Claudette Colvin (1939 - )

Tue Sep 05, 1939

Image

Image: Claudette Colvin in 1953, aged 13. Two years later, she would be arrested for refusing to comply with racial segregation on the bus. [Wikipedia]

Claudette Colvin, born on this day in 1939, is a retired American nurse who was a pioneer of the 1950s civil rights movement, refusing to give up her bus seat to a white woman at age 15, nine months before Rosa Parks did the same.

On March 2nd, 1955, she was arrested at the age of fifteen in Montgomery, Alabama for refusing to give up her seat to a white woman on a crowded, segregated bus. 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.

For many years, Montgomery’s black leaders did not publicize Colvin’s pioneering effort. She was an unmarried teenager at the time, and was reportedly impregnated by a married man. It is widely accepted that Colvin was not accredited by the civil rights campaigners at the time due to her pregnancy shortly after the incident, with even Rosa Parks saying “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.”

Colvin left Montgomery for New York City in 1958, because she had difficulty finding and keeping work following 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.

“My head was just too full of black history, you know, the oppression that we went through. It felt like Sojourner Truth was on one side pushing me down, and Harriet Tubman was on the other side of me pushing me down. I couldn’t get up.”

- Claudette Colvin