It is this that incenses Patton. Claudette Colvin gave birth to a son named Raymond in the same year 1955. In the south, male ministers made up the overwhelming . "I was more defiant and then they knocked my books out of my lap and one of them grabbed my arm. Blake approached her. Eclipsed by Parks, her act of defiance was largely ignored for many years. [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. Aster is known as a talisman of love and an enduring symbol of elegance. She had sons named Raymond and Randy. "If any of you are not gentlemen enough to give a lady a seat, you should be put in jail yourself," he said. Martin Luther King Jr., had been seeking to stir the outrage of African Americans and sympathetic whites into civic action. ", When the boycott was over and the African-American community had emerged victorious, King, Nixon and Parks appeared for the cameras. [2][14] Despite being a good student, Colvin had difficulty connecting with her peers in school due to grief. Video, 1894 shipwreck confirms tale of treacherous lifeboat, Claudette Colvin's interview on Outlook on the BBC World Service, Whiskey fungus forces Jack Daniels to stop construction, Harry and Meghan told to 'vacate' Frogmore Cottage, Rare Jurassic-era bug found at Arkansas Walmart, Havana Syndrome unlikely to have hostile cause - US, India PM Modi urges G20 to overcome divisions, Starbucks illegally fired workers over union - judge, NFL hopeful accused of racing in deadly car crash. The case, organized and filed in federal court by civil rights attorney Fred Gray, challenged city bus segregation in Montgomery as unconstitutional. Two more kicks soon followed. In the 2010s, Larkin arranged for a street to be named after Colvin. But attorney Gray found it all but impossible to find riders who would potentially risk their lives by attaching their names as plaintiffs. A 15-year-old high school student at the time, Colvin got fed up and refused to move even before Parks. When the trial was held, Colvin pleaded innocent but was found guilty and released on indefinite probation in her parents' care. She shops with her workmates and watches action movies on video. Her son Raymond Colvin died of a heart attack in 1993. Claudette Colvin, Who Was Arrested for Refusing to Give Up Her Bus Seat in 1955, Is Fighting to Clear Her Record The civil rights pioneer pushed back against segregation nine months before Rosa. .css-m6thd4{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;display:block;margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;font-family:Gilroy,Helvetica,Arial,Sans-serif;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.2;font-weight:bold;color:#323232;text-transform:capitalize;}@media (any-hover: hover){.css-m6thd4:hover{color:link-hover;}}How the Greensboro Four Began the Sit-In Movement, Biography: You Need to Know: Bayard Rustin, Biography: You Need to Know: Sylvia Rivera, Biography: You Need to Know: Dorothy Pittman Hughes, 10 Influential Asian American and Pacific Islander Activists. "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. The court declared her a ward of the state and remanded her to the custody of her family. ", Almost 50 years on, Colvin still talks about the incident with a mixture of shock and indignation - as though she still cannot believe that this could have happened to her. One month later, the Supreme Court declined to reconsider, and on December 20, 1956, the court ordered Montgomery and the state of Alabama to end bus segregation permanently. "I wasn't with it at all. She says she expected some abuse from the driver, but nothing more. Though he didn't say it, nobody was going to say that about the then heavily pregnant Colvin. She prayed furiously as they sped out, with the cop leering over her, guessing at her bra size. 2023 BBC. She said she felt as if she was "getting [her] Christmas in January rather than the 25th. On 2 March 1955, Colvin and her friends finished their classes and were let out of school early. History had me glued to the seat.. We used to have a lot of juke joints up there, and maybe men would drink too much and get into a fight. By the time she got home, her parents already knew. We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right,contact us! If one white person wanted to sit down there, then all the black people on that row were supposed to get up and either stand or move further to the back. After her refusal to give up her seat, Colvin was arrested on several charges, including violating the city's segregation laws. She was fingerprinted, denied a phone call and locked into a cell. Complexity, with all its nuances and shaded realities, is a messy business. Keep supporting great journalism by turning off your ad blocker. Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. Site contains certain content that is owned A&E Television Networks, LLC. One month later, the Supreme Court affirmed the order to Montgomery and the state of Alabama to end bus segregation. 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. But, as she recalls her teenage years after the arrest and the pregnancy, she hovers between resentment, sadness and bewilderment at the way she was treated. Colvin could not attend the proclamation due to health concerns. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR). King's role in the boycott transformed him into a national figure of the civil rights movement, 1894 shipwreck confirms tale of treacherous lifeboat. All I could do is cry. Colvin gave birth to Raymond, a son. "Move y'all, I want those two seats," he yelled. Betty Shabbaz, the widow of Malcolm X, was one of them. The baby was fair-skinned just like his dad and people accused her of having a white baby. After training, she landed a job as a nurses aide in a Catholic hospital in Manhattan. Smith was arrested in October 1955, but was also not considered an appropriate candidate for a broader campaign - ED Nixon claimed that her father was a drunkard; Smith insists he was teetotal. They would have come and seen my parents and found me someone to marry. BBC World Service. He was born on March 3, 1931, in Mound City, S.D., the son of Alfred Gunderson and Verna Johnson Gunderson. Reverend Ralph Abernathy, who played a key role as King's right-hand man throughout the civil rights years, referred to her as a "tool" of the movement. 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. A poor, single, pregnant, black, teenage mother who had both taken on the white establishment and fallen foul of the black one. [30], Colvin was a predecessor to the Montgomery bus boycott movement of 1955, which gained national attention. 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. I didn't want to discuss it with them," she says. 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. Raymond Colvin died in 1993 in New York of a heart attack at age 37. Claudette Colvin was an American civil rights activist during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. 83 Year Old #3. During her pregnancy, she was abandoned by civil rights leaders. Colvin was a kid. Her casting as the prim, ageing, guileless seamstress with her hair in a bun who just happened to be in the wrong place at the right time denied her track record of militancy and feminism. But there were two things about Colvin's stand on that March day that made it significant. It was a case of 'bourgey' blacks looking down on the working-class blacks. "Whenever people ask me: 'Why didn't you get up when the bus driver asked you?' But she rarely told her story after moving to New York City. He wasn't." Like Parks, she, too, pleaded not guilty to breaking the law. In high school, she had high ambitions of political activity. And I just kept blabbing things out, and I never stopped. In 1960, she gave birth to her second son, Randy. A group of black civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King, Jr., was organized to discuss Colvin's arrest with the police commissioner. "So I went and I testified about the system and I was saying that the system treated us unfairly and I used some of the language that they used when we got taken off the bus.". 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. However, some white passengers still refused to sit near a black person. Similarly, Rosa Parks left Montgomery for Detroit in 1957. [2] She was also a member of the NAACP Youth Council, where she formed a close relationship with her mentor, Rosa Parks. 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. Claudette had two sons named Raymond and Randy Colvin, and her first pregnancy was at the age of 16 with a much older man. She was arrested and became one of four plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, which ruled that Montgomery's segregated bus system was unconstitutional. But Colvin told the driver she had paid her fare and that it was her constitutional right to remain where she was. [citation needed]. Colvin went to her job instead. I say it felt as though Harriet Tubman's hands were pushing me down on one shoulder and Sojourner Truth's hands were pushing me down on the other shoulder. New York, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, This page was last edited on 1 March 2023, at 23:25. He was . ", She believes that, if her pregnancy had been the only issue, they would have found a way to overcome it. ", The upshot was that Colvin was left in an incredibly vulnerable position. In 2009, the writer Phillip Hoose published a book that told her story in detail for the first time. Most of the people didn't have problems with us sitting on the bus, most New Yorkers cared about economic problems. Claudette Colvin became a teenage mother in 1956 when she gave birth to a boy named Raymond. "The light-skinned girls always thought they were better looking," says Colvin. I didn't get up, because I didn't feel like I was breaking the law. [28], The Montgomery bus boycott was able to unify the people of Montgomery, regardless of educational background or class. Going to a segregated school had one advantage, she found - her teachers gave her a good grounding in black history. On March 2, 1955, Colvin was riding home on a city bus after school when a bus driver told her to give up her seat to a white passenger. [20] In a later interview, she said: "We couldn't try on clothes. The pace of life is so slow and the mood so mellow that local residents look as if they have been wading through molasses in a half-hearted attempt to catch up with the past 50 years. Blake persisted. "Middle-class blacks looked down on King Hill," says Colvin today. One white woman defended Colvin to the police; another said that, if she got away with this, "they will take over". The driver kept on going but stopped when he reached a junction where a police squad car was waiting. March 2 was named Claudette Colvin Day in Montgomery. 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. "I do feel like what I did was a spark and it caught on. "[22] Colvin was handcuffed, arrested, and forcibly removed from the bus. "When ED Nixon and the Women's Political Council of Montgomery recognised that you could be that hero, you met the challenge and changed our lives forever. Read about our approach to external linking. The driver wanted all of them to move to the back and stand so that the white passenger could sit. "But when she was found guilty, her agonised sobs penetrated the atmosphere of the courthouse. The policeman grabbed her and took her to a patrolman's car in which his colleagues were waiting. None of them spoke to me; they didn't see if I was okay. She was born on September 5, 1939. Colvins son Raymond died in 1993. That summer she became pregnant by a much older man. [51], National Museum of African American History and Culture, "Power Dynamics of a Segregated City: Class, Gender, and Claudette Colvin's Struggle for Equality", "Before Rosa Parks, Claudette Colvin Stayed in Her Bus Seat", "From Footnote to Fame in Civil Rights History", "Before Rosa Parks, A Teenager Defied Segregation On An Alabama Bus", "Chapter 1 (excerpt): 'Up From Pine Level', "#ThrowbackThursday: The girl who acted before Rosa Parks", "Claudette Colvin: an unsung hero in the Montgomery Bus Boycott", "The Origins of the Montgomery Bus Boycott", "A Forgotten Contribution: Before Rosa Parks, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat on the bus", "Claudette Colvin: First to keep her seat", "Claudette Colvin | Americans Who Tell The Truth", "Claudette Colvin: the woman who refused to give up her bus seat nine months before Rosa Parks", "2 other bus boycott heroes praise Parks' acclaim", "This once-forgotten civil rights hero deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom", "Chairman Crowley Honors Civil Rights Pioneer Claudette Colvin", "The Other Rosa Parks: Now 73, Claudette Colvin Was First to Refuse Giving Up Seat on Montgomery Bus", "Claudette Colvin Seeks Greater Recognition For Role In Making Civil Rights History", "Weekend: Civil rights heroine Claudette Colvin", "Claudette Colvin honored by Montgomery council", "Alabama unveils statue of civil rights icon Rosa Parks", "Rosa Parks statue unveiled in Alabama on anniversary of her refusal to give up seat", "She refused to move bus seats months before Rosa Parks. 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