Many people know Rosa Parks as a civil rights icon who refused to give up her seat to a white passenger and move to the back of the bus. Parks’s action led to the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott.
What most people don’t know is that nine months before Parks, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin did the same exact thing. Colvin’s act of heroic defiance would forever change American society, even though she is relatively unknown. Moreover, while Parks received the attention and place in history for refusing to give up her seat, Colvin was actually the litigant who got bus segregation laws thrown out.
On March 2, 1955, Colvin was taking the bus home from high school when she sat in the bus section that was reserved for white people. The bus driver ordered her to give up her seat, but she refused. She emphatically stated that she paid her bus fare and had a constitutional right to sit wherever she wanted. Police officers were called, and Colvin was put in handcuffs and arrested.
Colvin’s heroic stand was motivated by some of the history lessons she learned in school, she would later say. She recalled the courage of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth in their battles for equality. It inspired her to act and take a stand by sitting down.
“My head was just too full of black history, you know, the oppression that we went through,” Colvin recalled in an interview. “It felt like Sojourner Truth was on one side pushing me down, and Harriet Tubman was on the other side of me pushing me down. I couldn’t get up.”
After her arrest, Colvin was actually shamed and eschewed in her community for her resistance. She experienced different challenges in life and also became pregnant as a teenager. However, her story did not end there. Colvin would go on to legally challenge the Montgomery bus segregation laws. She was named a plaintiff, along with four other women, in a lawsuit filed in district court, Browder v. Gayle. This court case ultimately made its way up to the Supreme Court, which held that bus segregation laws were unconstitutional.
Parks was chosen over Colvin to be the face of the Montgomery bus boycott for reasons related to image. Historically presented as a random act of defiance against a racist system, Parks’s act was actually pre-planned. As a pregnant teenager, it was feared that Colvin would be viewed less sympathetically than Parks, a working woman and secretary of the NAACP who was both well-known and respected.
Thus, Colvin never became a household name. But her actions reverberate throughout history. At age 15, she changed the course of history and brought the odious racism of Jim Crow to a major defeat in federal court. The remarkable courage of this teenager from yesteryear paved the way for a better tomorrow for black people and all Americans.
