Claudette Colvin was 15 years old when she was arrested in Montgomery, Ala., and placed on indefinite probation, after refusing to vacate her seat on a bus so a young White woman could sit down.
This was March 1955 — nine months before Rosa Parks was arrested for violating Alabama’s racial segregation laws after refusing to give up her seat to a White man, an act that sparked the year-long Montgomery Bus Boycott. Parks, who died in 2005, went on to become an icon, widely celebrated as the “mother of the civil rights movement.”
What about Colvin? Though she was one of four female plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, the Supreme Court case that overturned Montgomery’s bus segregation laws, her role in challenging the Jim Crow system has been largely overshadowed. What’s worse, Colvin, who is now 82, was never taken off probation.
That needs to change — and perhaps now it will. Today, Colvin goes back to Montgomery to petition for her record to be cleared. She is also, in a carefully detailed 30-point affidavit, addressing something else: the fact that her story was largely expunged because civil rights leaders didn’t see her as an appropriate symbol for the movement.
Colvin got pregnant not long after her arrest. And she was defiant. She was also charged with a felony for assaulting a police officer who said she had kicked and scratched him.
I interviewed Colvin in March 2020, and offstage she told me she believed there was another reason her story was shunted aside. “Rosa Parks had the right background and the right skin color,” she said. Colvin, whose skin is a beautiful shade of chocolate, said the bias still stings, but she let go of anger a long time ago. “We were all seeking one thing,” she said. “Justice.”
Now the gray-haired Colvin seeks delayed justice, addressing the Juvenile Court for Montgomery County. She’ll be accompanied by the 90-year-old Fred Gray, the civil rights lawyer who represented her back in 1956.
For a woman silenced so many decades ago, it is fitting to let her tell her own story now. She does so in the following excerpts from her affidavit, beginning with the day she got out of school early and walked downtown to catch a bus home.