Claudette Colvin
Claudette Colvin (born September 5, 1939) is a pioneer of the African-American civil rights movement. She was the first person to resist bus segregation in Montgomery, Alabama, preceding the better known Rosa Parks incident by nine months. The court case stemming from her refusal to give up her seat on the bus, Browder v. Gayle, decided by the U.S. District Court in February, 1956 and then by the United States Supreme Court in December, 1956, ended 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. The NAACP leaders worried about using her to represent their movement, given the social norms of the time.
Colvin lived in Montgomery, Alabama. In 1955, at the age of 15, she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white person, in violation of local law. Her arrest preceded that of Rosa Parks by nine months.
In 1955 Colvin was a student at Booker T. Washington High School in Montgomery. She was returning from school on March 2, 1955 when she got on a Capital Heights bus downtown (at the same place Parks boarded another bus nine months later). Colvin's family owned a car, but she relied on the city's buses to get to school.
She sat in the section where, if a white person was standing, the blacks would have to get up and move to the back. 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 change seats. When Colvin refused, she was removed from the bus and arrested by two police officers.
When she refused to get up, she was still thinking about a school paper that she had written that day. It was about the prohibition against blacks' trying on clothing in department stores. They were prohibited from using the dressing rooms.
"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 a classmate at the time, Annie Larkins Price. "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 on Colvin's behalf in the juvenile court case, where Colvin was convicted of violating the segregation law and assault." "There was no assault," Price said.
On May 11, 1956, Colvin, along with three other women, testified in a Montgomery federal court hearing about her actions on the bus in a case called Browder v. Gayle. During the trial, Claudette 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 fought all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court (which declared bus segregation unconstitutional in December 1956). Attorneys decided not to use Colvin in the lawsuit because they wanted to build a case that clearly challenged the legality of bus segregation. Colvin had been charged with disorderly conduct."
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Posted By: Cynthia Merrill Artis
Friday, January 25th 2013 at 2:37PM
You can also
click
here to view all posts by this author...
