Claudette Colvin

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Claudette Colvin bigraphy, stories - Activists

Claudette Colvin : biography

05 September 1939 –

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."Her circumstances would make her an extremely vulnerable standard-bearer." ISBN 0-671-68742-5 p. 123

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.", June 14, 1999
  • 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.

Biography

Colvin was born and grew up in Montgomery, Alabama., Montgomery Boycott 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 be 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.