Claudette Colvin

Claudette Colvin (born Claudette Austin; September 5, 1939) is an American pioneer of the 1950s civil rights movement and retired nurse aide.

Not long after, in September 1952, Colvin started attending Booker T. Washington High School.

Despite being a good student, Colvin had difficulty connecting with her peers in school due to grief.

She was also a member of the NAACP Youth Council, where she formed a close relationship with her mentor, Rosa Parks.

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 occurred nine months before the similar, more widely known incident in which Rosa Parks, secretary of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), helped spark the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott.

In 1955, Colvin was a student at the segregated Booker T. Washington High School in the city.

She relied on the city's buses to get to and from school because her family did not own a car.

The majority of customers on the bus system were African American, but they were discriminated against by its custom of segregated seating.

Colvin was a member of the NAACP Youth Council and had been learning about the civil rights movement in school.

On March 2, 1955, she was returning home from school.

She sat in the colored section about two seats away from an emergency exit, in a Capitol Heights bus.

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.

When a white woman who got on the bus was left standing in the front, the bus driver, Robert W. Cleere, commanded Colvin and three other black women in her row to move to the back.

The other three moved, but another black woman, Ruth Hamilton, who was pregnant, got on and sat next to Colvin.

The driver looked at the women in his mirror.

"He asked us both to get up. [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.

"So I told him I was not going to get up either. So he said, 'If you are not going to get up, I will get a policeman.'" The police arrived and convinced a black man sitting behind the two women to move so that Mrs. Hamilton could move back, but Colvin still refused to move.

She was forcibly removed from the bus and arrested by the two policemen, Thomas J. Ward and Paul Headley.

This event took place nine months before the NAACP secretary Rosa Parks was arrested for the same offense.

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.

In a United States district court, Colvin testified before the three-judge panel that heard the case.

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 on appeal by the state, which upheld the district court's ruling on November 13, 1956.

One month later, the Supreme Court affirmed the order to Montgomery and the state of Alabama to end bus segregation.

The Montgomery bus boycott was then called off after a few months.

The court subsequently declared all segregation on public transportation unconstitutional.

For many years, Montgomery's black leaders did not publicize Colvin's pioneering effort.

She has said, "Young people think Rosa Parks just sat down on a bus and ended segregation, but that wasn't the case at all."

Colvin's case was dropped by civil rights campaigners because she was unmarried and pregnant during the proceedings.

It is now widely accepted that she was not accredited by civil rights campaigners due to her circumstances.

Rosa Parks said: "If the white press got ahold of that information, they would have [had] a field day. They'd call her a bad girl, and her case wouldn't have a chance."

The record of Colvin's arrest and adjudication of delinquency was expunged by the district court in 2021, with the support of the district attorney for the county where the charges were brought more than 66 years earlier.

Colvin was born Claudette Austin in Montgomery, Alabama to Mary Jane Gadson and C. P. Austin.

When Austin abandoned the family, Gadson was unable to financially support her children.

Colvin and her younger sister, Delphine, were taken in by their great aunt and uncle, Mary Anne and Q. P. Colvin, whose daughter, Velma, had already moved out.

Colvin and her sister referred to the Colvins as their parents and took their last name.

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.

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.

Two days before Colvin's 13th birthday, Delphine died of polio.