Another factor was that before long Colvin became pregnant. Broken-down cars sit outside tumble-down houses. You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked. 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. The case, organized and filed in federal court by civil rights attorney Fred Gray, challenged city bus segregation in Montgomery as unconstitutional. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. NPR's Margot Adler has said that black organizations believed that Rosa Parks would be a better figure for a test case for integration because she was an adult, had a job, and had a middle-class appearance. [2][14] Despite being a good student, Colvin had difficulty connecting with her peers in school due to grief. "She had remained calm all during the days of her waiting period and during the trial," wrote Robinson. The full enormity of what she had done was only just beginning to dawn on her. Jeanetta Reese later resigned from the case. 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 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. [43] The judge ordered that the juvenile record be expunged and destroyed in December 2021, stating that Colvin's refusal had "been recognized as a courageous act on her behalf and on behalf of a community of affected people". ", Rosa Parks is a heroine to the US civil rights movement. Then, they will reflect on a time when they took a stand on an important issue. 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). I was afraid they might rape me. It was a case of 'bourgey' blacks looking down on the working-class blacks. They'd call her a bad girl, and her case wouldn't have a chance."[6][8]. Rosa Parks was thrown off the bus on a Thursday; by Friday, activists were distributing leaflets that highlighted her arrest as one of many, including those of Colvin and Mary Louise Smith: "Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown in jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down," they read. [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. The Montgomery bus boycott was then called off after a few months. Colvin took her seat near the emergency door next to one black girl; two others sat across the aisle from her. The United States District Court ruled the state of Alabama and Montgomery's bus segregation laws were unconstitutional. 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. [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. [11][12], Two days before Colvin's 13th birthday, Delphine died of polio. Colvin was a kid. [29], Colvin gave birth to a son, Raymond, in March 1956. Her voice is soft and high, almost shrill. One month later, the Supreme Court affirmed the order to Montgomery and the state of Alabama to end bus segregation. ", 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. And I just kept blabbing things out, and I never stopped. In the south, male ministers made up the overwhelming majority of leaders. 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. I had been kicked out of school, and I had a 3-month-old baby.. The churches, buses and schools were all segregated and you couldn't even go into the same restaurants," Claudette Colvin says. Claudette Colvin became a teenage mother in 1956 when she gave birth to a boy named Raymond. "The news travelled fast," wrote Robinson. Colvin later moved to New York City and worked as a nurse's aide. "I told Mrs Parks, as I had told other leaders in Montgomery, that I thought the Claudette Colvin arrest was a good test case to end segregation on the buses," says Fred Gray, Parks's lawyer. "They said they didn't want to use a pregnant teenager because it would be controversial and the people would talk about the pregnancy more than the boycott," Colvin says. Though he didn't say it, nobody was going to say that about the then heavily pregnant Colvin. 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. And that person, it transpired, would be Rosa Parks. The bus went three stops before several white passengers got on. Black people were allowed to occupy those seats so long as white people didn't need them. A sanitation worker, Mr Harris, got up, gave her his seat and got off the bus. "We just sat there and waited for it all to happen," says Gloria Hardin, who was on the bus, too. 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. But she rarely told her story after moving to New York City. [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. 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. Claudette Colvin was an African American civil rights activist who pioneered the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s. She told me to let Rosa be the one: white people aren't going to bother Rosa, they like her". She works the night shift and sleeps "when the sleep falls on her" during the day. Moreover, she was not the first person to take a stand by keeping her seat and challenging the system. 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. Claudette Colvin (born Claudette Austin; September 5, 1939) [1] [2] is an American pioneer of the 1950s civil rights movement and retired nurse aide. The organisation didn't want a teenager in the role, she says. "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. History had me glued to the seat.. "Mrs Parks was a married woman," said ED Nixon. "I felt like Sojourner Truth was pushing down on one shoulder and Harriet Tubman was pushing down on the othersaying, 'Sit down girl!' [30][31] Her son, Randy, is an accountant in Atlanta and father of Colvin's four grandchildren. 9. She worked there for 35 years, retiring in 2004. Colvin never married but gave birth to two sons, the first was Raymond Colvin (b. December 1955, died 1993). He was . After her minister paid her bail, she went home where she and her family stayed up all night out of concern for possible retaliation. Colvin has retired from her job and has been living her life. Officers were called to the scene and Colvin was forcefully taken off of the bus and . Today, she sits in a diner in the Bronx, her pudding-basin haircut framing a soft face with a distant smile. She was arrested and became one of four plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, which ruled that Montgomery's segregated bus system was unconstitutional. "She lived in a little shack. 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. She and her son Raymond moved in with Velma while Colvin looked for work. For Colvin, the entire episode was traumatic: "Nowadays, you'd call it statutory rape, but back then it was just the kind of thing that happened," she says, describing the conditions under which she conceived. She is a civil rights activist from the 1950s and a retired nurse aide. If I had told my father who did it, he would have killed him. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. She deserves our attention, our gratitude and a warm, bright spotlight all her own. "I wasn't frightened but disappointed and angry because I knew I was sitting in the right seat.". It wasn't a bad area, but it had a reputation." Two more kicks soon followed. "Middle-class blacks looked down on King Hill," says Colvin today. 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. 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 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. She has literally become a footnote in history. She was convicted on all charges, appealed and lost again. In the 2010s, Larkin arranged for a street to be named after Colvin. I didn't get up, because I didn't feel like I was breaking the law. Phillip Hoose also wrote about her in the young adult biography Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice. Claudette Colvin is a civil rights activist of African descent. I was sitting on the last seat that they said you could sit in. [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. "We walked downtown and my friends and I saw the bus and decided to get on, it was right across the road from Dr Martin Luther King's church," Colvin says. She refused to name the father or have anything to do with him. Funeral Services will be held Saturday, April 20, 2013 at 11:00 a.m. at the Ft. Deposit Municipal Complex with Pastor. In 1960, she gave birth to her second son, Randy. It was believed that a venomous snake would die if placed in a vessel made of sapphire. The other three moved, but another black woman, Ruth Hamilton, who was pregnant, got on and sat next to Colvin. [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. Tour: Black America and the burden of the perfect victim. "If any of you are not gentlemen enough to give a lady a seat, you should be put in jail yourself," he said. Despite the light sentence, Colvin could not escape the court of public opinion. This led to a few articles and profiles by others in subsequent years. [24] She was convicted on all three charges in juvenile court. She was born on September 5, 1939. Claudette Colvin was the first person arrested by the police in Montgomery, AL for refusing to give up her bus seat. Meanwhile, Parks had been transformed from a politically-conscious activist to an upstanding, unfortunate Everywoman. This much we know. "I thought he would stop and shout and then drive on. . Members of the community acted as lookouts, while Colvin's father sat up all night with a shotgun, in case the Ku Klux Klan turned up. Either way, he had violated the South's deeply ingrained taboo on interracial sex - Alabama only voted to legalise interracial marriage last month (the state held a referendum at the same time as the ballot for the US presidency), and then only by a 60-40 majority. Two years earlier, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, African-Americans launched an effective bus boycott after drivers refused to honour an integrated seating policy, which was settled in an unsatisfactory fudge. Mayor Todd Strange presented the proclamation and, when speaking of Colvin, said, "She was an early foot soldier in our civil rights, and we did not want this opportunity to go by without declaring March 2 as Claudette Colvin Day to thank her for her leadership in the modern day civil rights movement." A 15-year-old high school student at the time, Colvin got fed up and refused to move even before Parks. She retired in 2004. "I went bipolar. Until recently, none of her workmates knew anything of her pioneering role in the civil rights movement. The driver looked at the women in his mirror. In high school, she had high ambitions of political activity. They felt she had the maturity to handle being at the center of potential controversy. With funding from church donations and activities organized by the chapter, Colvin had her day in court. Claudette Colvin's birth flower is Aster/Myosotis. 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. It is time for President Obama to. 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 would sit in the back and no one would even know I was there. She needed support. However, some white passengers still refused to sit near a black person. Under the twisted logic of segregation the white woman still couldn't sit down, as then white and black passengers would have been sharing a row of seats - and the whole point was that white passengers were meant to be closer to the front. They forced her into the back of a squad car, one officer jumping in after her. She became quiet and withdrawn. [30] Claudette began a job in 1969 as a nurse's aide in a nursing home in Manhattan. She shops with her workmates and watches action movies on video. Her rhythm is simple and lifestyle frugal. Angry protests erupt over Greek rail disaster, Explosive found in check-in luggage at US airport, 1894 shipwreck confirms tale of treacherous lifeboat. BBC World Service. I was glad that an adult had finally stood up to the system, but I felt left out.. Colvins feisty testimony was instrumental in the shocking success of the suit, which ended segregated seating on Montgomerys buses. ", 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. Born in Alabama #33. "I had almost a life history of being rebellious against being mistreated against my colour," she said. ", Nonetheless, the shock waves of her defiance had reverberated throughout Montgomery and beyond. 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. She sat down in the front of the bus and refused to move on her own will when asked. Fifty years have passed since campaigners overturned a ban on ethnic minorities working on buses in one British city. 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