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. Her voice is soft and high, almost shrill. Then, they will reflect on a time when they took a stand on an important issue. Most Americans, even in Montgomery, have never heard of her. [16], Through the trial Colvin was represented by Fred Gray, a lawyer for the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), which was organizing civil rights actions. A 15-year-old high school student at the time, Colvin got fed up and refused to move even before Parks. Rosa Parks was neither a victim nor a saint, but a long-standing political activist and feminist. Her son Raymond Colvin died of a heart attack in 1993. 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. She refused to give up her seat on a bus months before Rosa Parks' more famous protest. She concentrated her mind on things she had been learning at school. In a United States district court, she testified before the three-judge panel that heard the case. And, like the pregnant Mrs Hamilton, many African-Americans refused to tolerate the indignity of the South's racist laws in silence. [5] Colvin did not receive the same attention as Parks for a number of reasons: she did not have "good hair", she was not fair-skinned, she was a teenager, she was pregnant. "I was really afraid, because you just didn't know what white people might do at that time," says Colvin. Growing up in one of Montgomery's poorer neighborhoods, Colvin studied hard in school. "Mrs Parks was a married woman," said ED Nixon. After training, she landed a job as a nurses aide in a Catholic hospital in Manhattan. I think that history only has room enough for certainyou know, how many icons can you choose? Claudette Colvin Popularity . However, her story is often silenced. Nonetheless, Raymond died at the age of 37, reported Core Online. So he turned on the black men sitting behind her. In a letter published shortly before Shabbaz's death, she wrote to Parks with both praise and perspective: "'Standing up' was not even being the first to protest that indignity. In his Pulitzer prize-winning account of the civil rights years, Parting The Waters, Taylor Branch wrote: "Even if Montgomery Negroes were willing to rally behind an unwed, pregnant teenager - which they were not - her circumstances would make her an extremely vulnerable standard bearer. Phillip Hoose also wrote about her in the young adult biography Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice. Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. Site contains certain content that is owned A&E Television Networks, LLC. 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. "I never swore when I was young," she says. "Are you going to stand up?" "She was not the first person to be arrested for violation of the bus seating ordinance," said J Mills Thornton, an author and academic. People often make death hoaxes of well-known personalities to get public attention and views. Colvin never married but gave birth to two sons, the first was Raymond Colvin (b. December 1955, died 1993). She worked there for 35 years, retiring in 2004. Two policemen boarded the bus and asked Colvin why she wouldn't give up her seat. All I could do is cry. The other three moved, but another black woman, Ruth Hamilton, who was pregnant, got on and sat next to Colvin. A second son, Randy, born in 1960, gave her four grandchildren, who are all deeply proud of their grandmother's heroism. 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 light-skinned girls always thought they were better looking," says Colvin. However, some white passengers still refused to sit near a black person. Officers were called to the scene and Colvin was forcefully taken off of the bus and . On June 5, 1956, the United States District Court for the Middle District of Alabama issued a ruling declaring the state of Alabama and Montgomery's laws mandating public bus segregation as unconstitutional. It is here, at 658 Dixie Drive, that Colvin, 61, was raised by a great aunt, who was a maid, and great uncle, who was a "yard boy", whom she grew up calling her parents. He was so light-skinned (like his father) that people frequently said she had a baby by a white man. Raymond Colvin, age 62, a resident of Ft. Deposit, AL, died April 13, 2013. When the white seats were filled, the driver, J Fred Black, asked Parks and three others to give up their seats. Claudette Colvin is a civil rights activist of African descent. "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. To the exclusively male and predominantly middle-class, church-dominated, local black leadership in Montgomery, she was a fallen woman. 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. Phillip Hoose. 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. I was sitting on the last seat that they said you could sit in. 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. "So I told him I was not going to get up either. 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. [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". "Aren't you going to get up?" One month later, the Supreme Court affirmed the order to Montgomery and the state of Alabama to end bus segregation. Two years later, Colvin moved to New York City, where she had her second son, Randy, and worked as a nurse's aide at a Manhattan nursing home. She shouted that her constitutional rights were being violated. But people in King Hill do not remember Colvin as that type of girl, and the accusation irritates Colvin to this day. This occurred nine months before the more widely known incident in which Rosa Parks, secretary of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), helped spark the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott.[3]. ", "If the white press got ahold of that information, they would have [had] a field day," said Rosa Parks. Nixon referred to her as a "lovely, stupid woman"; ministers would greet her at church functions, with irony, "Well, if it isn't the superstar." Unable to find work in Montgomery, Colvin moved to New York in 1958, while her son Raymond remained behind with family. "She was a victim of both the forces of history and the forces of destiny," said King, in a quote now displayed in the civil rights museum in Atlanta. "They'd call her a bad girl, and her case wouldn't have a chance. Now 76 and retired, Colvin deserves her place in history. Instead of being celebrated as Rosa Parks would be just nine months later, fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin found herself shunned by her . Colvin says Parks had the right image to become the face of resistance to segregation because of her previous work with the NAACP. In New York, Colvin gave birth to another son, Randy. Charged with disturbing the peace, breaking the bus segregation laws and assaulting the officers who had apprehended her, she was released later that night. [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. Why has Claudette Colvin been denied her place in history? In the 2010s, Larkin arranged for a street to be named after Colvin. "I will take you off," said the policeman, then he kicked her. The case, organized and filed in federal court by civil rights attorney Fred Gray, challenged city bus segregation in Montgomery as unconstitutional. And, from there, the short distance to sanctity: they called her "Saint Rosa", "an angel walking", "a heaven-sent messenger". So, you know, I think you compare history, likemost historians say Columbus discovered America, and it was already populated. They forced her into the back of a squad car, one officer jumping in after her. In 1969, years after moving to NYC, she acquired a job working as a Nurse's aide at a Nursing home. [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. The leaders in the Civil Rights Movement tried to keep up appearances and make the "most appealing" protesters the most seen. "[20], Browder v. Gayle made its way through the courts. She now works as a nurses' aide at an old people's home in downtown Manhattan. 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