After her refusal to give up her seat, Colvin was arrested on several charges, including violating the city's segregation laws. People often make death hoaxes of well-known personalities to get public attention and views. BBC World Service. One month later, the Supreme Court affirmed the order to Montgomery and the state of Alabama to end bus segregation. "[37], In 2000, Troy State University opened a Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery to honor the town's place in civil rights history. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Claudette Colvin (born Claudette Austin; September 5, 1939) [1] [2] is an American pioneer of the 1950s civil rights movement and retired nurse aide. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. '", The atmosphere on the bus became very tense. Sikora telephoned a startled Colvin and wrote an article about her. "The NAACP had come back to me and my mother said: 'Claudette, they must really need you, because they rejected you because you had a child out of wedlock,'" Colvin says. Claudette Colvin was an African American civil rights activist who pioneered the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s. "So did the teachers, too. [50], In 2022, a biopic of Colvin titled Spark written by Niceole R. Levy and directed by Anthony Mackie was announced. In court, Colvin opposed the segregation law by declaring herself not guilty. Roy White, who was in charge of most of the project, asked Colvin if she would like to appear in a video to tell her story, but Colvin refused. This made her very scared that they would sexually assault her because this happened frequently. [2][13] Not long after, in September 1952, Colvin started attending Booker T. Washington High School. Going to a segregated school had one advantage, she found - her teachers gave her a good grounding in black history. Betty Shabbaz, the widow of Malcolm X, was one of them. The NMAAHC has a section dedicated to Rosa Parks, which Colvin does not want taken away, but her family's goal is to get the historical record right, and for officials to include Colvin's part of history. The churches, buses and schools were all segregated and you couldn't even go into the same restaurants," Claudette Colvin says. "Are you going to stand up?" . "There was segregation everywhere. The baby was fair-skinned just like his dad and people accused her of having a white baby. [27], In New York, Colvin and her son Raymond initially lived with her older sister, Velma Colvin. 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 light-skinned girls always thought they were better looking," says Colvin. All but housebound, mocked at school and dropped, as she put it, by Montgomerys black leadership, Colvin saw her self-confidence plummet. As more white passengers got on, the driver asked black people to give up their seats. The bus froze. Unable to find work in Montgomery, Colvin moved to New York in 1958, while her son Raymond remained behind with family. Join the conversation - find us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter. This led to a few articles and profiles by others in subsequent years. 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. ", "I wanted to go north and liberate my people," explains Colvin. Most of the people didn't have problems with us sitting on the bus, most New Yorkers cared about economic problems. After her minister paid her bail, she went home where she and her family stayed up all night out of concern for possible retaliation. "I didn't know if they were crazy, if they were going to take me to a Klan meeting. Rita Dove penned the poem "Claudette Colvin Goes to Work," which later became a song. Mothers expressed concern about permitting their children on the buses. Some have tried to change that. Why has Claudette Colvin been denied her place in history? ", The upshot was that Colvin was left in an incredibly vulnerable position. He was so light-skinned (like his father) that people frequently said she had a baby by a white man. "[21] Colvin recalled, "History kept me stuck to my seat. "He said he wanted the people to know about the 15-year-old, because really, if I had not made the first cry for freedom, there wouldn't have been a Rosa Parks, and after Rosa Parks, there wouldn't have been a Dr King. Two policemen boarded the bus and asked Colvin why she wouldn't give up her seat. [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. She refused, saying, "It's my constitutional right to sit here as much as that lady. Colvin was not invited officially for the formal dedication of the museum, which opened to the public in September 2016. With funding from church donations and activities organized by the chapter, Colvin had her day in court. [2][10] 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. Rosa didnt give me enough time to put in for a day off, she recalled. They would have come and seen my parents and found me someone to marry. [49], The Little-Known Heroes: Claudette Colvin, a children's picture book by Kaushay and Spencer Ford, was published in 2021. "Nobody slept at home because we thought there would be some retaliation," says Colvin. It is time for President Obama to award Colvin the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nations highest civilian honor, to recognize her sacrifice and passionate dedication to social justice. [16], Colvin was not the only woman of the Civil Rights Movement who was left out of the history books. Her son, Raymond, was born in March 1956. Claudette Colvin (1935- ) Claudette Colvin, a nurse's aide and Civil Rights Movement activist, was born on September 5, 1939, in Birmingham, Alabama. Clubs called special meetings and discussed the event with some degree of alarm. The civil rights pioneer, 82, had her name cleared after an Alabama family court judge granted Colvin's petition to expunge her record last month, her family said in a statement released. Claudette Colvin, 81, was a true pioneer in the Civil Rights Movement. King Hill, Montgomery, is the sepia South. 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. "I thought he would stop and shout and then drive on. Phillip Hoose is author of Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice., On March2, 1955, a young African American woman boarded a city bus in Montgomery, Ala., took her seat and, minutes later, refused the drivers command to surrender it to a white passenger. [30][31] Her son, Randy, is an accountant in Atlanta and father of Colvin's four grandchildren. In March 1955, nine months before Rosa Parks defied segregation laws by refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, 15-year-old Claudette . 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. Parks's arrest sparked a chain reaction that started the bus boycott that launched the civil rights movement that transformed the apartheid of America's southern states from a local idiosyncrasy to an international scandal. 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. "Had it not been for Claudette Colvin, Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, and Mary Louise Smith, there may not have been a Thurgood Marshall, a Martin Luther King or a Rosa Parks. ", 'Facts speak only when the historian calls on them," wrote the historian EH Carr in his landmark work, What Is History? A bus driver called police on March 2, 1955, to complain that two Black girls were sitting . The court declared her a ward of the state and remanded her to the custody of her family. Two police officers arrived and pulled her from her seat. And that person, it transpired, would be Rosa Parks. Colvin took her seat near the emergency door next to one black girl; two others sat across the aisle from her. She works the night shift and sleeps "when the sleep falls on her" during the day. 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. [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. "They did think I was nutty and crazy.". "In a few hours, every Negro youngster on the streets discussed Colvin's arrest. Gary Younge investigates, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning. Fifty years have passed since campaigners overturned a ban on ethnic minorities working on buses in one British city. Like Parks, she, too, pleaded not guilty to. [4], "The bus was getting crowded, and I remember the bus driver looking through the rearview mirror asking her [Colvin] to get up for the white woman, which she didn't," said Annie Larkins Price, a classmate of Colvin. [17][18][6] This event took place nine months before the NAACP secretary Rosa Parks was arrested for the same offense. Blake persisted. She dreamed of becoming the President of the United States. After decades of estrangement, Parks once telephoned Colvin in the late 1980s and invited her to hear Parks speak at a community college. 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. A group of black civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King, Jr., was organized to discuss Colvin's arrest with the police commissioner. She says she expected some abuse from the driver, but nothing more. So he said, 'If you are not going to get up, I will get a policeman. Rosa Parks was neither a victim nor a saint, but a long-standing political activist and feminist. '', the upshot was that Colvin was arrested on several charges, including the! The same restaurants, '' says Colvin neither a victim nor a saint but! 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