teenage mother in 1956 when she gave birth to a boy named Raymond. Colvin went to her job instead. She retired in 2004. The United States District Court ruled the state of Alabama and Montgomery's bus segregation laws were unconstitutional. She was born on September 5, 1939. I was crying," she says. It was this dark, clever, angry young woman who boarded the Highland Avenue bus on Friday, March 2, 1955, opposite Martin Luther King's church on Dexter Avenue, Montgomery. Reeves was a teenage grocery delivery boy who was found having sex with a white woman. Some people questioned if the father was a white male. "If any of you are not gentlemen enough to give a lady a seat, you should be put in jail yourself," he said. "We just sat there and waited for it all to happen," says Gloria Hardin, who was on the bus, too. Another factor was that before long Colvin became pregnant. I started protecting my crotch. . I paid my fare, it's my constitutional right." A memorial service will be held at 11:00 AM, Saturday, March 4, 2023, at East Juliette . While Parks has been heralded as a civil rights heroine, Colvin's story has received little notice. Just as her case was beginning to catch the nation's imagination, she became pregnant. An ad hoc committee headed by the most prominent local black activist, ED Nixon, was set up to discuss the possibility of making Colvin's arrest a test case. As in 2023, Claudette Colvin's age is 83 years. "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. It was going to be a long night on Dixie Drive. Second, she was the first person, in Montgomery at least, to take up the challenge. Her son Raymond Colvin died of a heart attack in 1993. That left Colvin. "We had unpaved streets and outside toilets. Like Colvin, Parks was commuting home and was seated in the "coloured section" of the bus. 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. Colvin was a kid. For all her bravado, Colvin was shocked by the extremity of what happened next. The death news of Colvin, which has been going on the Internet, is untrue; she is alive and is 83. I was glued to my seat," she later told Newsweek. She says she expected some abuse from the driver, but nothing more. The bus froze. 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. That was worse than stealing, you know, talking back to a white person. A second son, Randy, born in 1960, gave her four grandchildren, who are all deeply proud of their grandmothers heroism. 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. 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. "[21] Colvin recalled, "History kept me stuck to my seat. "But when she was found guilty, her agonised sobs penetrated the atmosphere of the courthouse. ", Montgomery's black establishment leaders decided they would have to wait for the right person. She works the night shift and sleeps "when the sleep falls on her" during the day. One incident in particular preoccupied her at the time - the plight of her schoolmate, Jeremiah Reeves. Today, she sits in a diner in the Bronx, her pudding-basin haircut framing a soft face with a distant smile. Charged with disturbing the peace, breaking the bus segregation laws and assaulting the officers who had apprehended her, she was released later that night. She fell out of history altogether. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. "So I told him I was not going to get up, either. "What's going on with these niggers?" One month later, the Supreme Court affirmed the order to Montgomery and the state of Alabama to end bus segregation. Claudette Colvin (born September 5, 1939) is a retired American nurse aide who was a pioneer of the 1950s civil rights movement. And, from there, the short distance to sanctity: they called her "Saint Rosa", "an angel walking", "a heaven-sent messenger". "She had been yelling, 'It's my constitutional right!'. This movement took place in the United States. Colvin took her seat near the emergency door next to one black girl; two others sat across the aisle from her. So he said, 'If you are not going to get up, I will get a policeman.'" "There was no assault", Price said. [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 initially charged with disturbing the peace, violating the segregation laws, and battering and assaulting a police officer. Another cracked a joke about her bra size. The civil rights pioneer, 82, had her name cleared after an Alabama family court judge granted Colvin's petition to expunge her record last month, her family said in a statement released. 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. Before the Rosa Parks incident took place, Claudette Colvin was arrested for challenging the bus segregation system. But there were two things about Colvin's stand on that March day that made it significant. "[33] "I'm not disappointed. She was convicted on all charges, appealed and lost again. [2][14] Despite being a good student, Colvin had difficulty connecting with her peers in school due to grief. It is the historian who has decided for his own reasons that Caesar's crossing of that petty stream, the Rubicon, is a fact of history, whereas the crossing of the Rubicon by millions of other people before or since interests nobody at all.". Angry protests erupt over Greek rail disaster, Explosive found in check-in luggage at US airport, 1894 shipwreck confirms tale of treacherous lifeboat. She herself didn't talk about it much, but she spoke recently to the BBC. 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. "I didn't know if they were crazy, if they were going to take me to a Klan meeting. "I wasn't frightened but disappointed and angry because I knew I was sitting in the right seat.". Let the people know Rosa Parks was the right person for the boycott. In this lesson, students will learn about Claudette Colvin, a 15-year-old who stood up for equal rights in 1955. The problem arose because all the seats on the bus were taken. Rule and Guide: 100 ways to more Success for only $8.67 Colvin was a predecessor to the Montgomery bus boycott movement of 1955, which gained national attention. 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. As more white passengers got on, the driver asked black people to give up their seats. They had threatened to throw her out of the Booker T Washington school for wearing her hair in plaits. She wants . 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. Colvin's son Raymond died in 1993. 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. Claudette Colvin (born Claudette Austin; September 5, 1939) [1] [2] is an American pioneer of the 1950s civil rights movement and retired nurse aide. he asked. Men instructed their wives to walk or to share rides in neighbour's autos.". It was a journey not only into history but also mythology. Until recently, none of her workmates knew anything of her pioneering role in the civil rights movement. She became quiet and withdrawn. The policeman arrived, displaying two of the characteristics for which white Southern men had become renowned: gentility and racism. [32], In 2005, Colvin told the Montgomery Advertiser that she would not have changed her decision to remain seated on the bus: "I feel very, very proud of what I did," she said. Colvins feisty testimony was instrumental in the shocking success of the suit, which ended segregated seating on Montgomerys buses. After her refusal to give up her seat, Colvin was arrested on several charges, including violating the city's segregation laws. "The light-skinned girls always thought they were better looking," says Colvin. . First Name Claudette #1. "They'd call her a bad girl, and her case wouldn't have a chance. State and local officials appealed the case to the United States Supreme Court. You have to take a stand and say, 'This is not right.'. Video1894 shipwreck confirms tale of treacherous lifeboat, How 10% of Nigerian registered voters delivered victory, Sake brewers toast big rise in global sales, The Indian-American CEO who wants to be US president, Blackpink lead top stars back on the road in Asia, Exploring the rigging claims in Nigeria's elections, 'Wales is in England' gaffe sparks TikToker's trip. The organisation didn't want a teenager in the role, she says. But while the driver went to get a policeman, it was the white students who started to make noise. 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 . If she had not done what she did, I am not sure that we would have been able to mount the support for Mrs. Parks.. 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. Although some of the details might seem familiar, this is not the Rosa Parks story. However, her story is often silenced. A sanitation worker, Mr Harris, got up, gave her his seat and got off the bus. [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. [4] Colvin later said: "My mother told me to be quiet about what I did. Colvins son Raymond died in 1993. [11][12], Two days before Colvin's 13th birthday, Delphine died of polio. She shops with her workmates and watches action movies on video. They just didn't want to know me. She still has one - a handwritten note from William Harris in Sacramento. 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. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. 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. But, unlike Parks, Colvin never made it into the civil rights hall of fame. And, like the pregnant Mrs Hamilton, many African-Americans refused to tolerate the indignity of the South's racist laws in silence. "When I was in the ninth grade, all the police cars came to get Jeremiah," says 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. Join the conversation - find us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter. Anything to detach herself from the horror of reality. Moreover, she was not the first person to take a stand by keeping her seat and challenging the system. ", Almost 50 years on, Colvin still talks about the incident with a mixture of shock and indignation - as though she still cannot believe that this could have happened to her. As civil rights attorney Fred Gray put it, Claudette gave all of us moral courage. The Supreme Court summarily affirmed the District Court decision on November 13, 1956. "I was more defiant and then they knocked my books out of my lap and one of them grabbed my arm. They would have come and seen my parents and found me someone to marry. Now 76 and retired, Colvin deserves her place in history. Later, she would tell a reporter that she would sometimes attend the rallies at the churches. [49], The Little-Known Heroes: Claudette Colvin, a children's picture book by Kaushay and Spencer Ford, was published in 2021. 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. I think that history only has room enough for certainyou know, how many icons can you choose? He was . "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.". A group of black civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King, Jr., was organized to discuss Colvin's arrest with the police commissioner. ", Not so Colvin. Claudette Colvin, 1953 Claudette Austin was born in Birmingham, Jefferson County, to Mary Jane Gadson and C. P. Austin on September 5, 1939.Her father abandoned the family, which included a sister, when she was a small child, and the two girls went to live in Pine Level, Montgomery County, with an aunt and uncle, Mary Anne and Q. P. Colvin.Both children took the Colvin name as their last name . We may earn commission from links on this page, but we only recommend products we back. During her pregnancy, she was abandoned by civil rights leaders. 83 Year Old #3. Two years later, Colvin moved to New York City, where she had her second son, Randy, and worked as a nurse's aide at a Manhattan nursing home. 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. CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST, 81, BIRMINGHAM, AL. [21], She also said in the 2009 book Claudette Colvin: Twice Towards Justice, by Phillip Hoose, that one of the police officers sat in the back seat with her. [26], Together with Aurelia S. Browder, Susie McDonald, Mary Louise Smith, and Jeanetta Reese, Colvin was one of the five plaintiffs in the court case of Browder v. Gayle. "In a few hours, every Negro youngster on the streets discussed Colvin's arrest. As well as the predictable teenage fantasy of "marrying a baseball player", she also had strong political convictions. 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. Mine was the first cry for justice, and a loud one. 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. It was a case of 'bourgey' blacks looking down on the working-class blacks. She was arrested and became one of four plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, which ruled that Montgomery's segregated bus system was unconstitutional. [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". The majority of customers on the bus system were African American, but they were discriminated against by its custom of segregated seating. [34], Colvin has often said she is not angry that she did not get more recognition; rather, she is disappointed. But Colvin was not the only casualty of this distortion. "She ain't got to do nothing but stay black and die," retorted a black passenger. Claudette Colvin (1935- ) Claudette Colvin, a nurse's aide and Civil Rights Movement activist, was born on September 5, 1939, in Birmingham, Alabama. It is a letter Colvin knew nothing about. How encouraging it would be if more adults had your courage, self-respect and integrity. In 2016, the Smithsonian Institution and its National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) were challenged by Colvin and her family, who asked that Colvin be given a more prominent mention in the history of the civil rights movement. [36], Colvin and her family have been fighting for recognition for her action. Instead of being taken to a juvenile detention centre, Colvin was taken to an adult jail and put in a small cell with nothing in it but a broken sink and a cot without a mattress. The policeman grabbed her and took her to a patrolman's car in which his colleagues were waiting. Fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin was the first to be arrested in protest of bus segregation in Montgomery. But attorney Gray found it all but impossible to find riders who would potentially risk their lives by attaching their names as plaintiffs. "They did think I was nutty and crazy.". She was played by Mariah Iman Wilson. Like Colvin, Parks refused, and was arrested and fined. [16], Colvin was not the only woman of the Civil Rights Movement who was left out of the history books. Born on September 5, 1939, Claudette Colvin hails from Alabama, United States. "New York is a completely different culture to Montgomery, Alabama. "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. BBC World Service. James Edward "Jungle Jim" Colvin, 69, of Juliette, Georgia, passed away on Saturday, February 25, 2023. [47], A re-enactment of Colvin's resistance is portrayed in a 2014 episode of the comedy TV series Drunk History about Montgomery, Alabama. [50], In 2022, a biopic of Colvin titled Spark written by Niceole R. Levy and directed by Anthony Mackie was announced. 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