[16] On March 2, 1955, she was returning home from school. Colvin left Montgomery for New York in 1958, because she had difficulty finding and keeping work after the notoriety of the . Colvin went to her job instead. Although some of the details might seem familiar, this is not the Rosa Parks story. Tour: Black America and the burden of the perfect victim. Despite the light sentence, Colvin could not escape the court of public opinion. [2][14] Despite being a good student, Colvin had difficulty connecting with her peers in school due to grief. The driver, James Blake, turned around and ordered the black passengers to go to the back of the bus, so that the whites could take their places. In a United States district court, she testified before the three-judge panel that heard the case. "The white people were always seated at the front of the bus and the black people were seated at the back of the bus. Anything to detach herself from the horror of reality. She sat down in the front of the bus and refused to move on her own will when asked. Raymond Colvin died in 1993 in New York of a heart attack, aged 37. After training, she landed a job as a nurses aide in a Catholic hospital in Manhattan. Colvin has said, "Young people think Rosa Parks just sat down on a bus and ended segregation, but that wasn't the case at all. By then I didnt have much time for celebrating anyway. 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. [16][19], When Colvin refused to get up, she was thinking about a school paper she had written that day about the local customs that prohibited blacks from using the dressing rooms in order to try on clothes in department stores. She has literally become a footnote in history. In 2016, the Smithsonian Institution and its National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) were challenged by Colvin and her family, who asked that Colvin be given a more prominent mention in the history of the civil rights movement. It is this that incenses Patton. She worked there for 35 years, retiring in 2004. Councilman Larkin's sister was on the bus in 1955 when Colvin was arrested. "We learned about negro spirituals and recited poems but my social studies teachers went into more detail," she says. She was fingerprinted, denied a phone call and locked into a cell. She gave birth to a fair-skin child named Raymond in the year 1956 whose skin tone was similar to her partner. Keep supporting great journalism by turning off your ad blocker. At the time, Parks was a seamstress in a local department store but was also a secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP). At the time, black leaders, including the Rev. "I remember during Easter one year, I was to get a pair of black patent shoes but you could only get them from the white stores, so my mother drew the outline of my feet on a brown paper bag in order to get the closest size, because we weren't allowed to go in the store to try them on.". Martin Luther King Jr., had been seeking to stir the outrage of African Americans and sympathetic whites into civic action. She appreciated, but never embraced, King's strategy of nonviolent resistance, remains a keen supporter of Malcolm X and was constantly frustrated by sexism in the movement. Video1894 shipwreck confirms tale of treacherous lifeboat, How 10% of Nigerian registered voters delivered victory, Sake brewers toast big rise in global sales, The Indian-American CEO who wants to be US president, Blackpink lead top stars back on the road in Asia, Exploring the rigging claims in Nigeria's elections, 'Wales is in England' gaffe sparks TikToker's trip. "I was really afraid, because you just didn't know what white people might do at that time," says Colvin. The young Ms. Colvin was portrayed by actress Mariah Iman Wilson. [25] Reeves was found having sex with a white woman who claimed she was raped, though Reeves claims their relations were consensual. Let the people know Rosa Parks was the right person for the boycott. Clubs called special meetings and discussed the event with some degree of alarm. ", The upshot was that Colvin was left in an incredibly vulnerable position. But people in King Hill do not remember Colvin as that type of girl, and the accusation irritates Colvin to this day. Somehow, as Mrs. "For nobody can doubt the boundless outreach of her integrity. [24] She was convicted on all three charges in juvenile court. Parkss protest helped spark the Montgomery bus boycott, which black leaders sought to supplement with a federal civil suit challenging the constitutionality of Montgomerys bus laws. She became quiet and withdrawn. I was thinking, Hey, I did that months ago, Colvin recalled. Her reputation also made it impossible for her to find a job. They felt she had the maturity to handle being at the center of potential controversy. Despite her personal challenges, Colvin became one of the four plaintiffs in the Browder v. Gayle case, along with Aurelia S. Browder, Susie McDonald and Mary Louise Smith (Jeanatta Reese, who was initially named a plaintiff in the case, withdrew early on due to outside pressure). It was going to be a long night on Dixie Drive. 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 . Raymond Colvin, age 62, a resident of Ft. Deposit, AL, died April 13, 2013. Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page. Claudette Colvin's birth flower is Aster/Myosotis. I was sitting on the last seat that they said you could sit in. Betty Shabbaz, the widow of Malcolm X, was one of them. The woman alleged rape; Reeves insisted it was consensual. The case, organized and filed in federal court by civil rights attorney Fred Gray, challenged city bus segregation in Montgomery as unconstitutional. Claudette Colvin was the first person arrested by the police in Montgomery, AL for refusing to give up her bus seat. 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. ", But even as she inspired awe throughout the country, elders within Montgomery's black community began to doubt her suitability as a standard-bearer of the movement. "Y'all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats," he said. She needed support. He went back to Colvin, now seven months pregnant. 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. She concentrated her mind on things she had been learning at school. I think that history only has room enough for certainyou know, how many icons can you choose? She was forcibly removed from the bus and arrested by the two policemen, Thomas J. [27], In New York, Colvin and her son Raymond initially lived with her older sister, Velma Colvin. But the very spirit and independence of mind that had inspired Parks to challenge segregation started to pose a threat to Montgomery's black male hierarchy, which had started to believe, and then resent, their own spin. 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. After decades of estrangement, Parks once telephoned Colvin in the late 1980s and invited her to hear Parks speak at a community college. "I respect my elders, but I don't respect what they did to Colvin," she says. She was born on September 5, 1939. - Claudette Colvin On March 2, 1955, an impassioned teenager, fed up with the daily injustices of Jim Crow segregation, refused to give her seat to a white woman on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. "Are you going to stand up?" In August that year, a 14-year-old boy called Emmet Till had said, "Bye, baby", to a woman at a store in nearby Mississippi, and was fished out of the nearby Tallahatchie river a few days later, dead with a bullet in his skull, his eye gouged out and one side of his forehead crushed. 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. Your IP: "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. The urban bustle surrounding her could not seem further away from King Hill. The story of Colvins courage might have been forgotten forever had not Frank Sikora, a Birmingham newspaper reporter assigned in 1975 to write a retrospective of the bus boycott, remembered that there had been a girl arrested before Parks. "[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. he asked. "I was really afraid, because you just didn't know what white people might do at that time," Colvin later said. ", 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. 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. That summer she became pregnant by a much older man. Colvin's sister, Gloria Laster, said. 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. Broken-down cars sit outside tumble-down houses. King Hill, Montgomery, is the sepia South. She fell out of history altogether. In this lesson, students will learn about Claudette Colvin, a 15-year-old who stood up for equal rights in 1955. So he said, 'If you are not going to get up, I will get a policeman. Respectfully and faithfully yours. (Julie Jacobson/Associated Press). asked the policeman. "It is the second time since the Claudette Colvin case that a Negro woman has been arrested for the same thing.". He was drug-addicted and alcoholic and passed away of a cardiac attack in Colvin's apartment. And I just kept blabbing things out, and I never stopped. I was glued to my seat. 45.148.121.138 Rembert said, "I know people have heard her name before, but I just thought we should have a day to celebrate her." "The news travelled fast," wrote Robinson. A memorial service will be held at 11:00 AM, Saturday, March 4, 2023, at East Juliette . Gary Younge investigates, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning. Join the conversation - find us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter. Colvin was the first person to be arrested for challenging Montgomery's bus segregation policies, so her story made a few local papers - but nine months later, the same act of defiance by Rosa Parks was reported all over the world. "I wasn't with it at all. [9] 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. 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. "But when she was found guilty, her agonised sobs penetrated the atmosphere of the courthouse. 83 Year Old #3. After her refusal to give up her seat, Colvin was arrested on several charges, including violating the city's segregation laws. How encouraging it would be if more adults had your courage, self-respect and integrity. Claudette Colvin was an African American civil rights activist who pioneered the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s. "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. Claudette Colvin was born Claudette Austin in Montgomery, Alabama, on September 5, 1939, to Mary Jane Gadson and C. P. Austin. Some have tried to change that. ", "I wanted to go north and liberate my people," explains Colvin. So we choose the facts to fit the narrative we want to hear. 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