Claudette Colvin Refuses to Move (1955)

Wed Mar 02, 1955

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Image: Claudette Colvin at 13 years old, April 20th, 1953 [blackpast.org]

On this day in 1955, 15-year old Claudette Colvin was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama for refusing to give up her seat to a white woman, nine months before the more widely known incident with Rosa Parks.

Colvin’s arrest was not peaceful - Claudette was forcibly removed from the bus by police while shouting that her constitutional rights were being violated, and she was sexually harassed while detained. Colvin was charged with disturbing the peace, violating segregation laws, and battering and assaulting a police officer.

Parks was deliberately chosen by the NAACP as a better person to predicate the struggle for civil rights in Montgomery on. Parks was married, employed, and worked as a secretary of the local chapter of the NAACP.

Colvin, however, was an unmarried teenager at the time and rumored to be pregnant by a married man. On Colvin’s case, Parks stated “If the white press got ahold of that information, they would have [had] a field day. They’d call her a bad girl, and her case wouldn’t have a chance.” Of Parks, Colvin said “Her skin texture was the kind that people associate with the middle class. She fit that profile.”

Colvin was one of four women plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, the court case that successfully overturned bus segregation laws in Alabama.

Colvin left Montgomery for New York City in 1958 because she had difficulty finding work after her participation in the federal court case that overturned bus segregation (similarly, Rosa Parks left Montgomery for Detroit in 1957). Colvin stated she was branded a troublemaker by many in her community. She withdrew from college and went on to become a nurse in Manhattan.

On her act of defiance that day, Colvin stated “History kept me stuck to my seat. I felt the hand of Harriet Tubman pushing down on one shoulder and Sojourner Truth pushing down on the other.”