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Claudette Colvin (born September 5, 1939), who some historians say is the "Mother of the modern Civil Rights Movement", is an African American woman from Alabama. In 1955, at the age of 15, she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white person, in violation of local law. Her arrest preceded civil rights activist Rosa Parks' (on December 1, 1955) by nine months. In later months following the incident, Colvin became pregnant, thus making the NAACP question whether or not Colvin was a "reputable" face for the Civil Rights movement.
[edit] Bus incidentIn 1955 Colvin was a student at Booker T. Washington High School in Montgomery.[1] Colvin's family didn't own a car, so she relied on the city's gold-and-green buses to get to school. On March 2, 1955, she boarded a public bus and, shortly thereafter, refused to give up her seat to a white man. Colvin was coming home from school that day when she got on a Capital Heights bus downtown at the same place Parks boarded another bus months later. Colvin was sitting about two seats from the emergency exit when four whites boarded. The bus driver, Robert W. Cleere, ordered her along with three other black passengers to get up. She refused and was removed from the bus by two police officers, who took her to jail. When she refused to get up, she was still thinking about a school paper that she wrote that day. It was about the prohibition for black people to try on white clothes in department stores.[2] "The bus was getting crowded and I remember him (the bus driver) looking through the rear view mirror asking her to get up out of her seat, which she didn't," said a classmate at the time, Annie Larkins Price. "She didn't say anything. She just continued looking out the window. She decided on that day that she wasn't going to move." Price testified on Colvin's behalf in the juvenile court case, where Colvin was convicted of violating the segregation law and assault. "There was no assault," Price said. Colvin was handcuffed, arrested and forcibly removed from the bus. She screamed that her constitutional rights were being violated. At the time, Colvin was active in the NAACP's Youth Council, and she was actually being advised by Rosa Parks. [edit] Community responseE.D. Nixon, then a leader of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, had been waiting for a test case to challenge bus segregation and vowed to help Colvin after her father posted bail. But then came the second-guessing: Colvin came from a very poor background where her father mowed lawns, her mother was a maid and they lived in King Hill, the poorest section of Montgomery. The police, who took her to the city hall and then jail, also accused the teenager of spewing curse words, which Colvin denied, saying that in fact the obscenities were leveled at her. A number of black leaders, including Parks, raised money for Colvin's defense. At the time, local black leaders believed that Colvin's case was an appropriate one to litigate all the way to the United States Supreme Court, as part of a broader effort to overturn segregation laws in the South. Colvin's lawyers wanted a new arrangement on the city's bus. Mainly, they wanted white people to take the front and black to take the back and the middle of the bus would be available to everyone. Therefore, they sent a petition to the bus compagny and to the city officials. To everyone's surprise, David Birmingham, a Police and Fire Commissioner, agreed to the petition. But the city bus company refused.[2] Soon after her arrest, however, Colvin became pregnant by a much older, married man. Local black leaders felt that this moral transgression would not only scandalize the deeply religious black community, but also make Colvin suspect in the eyes of sympathetic whites. In particular, they felt that the white press would manipulate Colvin's illegitimate pregnancy as a means of undermining Colvin's victim status and any subsequent boycott of the bus company. Rosa Parks stated that "If the white press got ahold of that information, they would have [had] a field day. They'd call her a bad girl, and her case wouldn't have a chance. So the decision was made to wait until we had a plaintiff who was more upstanding before we went ahead and invested any more time, effort, and money."[2] She was ultimately sentenced to probation for the ordinance violation, but a boycott never materialized from the event. Some historians have argued that civil rights leaders, who were predominantly middle class, were uneasy with Colvin's lower class background. Indeed, before Colvin, the NAACP had considered and rejected several protesters deemed unsuitable or unable to withstand the pressures of cross-examination during a legal challenge to racial segregation laws. [edit] Court trialOn May 11, 1956, Colvin testified in a Montgomery federal court hearing about her actions on the bus in a case called Browder v. Gayle. During the trial, Claudette Colvin described her arrest. "I kept saying, 'He has no right... this is my constitutional right... you have no right to do this.' And I just kept blabbing things out, and I never stopped. That was worse than stealing, you know, talking back to a white person."[2] [edit] Personal lifeIn 1956, Colvin gave birth to a son Raymond, who was so fair-skinned (like his father) that people frequently accused her of having a white baby. She left Alabama for New York in 1958, and for over 30 years worked the night shift at a Catholic nursing home. Colvin retired in 2004 after 35 years of working as a nurse's assistant in the nursing home. Raymond became addicted to drugs and alcohol. At 37, he died of a heart attack in Colvin's apartment.[citation needed] About her life, her dreams of becoming a lawyer, she says, "Yes, I’m disappointed. But then again, no one knows what’s in store for them. At least my grandkids don’t have to suffer what I had to suffer." According to the Montgomery Advertiser, Colvin said that she would not change her decision to remain seated. "I feel proud of what I did. I do feel like what I did was a spark and it caught on... I'm not disappointed," Colvin said. "Let the people know Rosa Parks was the right person for the boycott. 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."[citation needed] [edit] LegacyStoryteller-actress Awele Makeba wrote, directed and starred in a one-woman drama, Rage Is Not A 1-Day Thing!, in which Makeba relates the story of the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott through the eyes of Colvin following her arrest. [edit] See also[edit] References
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