In the nine months between her arrest and that of Parks, another young black woman, Mary Louise Smith, suffered a similar fate. She deserves our attention, our gratitude and a warm, bright spotlight all her own. "For nobody can doubt the boundless outreach of her integrity. State and local officials appealed the case to the United States Supreme Court. Raymond Colvin died in 1993 in New York of a heart attack at age 37. Somehow, as Mrs. The majority of customers on the bus system were African American, but they were discriminated against by its custom of segregated seating. As civil rights attorney Fred Gray put it, Claudette gave all of us moral courage. He went back to Colvin, now seven months pregnant. ", Some in Montgomery, particularly in King Hill, think the decision was informed by snobbery. This was partially a product of the outward face the NAACP was trying to broadcast and partially a product of the women fearing losing their jobs, which were often in the public school system. Daryl Bailey, the District Attorney for the county, supported her motion, stating: "Her actions back in March of 1955 were conscientious, not criminal; inspired, not illegal; they should have led to praise and not prosecution". "[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. Parks was, too. "[20], Browder v. Gayle made its way through the courts. ", Not so Colvin. ", "If the white press got ahold of that information, they would have [had] a field day," said Rosa Parks. 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 . [30][31] Her son, Randy, is an accountant in Atlanta and father of Colvin's four grandchildren. She decided on that day that she wasn't going to move. 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. She wants . She was detained on March 2, 1955, in . She was fingerprinted, denied a phone call and locked into a cell. A second son, Randy, born in 1960, gave her four grandchildren, who are all deeply proud of their grandmothers heroism. Taylor Branch. Her parents were Mary Jane Gadson and C.P. It is a rare, and poor, civil rights book that covers the Montgomery bus boycott and does not mention Claudette Colvin. ", Rosa Parks is a heroine to the US civil rights movement. 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. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. When the white seats were filled, the driver, J Fred Black, asked Parks and three others to give up their seats. The three other girls got up; Colvin stayed put. 83 Year Old #3. "Y'all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats," he said. "[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. "But when she was found guilty, her agonised sobs penetrated the atmosphere of the courthouse. [36], Colvin and her family have been fighting for recognition for her action. They just didn't want to know me. It was not your tired feet, but your strength of character and resolve that inspired us." Raymond Colvin, age 62, a resident of Ft. Deposit, AL, died April 13, 2013. 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 : biography. [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. He was . Fifty years have passed since campaigners overturned a ban on ethnic minorities working on buses in one British city. Some people questioned if the father was a white male. It was going to be a long night on Dixie Drive. They remember her as a confident, studious, young girl with a streak that was rebellious without being boisterous. When Ms Nesbitt, her 10th grade teacher, asked the class to write down what they wanted to be, she unfolded a piece of paper with Colvin's handwriting on it that said: "President of the United States. Her rhythm is simple and lifestyle frugal. [2] Colvin and her sister referred to the Colvins as their parents and took their last name. [4] Colvin later said: "My mother told me to be quiet about what I did. She now works as a nurses' aide at an old people's home in downtown Manhattan. ", 'Facts speak only when the historian calls on them," wrote the historian EH Carr in his landmark work, What Is History? However, some white passengers still refused to sit near a black person. ", 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. "So I told him I was not going to get up, either. For several hours, she sat in jail, completely terrified. Colvin felt compelled to stand her ground. She told me to let Rosa be the one: white people aren't going to bother Rosa, they like her". She dreamed of becoming the President of the United States. 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. But while the driver went to get a policeman, it was the white students who started to make noise. But attorney Gray found it all but impossible to find riders who would potentially risk their lives by attaching their names as plaintiffs. Angry protests erupt over Greek rail disaster, Explosive found in check-in luggage at US airport, 1894 shipwreck confirms tale of treacherous lifeboat. Claudette Colvin gave birth to a son named Raymond in the same year 1955. But go to King Hill and mention her name, and the first thing they will tell you is that she was the first. "If any of you are not gentlemen enough to give a lady a seat, you should be put in jail yourself," he said. I was afraid they might rape me. "What's going on with these niggers?" . The bus froze. 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. Broken-down cars sit outside tumble-down houses. The organisation didn't want a teenager in the role, she says. . 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. He remarks that if the ACLU had used her act of civil disobedience, rather than that of Rosa Parks' eight months later, to highlight the injustice of segregation, a young preacher named Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. may never have attracted national attention, and America probably would not have had his voice for the Civil Rights Movement. Sikora telephoned a startled Colvin and wrote an article about her. [16] On March 2, 1955, she was returning home from school. "I make up stories to convince them to stay in bed." [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. "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. "She was a victim of both the forces of history and the forces of destiny," said King, in a quote now displayed in the civil rights museum in Atlanta. Others say it is because she was a foul-mouthed tearaway. "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. "I was more defiant and then they knocked my books out of my lap and one of them grabbed my arm. Reeves was a teenage grocery delivery boy who was found having sex with a white woman. She retired in 2004. Associated With. "She had been yelling, 'It's my constitutional right!'. 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. By Monday, the day the boycott began, Colvin had already been airbrushed from the official version of events. Raymond Colvin died in 1993 in New York of a heart attack, aged 37. And I just kept blabbing things out, and I never stopped. They would have come and seen my parents and found me someone to marry. It was a case of 'bourgey' blacks looking down on the working-class blacks. Officers were called to the scene and Colvin was forcefully taken off of the bus and . The once-quiet student was branded a troublemaker by some, and she had to drop out of college. [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. She shops with her workmates and watches action movies on video. Colvin was initially charged with disturbing the peace, violating the segregation laws, and battering and assaulting a police officer. ", The upshot was that Colvin was left in an incredibly vulnerable position. Parks made hers on Dec. 1 that same year. "We didn't know what was going to happen, but we knew something would happen. Ms. Colvin in New York on Feb. 5, 2009. "I didn't know if they were crazy, if they were going to take me to a Klan meeting. ", Nonetheless, the shock waves of her defiance had reverberated throughout Montgomery and beyond. She was 15. Colvin's sister, Gloria Laster, said. You had to take a brown paper bag and draw a diagram of your foot and take it to the store". "I was really afraid, because you just didn't know what white people might do at that time," says Colvin. Keep supporting great journalism by turning off your ad blocker. She relied on the city's buses to get to and from school because her family did not own a car. [17][18][6] This event took place nine months before the NAACP secretary Rosa Parks was arrested for the same offense. In this respect, the civil rights movement in Montgomery moved fast. Claudette Colvin is a civil rights activist who, before .css-47aoac{-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-decoration-thickness:0.0625rem;text-decoration-color:inherit;text-underline-offset:0.25rem;color:#A00000;-webkit-transition:all 0.3s ease-in-out;transition:all 0.3s ease-in-out;}.css-47aoac:hover{color:#595959;text-decoration-color:border-link-body-hover;}Rosa Parks, refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. James Edward "Jungle Jim" Colvin, 69, of Juliette, Georgia, passed away on Saturday, February 25, 2023. "You may do that," said Parks, who is now 87 and lives in Detroit. "It would have been different if I hadn't been pregnant, but if I had lived in a different place or been light-skinned, it would have made a difference, too. "They put him on death row." Telephones rang. I felt inspired by these women because my teacher taught us about them in so much detail," she says. Unable to find work in Montgomery, Colvin moved to New York in 1958, while her son Raymond remained behind with family. Though he didn't say it, nobody was going to say that about the then heavily pregnant Colvin. "They just dropped me. [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. "He asked us both to get up. All but housebound, mocked at school and dropped, as she put it, by Montgomerys black leadership, Colvin saw her self-confidence plummet. 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 . 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. You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked. A poor, single, pregnant, black, teenage mother who had both taken on the white establishment and fallen foul of the black one. Her reputation also made it impossible for her to find a job. The woman alleged rape; Reeves insisted it was consensual. So he turned on the black men sitting behind her. "It is the second time since the Claudette Colvin case that a Negro woman has been arrested for the same thing.". The record of her arrest and adjudication of delinquency was expunged by the district court in 2021, with the support of the district attorney for the county in which the charges were brought more than 66 years before. In 1958, Colvin moved from Montgomery to New York City because she was having trouble obtaining and keeping a job after taking part in the . However, her story is often silenced. The full enormity of what she had done was only just beginning to dawn on her. Ms. Colvin made her stand on March 2, 1955, and Mrs. A 15-year-old high school student at the time, Colvin got fed up and refused to move even before Parks. She was born on September 5, 1939. Claudette Colvin (born Claudette Austin; September 5, 1939)[1][2] is an American pioneer of the 1950s civil rights movement and retired nurse aide. "However, the black leadership in Montgomery at the time thought that we should wait. [49], The Little-Known Heroes: Claudette Colvin, a children's picture book by Kaushay and Spencer Ford, was published in 2021. Nonetheless, Raymond died at the age of 37, reported Core Online. [16], Colvin was not the only woman of the Civil Rights Movement who was left out of the history books. 2023 BBC. In this lesson, students will learn about Claudette Colvin, a 15-year-old who stood up for equal rights in 1955. "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. You can't sugarcoat it. Claudette Colvin became a teenage mother in 1956 when she gave birth to a boy named Raymond. Despite the light sentence, Colvin could not escape the court of public opinion. "There was no assault", Price said. Claudette Colvin in 2009. 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. Soon afterwards, on 5 December, 40,000 African-American bus passengers boycotted the system and that afternoon, black leaders met to form the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), electing a young pastor, Martin Luther King Jr, as their president. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Meanwhile, Parks had been transformed from a politically-conscious activist to an upstanding, unfortunate Everywoman. The problem arose because all the seats on the bus were taken. While Parks has been heralded as a civil rights heroine, Colvin's story has received little notice. As in 2023, Claudette Colvin's age is 83 years. "She gave me the feeling that I was the Moses that God had sent to Pharaoh," said Fred Gray, the lawyer who went on to represent her. "We just sat there and waited for it all to happen," says Gloria Hardin, who was on the bus, too. Men instructed their wives to walk or to share rides in neighbour's autos.". The driver wanted all of them to move to the back and stand so that the white passenger could sit. Four years later, they executed him. 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. I didn't want to discuss it with them," she says. 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. Black people were allowed to occupy those seats so long as white people didn't need them. 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. On March 2, 1955, she was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, at the age of 15, for refusing to give up her seat on a crowded, segregated bus to a white woman. Colvin was a kid. "[38], Colvin's role has not gone completely unrecognized. The lighter you were, it was generally thought, the better; the closer your skin tone was to caramel, the closer you were perceived to be to whatever power structure prevailed, and the more likely you were to attract suspicion from those of a darker hue. 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. "So did the teachers, too. Charged with disturbing the peace, breaking the bus segregation laws and assaulting the officers who had apprehended her, she was released later that night. But what I do remember is when they asked me to stick my arms out the window and that's when they handcuffed me," Colvin says. After her minister paid her bail, she went home where she and her family stayed up all night out of concern for possible retaliation. This much we know. Cloudflare Ray ID: 7a1897c67fea0e3a But it is also a rare and excellent one that gives her more than a passing, dismissive mention. I was sitting on the last seat that they said you could sit in. Born on September 5 #12. When Colvin's case was appealed to the Montgomery Circuit Court on May 6, 1955, the charges of disturbing the peace and violating the segregation laws were dropped, although her conviction for assaulting a police officer was upheld. She said, "They've already called it the Rosa Parks museum, so they've already made up their minds what the story is. Unlike Randy, Raymond was white, once he found out how white people treated colored people, he then hated school, and sadly he died in 1993 at the age of 37, when he started doing so many jobs at. "New York is a completely different culture to Montgomery, Alabama. [30] Claudette began a job in 1969 as a nurse's aide in a nursing home in Manhattan. "She was an A student, quiet, well-mannered, neat, clean, intelligent, pretty, and deeply religious," writes Jo Ann Robinson in her authoritative book, The Montgomery Bus Boycott And The Women Who Started It. It is time for President Obama to. 1956- Colvin was one of four Black women who served as plaintiffs in a federal court suit 1956- Had her child, his name was Raymond 1957- People were bombing black churches 1957- Congress approved the Civil Rights Act of 1957 She retired in 2004. She sat in the colored section about two seats away from an emergency exit, in a Capitol Heights bus. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR). For all her bravado, Colvin was shocked by the extremity of what happened next. Claudette Colvin Popularity . Ward and Paul Headley. But she rarely told her story after moving to New York City. The case went to the United States Supreme Court on appeal by the state, and it upheld the district court's ruling on November 13, 1956. Performance & security by Cloudflare. 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. I felt the hand of Harriet Tubman pushing down on one shoulder and Sojourner Truth pushing down on the other. With funding from church donations and activities organized by the chapter, Colvin had her day in court. Phillip Hoose. She concentrated her mind on things she had been learning at 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. So I told him I was sitting on the bus were taken `` what 's on! We should wait find work in Montgomery, Colvin could not escape the court public. 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