Claudette Colvin

Claudette Colvin (born September 5, 1939) is a pioneer of the African-American civil rights movement. In 1955, she was the first person arrested for resisting bus segregation in Montgomery, Alabama, preceding the better known Rosa Parks incident by nine months.

She was among the five women originally included in the federal court case, filed on February 1, 1956 as Browder v. Gayle (1956), and testified before the three-judge panel that heard the case in the United States District Court. On June 13, 1956, the judges determined that the state and local laws requiring bus segregation in Alabama were unconstitutional. The case went to the [United States Supreme Court], which upheld their ruling on December 17, 1956. Three days later, the Supreme Court issued an order to Montgomery and the state to end bus segregation in Alabama.

Montgomery's black leaders did not publicize Colvin's pioneering effort for long because she was a teenager and became pregnant while unmarried. Given the social norms of the time and her youth, the NAACP leaders worried about using her to represent their movement.

Biography
Colvin was born and grew up in Montgomery, Alabama. In 1955 Colvin was a student at the segregated Booker T. Washington High School in the city. She was returning home from school on March 2, 1955 when she got on a Capital Heights bus downtown. She relied on the city's buses to get to and from school.

She sat in the middle section. If the bus became so crowded that all the "white seats" in front were filled and a white person was standing, the rule was that the blacks were supposed to leave these seats and move to the back, and stand if needed. When a white woman got on the bus and was standing, the bus driver, Robert W. Cleere, ordered Colvin and two other black passengers to get up and move to the back. When Colvin refused, she was removed from the bus and arrested by two police officers. This was nine months before the Montgomery Improvement Association decided to stage a similar event that they had secretary Rosa Parks famously instigate and was arrested for the same offense. Her arrest preceded that of Rosa Parks by nine months.

When Colvin refused to get up, she happened to be thinking about a school paper that she had written that day. It was about the local custom that prevented blacks from using the dressing rooms and trying on clothing in department stores.

"The bus was getting crowded and I remember the bus driver looking through the rear view mirror asking her to get up for the white woman, which she didn't," said Annie Larkins Price, a classmate of Colvin's. "She had been yelling it's my constitutional right. She decided on that day that she wasn't going to move." Colvin was handcuffed, arrested and forcibly removed from the bus. She shouted that her constitutional rights were being violated. Price testified for Colvin in the juvenile court case. Colvin was convicted of violating the segregation law and assault. "There was no assault," Price said.

Court trial
In the larger federal case filed as Browder v. Gayle, on May 11, 1956, Colvin, along with Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, and Mary Louise Smith, testified in the United States District Court hearing before a three-judge panel about their actions.

During the trial, Colvin described her arrest: "'I kept saying, 'He has no civil right... this is my constitutional right... you have no right to do this.' And I just kept blabbing things out, and I never stopped. That was worse than stealing, you know, talking back to a white person.'"

The case was appealed by state and local officials to the United States Supreme Court. On November 13, 1956, the case was heard by the Supreme Court who affirmed the District Court's ruling. In December, the Supreme Court declined to reconsider and on December 20, 1956, it ordered Montgomery and Alabama to end bus segregation in the state.

In 2005, Colvin told the Montgomery Advertiser that she would not have changed her decision to remain seated. "'I feel very, very proud of what I did. I do feel like what I did was a spark and it caught on.' 'I'm not disappointed,' Colvin said. 'Let the people know Rosa Parks was the right person for the boycott. 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.'"

Personal life
In 1956, Colvin gave birth to a son, Raymond. He was so light-skinned (like his father) that people frequently said she had a baby by a white man. Colvin "left Montgomery for New York in 1958, because she had difficulty finding and keeping work after the notoriety of the federal court case overturning bus segregation. (Similarly, Parks left Montgomery for Detroit in 1957.)

In New York, the young Colvin and Raymond first lived with her older sister, Velma Colvin. She got a job as a nurse’s aide in a nursing home in Manhattan, where she worked for 35 years. She retired in 2004. Colvin never married. While living in New York, she had a second son, who became an accountant in Atlanta, married and had his own family. Raymond Colvin died in 1993 at age 37 in New York.

In popular culture

 * Rita Dove, a U.S. poet laureate, included "Claudette Colvin Goes to Work", in her book of collected poetry, On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999). Dove referred to Colvin in her magazine article, "The Torchbearer Rosa Parks."
 * The folk singer John McCutcheon set the poem to music, sang and recorded "Claudette Colvin Goes to Work", with Rita Dove speaking one line, on his CD Mightier than the Sword (2006).
 * Awele Makeba wrote, directed and starred in a one-woman drama, Rage Is Not A 1-Day Thing!, in which she relates the story of the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott through the eyes of Colvin following her arrest.
 * Phillip Hoose wrote a biography, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice, which won the 2009 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature.