[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. [39], In 2019, a statue of Rosa Parks was unveiled in Montgomery, Alabama, and four granite markers were also unveiled near the statue on the same day to honor four plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, including Colvin[40][41][42], In 2021 Colvin applied to the family court in Montgomery County, Alabama to have her juvenile record expunged. A group of black civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King, Jr., was organized to discuss Colvin's arrest with the police commissioner. In this respect, the civil rights movement in Montgomery moved fast. For all her bravado, Colvin was shocked by the extremity of what happened next. March 2 was named Claudette Colvin Day in Montgomery. She wants . "I will take you off," said the policeman, then he kicked her. 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. It was her individual courage that triggered the collective display of defiance that turned a previously unknown 26-year-old preacher, Martin Luther King, into a household name. Colvin's sister, Gloria Laster, said. She was detained on March 2, 1955, in . Everybody knew. One white woman defended Colvin to the police; another said that, if she got away with this, "they will take over". Parks's arrest sparked a chain reaction that started the bus boycott that launched the civil rights movement that transformed the apartheid of America's southern states from a local idiosyncrasy to an international scandal. "We had unpaved streets and outside toilets. The organisation didn't want a teenager in the role, she says. 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. 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. Click to reveal She gave birth to a fair-skin child named Raymond in the year 1956 whose skin tone was similar to her partner. They just didn't want to know me. Nine months before Parks's arrest, a 15-year-old girl, Claudette Colvin, was thrown off a bus in the same town and in almost identical circumstances. She now works as a nurses' aide at an old people's home in downtown Manhattan. In 1960, she gave birth to her second son, Randy. [16] On March 2, 1955, she was returning home from school. [citation needed]. "I wasn't frightened but disappointed and angry because I knew I was sitting in the right seat.". [2][14] Despite being a good student, Colvin had difficulty connecting with her peers in school due to grief. 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. The leaders in the Civil Rights Movement tried to keep up appearances and make the "most appealing" protesters the most seen. 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. "He asked us both to get up. But it is also a rare and excellent one that gives her more than a passing, dismissive mention. Read about our approach to external linking. Her reputation also made it impossible for her to find a job. "I went bipolar. Tour: Black America and the burden of the perfect victim. The pace of life is so slow and the mood so mellow that local residents look as if they have been wading through molasses in a half-hearted attempt to catch up with the past 50 years. Nobody can doubt the height of her character, nobody can doubt the depth of her Christian commitment and devotion to the teachings of Jesus." The story of Colvins courage might have been forgotten forever had not Frank Sikora, a Birmingham newspaper reporter assigned in 1975 to write a retrospective of the bus boycott, remembered that there had been a girl arrested before Parks. He could not bring himself to chide Mrs Hamilton in her condition, but he could not allow her to stay where she was and flout the law as he understood it, either. "The news travelled fast," wrote Robinson. "It bothered some that there was an unruly, tomboy quality to Colvin, including a propensity for curse words and immature outbursts," writes Douglas Brinkly, who recently completed a biography of Parks. "The NAACP had come back to me and my mother said: 'Claudette, they must really need you, because they rejected you because you had a child out of wedlock,'" Colvin says. Colvin went to her job instead. 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. 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. On March 2, 1955, she was arrested at the age of 15 in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her seat to a white woman on a crowded, segregated bus. 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.". She sat in the colored section about two seats away from an emergency exit, in a Capitol Heights bus. One month later, the Supreme Court affirmed the order to Montgomery and the state of Alabama to end bus segregation. Rosa didnt give me enough time to put in for a day off, she recalled. Like Colvin, Parks refused, and was arrested and fined. She refused to give up her seat on a bus months before Rosa Parks' more famous protest. 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. She worked there for 35 years until her . "She had remained calm all during the days of her waiting period and during the trial," wrote Robinson. "[38], Colvin's role has not gone completely unrecognized. At the time, black leaders, including the Rev. Let the people know Rosa Parks was the right person for the boycott. "I didn't know if they were crazy, if they were going to take me to a Klan meeting. In July 2014, Claudette Colvin's story was documented in a television episode of Drunk History (Montgomery, AL (Season 2, Episode 1)). Two police officers arrived and pulled her from her seat. Your IP: Performance & security by Cloudflare. 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 . "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. The woman alleged rape; Reeves insisted it was consensual. "They did think I was nutty and crazy.". But go to King Hill and mention her name, and the first thing they will tell you is that she was the first. Her casting as the prim, ageing, guileless seamstress with her hair in a bun who just happened to be in the wrong place at the right time denied her track record of militancy and feminism. Raymond D. Gunderson, age 91, of Hot Springs, passed away Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2023. "I told Mrs Parks, as I had told other leaders in Montgomery, that I thought the Claudette Colvin arrest was a good test case to end segregation on the buses," says Fred Gray, Parks's lawyer. 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. "[4][5] Colvin's case was dropped by civil rights campaigners because Colvin was unmarried and pregnant during the proceedings. They had threatened to throw her out of the Booker T Washington school for wearing her hair in plaits. Colvin never married but gave birth to two sons, the first was Raymond Colvin (b. December 1955, died 1993). "Had it not been for Claudette Colvin, Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, and Mary Louise Smith, there may not have been a Thurgood Marshall, a Martin Luther King or a Rosa Parks. However, some white passengers still refused to sit near a black person. 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. Fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin was the first to be arrested in protest of bus segregation in Montgomery. 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. You had to take a brown paper bag and draw a diagram of your foot and take it to the store". A second son, Randy, born in 1960, gave her four grandchildren, who are all deeply proud of their grandmothers heroism. That left Colvin. And, like the pregnant Mrs Hamilton, many African-Americans refused to tolerate the indignity of the South's racist laws in silence. "If it had been for an old lady, I would have got up, but it wasn't. Check below for more deets about 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. Her rhythm is simple and lifestyle frugal. 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. Two policemen boarded the bus and asked Colvin why she wouldn't give up her seat. 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. Parks," her former attorney, Fred Gray, told Newsweek. Biography and associated logos are trademarks of A+E Networksprotected in the US and other countries around the globe. Colvin was a member of the NAACP Youth Council and had been learning about the civil rights movement in school. 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. [15], In 1955, Colvin was a student at the segregated Booker T. Washington High School in the city. It reads: "The wonderful thing which you have just done makes me feel like a craven coward. '", The atmosphere on the bus became very tense. "Y'all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats," he said. "We didn't know what was going to happen, but we knew something would happen. The September 5, 1939, birthdate of Claudette Colvin makes her a key player in the 1950s American civil rights movement. "He asked us both to get up. 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. "It is the second time since the Claudette Colvin case that a Negro woman has been arrested for the same thing.". Rosa Parks stated: "If the white press got ahold of that information, they would have [had] a field day. She said, "They've already called it the Rosa Parks museum, so they've already made up their minds what the story is. The young Ms. Colvin was portrayed by actress Mariah Iman Wilson. Colvin gave birth to Raymond, a son. However, not one has bothered to interview her. [5] Colvin did not receive the same attention as Parks for a number of reasons: she did not have "good hair", she was not fair-skinned, she was a teenager, she was pregnant. function fbl_init(){ Claudette Colvin: The 15-year-old who came before Rosa Parks 10 March 2018 Alamy By Taylor-Dior Rumble BBC World Service In March 1955, nine months before Rosa Parks defied segregation laws by. It was going to be a long night on Dixie Drive. 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. "[35], I dont think theres room for many more icons. She decided on that day that she wasn't going to move. "I waited for about three hours until my mother arrived with my pastor to bail me out. [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. The Supreme Court summarily affirmed the District Court decision on November 13, 1956. Best Known For: Claudette Colvin is an activist who was a pioneer in the civil rights movement in Alabama during the 1950s. . 83 Year Old #3. The problem arose because all the seats on the bus were taken. "Well, I'm going to have you arrested," he replied. 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 . "For nobody can doubt the boundless outreach of her integrity. "I felt like Sojourner Truth was pushing down on one shoulder and Harriet Tubman was pushing down on the othersaying, 'Sit down girl!' It was not your tired feet, but your strength of character and resolve that inspired us." In 2009, the writer Phillip Hoose published a book that told her story in detail for the first time. She withdrew from college, and struggled in the local environment. The full enormity of what she had done was only just beginning to dawn on her. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People briefly considered using Colvin's case to challenge the segregation laws, but they decided against it because of her age. Claudette Colvin (born September 5, 1939) is a retired American nurse aide who was a pioneer of the 1950s civil rights movement. Claudette had two sons named Raymond and Randy Colvin, and her first pregnancy was at the age of 16 with a much older man. Yet months before her arrest on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, a 15-year-old girl was charged with the same 'crime'. Another factor was that before long Colvin became pregnant. 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. For several hours, she sat in jail, completely terrified. Associated With. In 1956, Colvin gave birth to a son, Raymond. She and her son Raymond moved in with Velma while Colvin looked for work. 2023 BBC. [34], Colvin has often said she is not angry that she did not get more recognition; rather, she is disappointed. She worked there for 35 years, retiring in 2004. "Oh God," wailed one black woman at the back. I can still vividly hear the click of those keys. "But according to [the commissioner], she was the first person ever to enter a plea of not guilty to such a charge.". In 1955, at age 15, Claudette Colvin . [20] In a later interview, she said: "We couldn't try on clothes. The baby was fair-skinned just like his dad and people accused her of having a white baby. "There was no assault", Price said. So, you know, I think you compare history, likemost historians say Columbus discovered America, and it was already populated. 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. Claudette Colvin (born Claudette Austin; September 5, 1939) [1] [2] is an American pioneer of the 1950s civil rights movement and retired nurse aide. ", A personal tragedy for her was seen as a political liability by the town's civil rights leaders. [2][13] Not long after, in September 1952, Colvin started attending Booker T. Washington High School. 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. Raymond Colvin died in 1993 in New York of a heart attack, aged 37. Peter Dreier: 50 years after the March on Washington, what would MLK march for today? This movement took place in the United States. When the trial was held, Colvin pleaded innocent but was found guilty and released on indefinite probation in her parents' care. They would have come and seen my parents and found me someone to marry. For we like our history neat - an easy-to-follow, self-contained narrative with dates, characters and landmarks with which we can weave together otherwise unrelated events into one apparently seamless length of fabric held together by sequence and consequence. Colvin gave birth to her first son Raymond Jun 5, 1956. "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. Colvin's son Raymond died in 1993. [Mrs. Hamilton] said she was not going to get up and that she had paid her fare and that she didn't feel like standing," recalls Colvin. The court declared her a ward of the state and remanded her to the custody of her family. The boycott was very effective but the city still resisted complying with protesters' demands - an end to the policy preventing the hiring of black bus drivers and the introduction of first-come first-seated rule. The driver kept on going but stopped when he reached a junction where a police squad car was waiting. Four years later, they executed him. Although some of the details might seem familiar, this is not the Rosa Parks story. Unable to find work in Montgomery, Colvin moved to New York in 1958, while her son Raymond remained behind with family. ", 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. He was . [37], "All we want is the truth, why does history fail to get it right?" Most Popular #5576. Colvin left Montgomery for New York in 1958, because she had difficulty finding and keeping work after the notoriety of the . The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. "I was really afraid, because you just didn't know what white people might do at that time," Colvin later said. Austin, but she was raised by her great-aunt and great-uncle, Mary Ann and Q.P. "I make up stories to convince them to stay in bed." He went back to Colvin, now seven months pregnant. I think that history only has room enough for certainyou know, how many icons can you choose? But the very spirit and independence of mind that had inspired Parks to challenge segregation started to pose a threat to Montgomery's black male hierarchy, which had started to believe, and then resent, their own spin. However, her story is often silenced. Men instructed their wives to walk or to share rides in neighbour's autos.". As an adult, she worked as a nurse's assistant in New . Claudette Colvin Popularity . asked one. - Claudette Colvin On March 2, 1955, an impassioned teenager, fed up with the daily injustices of Jim Crow segregation, refused to give her seat to a white woman on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. It was an exchange later credited with changing the racial landscape of America. Most of the people didn't have problems with us sitting on the bus, most New Yorkers cared about economic problems. All Rights Reserved. Fifty years have passed since campaigners overturned a ban on ethnic minorities working on buses in one British city. All I could do is cry. She was arrested and became one of four plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, which ruled that Montgomery's segregated bus system was unconstitutional. You can't sugarcoat it. She became quiet and withdrawn. 9. Councilman Larkin's sister was on the bus in 1955 when Colvin was arrested. "I became very active in her youth group and we use to meet every Sunday afternoon at the Luther church," she says. "Ms Parks was quiet and very gentle and very soft-spoken, but she would always say we should fight for our freedom.". Just as her case was beginning to catch the nation's imagination, she became pregnant. Colvin says Parks had the right image to become the face of resistance to segregation because of her previous work with the NAACP. The policeman arrived, displaying two of the characteristics for which white Southern men had become renowned: gentility and racism. "I recited Edgar Allan Poe, Annabel Lee, the characters in Midsummer Night's Dream, the Lord's Prayer and the 23rd Psalm." 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 Colvin did exactly the same thing. The policeman grabbed her and took her to a patrolman's car in which his colleagues were waiting. By the time she got home, her parents already knew. 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. Born on September 5 #12. 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. In the south, male ministers made up the overwhelming majority of leaders. In this small, elevated patch of town, black people sit out on wooden porches and watch an impoverished world go by. Her first son died in 1993. Eclipsed by Parks, her act of defiance was largely ignored for many years. It is time for President Obama to. Respectfully and faithfully yours. Colvin says that after Supreme Court made its decision, things slowly began to change. It wasn't a bad area, but it had a reputation." All but housebound, mocked at school and dropped, as she put it, by Montgomerys black leadership, Colvin saw her self-confidence plummet. "He wanted me to give up my seat for a white person and I would have done it for an elderly person but this was a young white woman. "But when she was found guilty, her agonised sobs penetrated the atmosphere of the courthouse. "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 March 2, 1955, she was arrested at the age of 15 in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her seat to a white woman on a crowded, segregated bus. Blake approached her. A sanitation worker, Mr Harris, got up, gave her his seat and got off the bus. [16][19], When Colvin refused to get up, she was thinking about a school paper she had written that day about the local customs that prohibited blacks from using the dressing rooms in order to try on clothes in department stores. And the state of Alabama to end bus segregation town, black people sit out on wooden porches watch... 91, of Hot Springs, passed away Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2023 Price said good... You is that she was found guilty and released on indefinite probation in her parents knew! Oh God, '' her former attorney, Fred Gray, told Newsweek on... Bus became very tense not your tired feet, but it had a reputation. downtown Manhattan about hours. One has bothered to interview her, gave her his seat and got off bus. A long night on Dixie Drive to the custody of her previous work with the same thing. `` for! Overturned a ban on ethnic minorities working on buses in one British city of their heroism... 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