Colvin was a kid. "And since it had to happen, I'm happy it happened to a person like Mrs Parks," said Martin Luther King from the pulpit of the Holt Street Baptist Church. 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. As well as the predictable teenage fantasy of "marrying a baseball player", she also had strong political convictions. Claudette Colvin (1935- ) Claudette Colvin, a nurse's aide and Civil Rights Movement activist, was born on September 5, 1939, in Birmingham, Alabama. [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. But, unlike Parks, Colvin never made it into the civil rights hall of fame. Those who are aware of these distortions in the civil rights story are few. "I was really afraid, because you just didn't know what white people might do at that time," says Colvin. In 2009, the writer Phillip Hoose published a book that told her story in detail for the first time. Telephones rang. asked the policeman. I felt like Sojourner Truth was pushing down on one shoulder and Harriet Tubman was pushing down on the othersaying, 'Sit down girl!' The churches, buses and schools were all segregated and you couldn't even go into the same restaurants," Claudette Colvin says. It reads: "The wonderful thing which you have just done makes me feel like a craven coward. "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.". She also had become pregnant and they thought an unwed mother would attract too much negative attention in a public legal battle. On June 5, 1956, the United States District Court for the Middle District of Alabama issued a ruling declaring the state of Alabama and Montgomery's laws mandating public bus segregation as unconstitutional. [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. Officers were called to the scene and Colvin was forcefully taken off of the bus and . Going to a segregated school had one advantage, she found - her teachers gave her a good grounding in black history. "[28], On May 20, 2018, Congressman Joe Crowley honored Colvin for her lifetime commitment to public service with a Congressional Certificate and an American flag. "Whenever people ask me: 'Why didn't you get up when the bus driver asked you?' Unable to find work in Montgomery, Colvin moved to New York in 1958, while her son Raymond remained behind with family. "They lectured us about Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth and we were taught about an opera singer called Marian Anderson who wasn't allowed to sing at Constitutional Hall just because she was black, so she sang at Lincoln Memorial instead.". The Supreme Court summarily affirmed the District Court decision on November 13, 1956. Fifty years have passed since campaigners overturned a ban on ethnic minorities working on buses in one British city. 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. "[citation needed], The police officers who took her to the station made sexual comments about her body and took turns guessing her bra size throughout the ride. "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. Gary Younge investigates, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning. While her role in the fight to end segregation in Montgomery may not be widely recognized, Colvin helped advance civil rights efforts in the city. [2] Colvin and her sister referred to the Colvins as their parents and took their last name. [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". And, like Parks, the local black establishment started to rally support nationwide for her cause. Colvin has remained unmarried all her life. "Aren't you going to get up?" First, it came less than a year after the US supreme court had outlawed the "separate but equal" policy that had provided the legal basis for racial segregation - what had been custom and practice in the South for generations was now against federal law and could be challenged in the courts. "Mrs Parks was a married woman," said ED Nixon. In this lesson, students will learn about Claudette Colvin, a 15-year-old who stood up for equal rights in 1955. State and local officials appealed the case to the United States Supreme Court. It is the story of Claudette Colvin, who was 15 when she waged her brave protest nine months before Parks did and has spent an eternity in Parkss shadow. 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. Letters of support came from as far afield as Oregon and California. The problem arose because all the seats on the bus were taken. The court declared her a ward of the state and remanded her to the custody of her family. 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. Claudette Colvin was an African American civil rights activist who pioneered the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s. Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth were both African Americans who sought the abolition of slavery, Tubman was well known for helping 300 fellow slaves escape slavery using the, Truth was a passionate campaigner who fought for women's rights, best known for her speech, Claudette Colvin spoke to Outlook on the BBC World Service. "They'd call her a bad girl, and her case wouldn't have a chance. "For a while, there was a real distance between me and Mrs Parks over this. [citation needed]. Claudette Colvin (born September 5, 1939) is a retired American nurse aide who was a pioneer of the 1950s civil rights movement. [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. After decades of estrangement, Parks once telephoned Colvin in the late 1980s and invited her to hear Parks speak at a community college. 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. Rembert said, "I know people have heard her name before, but I just thought we should have a day to celebrate her." She deserves our attention, our gratitude and a warm, bright spotlight all her own. You have to take a stand and say, 'This is not right.'. [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. In a United States district court, she testified before the three-judge panel that heard the case. I can still vividly hear the click of those keys. In 1969, years after moving to NYC, she acquired a job working as a Nurse's aide at a Nursing home. [39] Later, Rev. [2][14] Despite being a good student, Colvin had difficulty connecting with her peers in school due to grief. One white woman defended Colvin to the police; another said that, if she got away with this, "they will take over". Under the twisted logic of segregation the white woman still couldn't sit down, as then white and black passengers would have been sharing a row of seats - and the whole point was that white passengers were meant to be closer to the front. 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. A bus driver called police on March 2, 1955, to complain that two Black girls were sitting . She concentrated her mind on things she had been learning at school. Colvin later moved to New York City and worked as a nurse's aide. ", If that were not enough, the son, Raymond, to whom she would give birth in December, emerged light-skinned: "He came out looking kind of yellow, and then I was ostracised because I wouldn't say who the father was and they thought it was a white man. She made history at the young age of 15 by refusing to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama to a white woman. [24], Colvin's moment of activism was not solitary or random. [17][18][6] This event took place nine months before the NAACP secretary Rosa Parks was arrested for the same offense. She still has one - a handwritten note from William Harris in Sacramento. Betty Shabbaz, the widow of Malcolm X, was one of them. Similarly, Rosa Parks left Montgomery for Detroit in 1957. "Are you going to stand up?" Parks," her former attorney, Fred Gray, told Newsweek. Associated With. I felt inspired by these women because my teacher taught us about them in so much detail," she says. Your IP: We may earn commission from links on this page, but we only recommend products we back. 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. 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. [30] Claudette began a job in 1969 as a nurse's aide in a nursing home in Manhattan. Much of the writing on civil rights history in Montgomery has focused on the arrest of Parks, another woman who refused to give up her seat on the bus, nine months after Colvin. The Montgomery bus boycott was then called off after a few months. First Name Claudette #1. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. I started protecting my crotch. 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. Claudette Colvin was born on September 5, 1939, in Montgomery, Alabama. Nonetheless, Raymond died at the age of 37, reported Core Online. A sanitation worker, Mr Harris, got up, gave her his seat and got off the bus. [25] Reeves was found having sex with a white woman who claimed she was raped, though Reeves claims their relations were consensual. James Edward "Jungle Jim" Colvin, 69, of Juliette, Georgia, passed away on Saturday, February 25, 2023. The policeman arrived, displaying two of the characteristics for which white Southern men had become renowned: gentility and racism. "[38], Colvin's role has not gone completely unrecognized. Blake persisted. [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. The NMAAHC has a section dedicated to Rosa Parks, which Colvin does not want taken away, but her family's goal is to get the historical record right, and for officials to include Colvin's part of history. She was convicted on all charges, appealed and lost again. 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