On March 2nd, 1955, nine months before Rosa Parks arrest, a teenage schoolgirl named Claudette Colvin boarded a city bus after school to head home. As it filled up, a white woman was left standing, and the bus driver ordered the 15-year-old Colvin to get up and move to the back. She refused and was dragged off the bus in handcuffs. Obama talked about Rosa Parks “singular act,” but it wasnt exactly singular because Claudette Colvin had done it nine months before.
Claudette Colvin talking:
What gave me the courage? All the unfair treatment that I had experienced in my early childhood. Plus, you remember, February, we celebrated Negro History Week, but our school did it for the whole month. So I had a whole month to talk about all the injustices.
we had an instructor named Ms. Geraldine Nesbitt, myshe refused to teach English. She taught literature. And Mrs. Josie Lawrence, my history teacher, she taught us about Africa. And we learned abouteven we learned aboutthrough current events, we learned about Africa. And so, I began to think about all of this and how unfair we was treated.
one of the questions asks, “Why didnt you get up when the bus driver asked you, and the policemen?” I say, “I could not move, because history had me glued to the seat.” And they say, “How is that?” I say, “Because it felt like Sojourner Truths hands were pushing me down on one shoulder and Harriet Tubmans hands were pushing me down on another shoulder, and I could not move. And I yelled out, Its my constitutional rights,” because I wasnt breaking a law under the states law, separate but equal; I was sitting in the area that was reserved for black passengers. At that time, we didnt even want to be called “black,” because black had a negative connotation. We were called “coloreds.” So I was sitting in the coloreds section. But because of Jim Crow law, the bus driver had police force, he could ask you to get up. And the problem was that the white woman that was standing near me, she wasnt an elderly white woman. She was a young white woman. She had a whole seat to sit down byopposite me, in the opposite row, but she refused to sit down; because of Jim Crow laws, a white person couldnt sit opposite a colored person. And a white person had to sit in front of you. The purpose was to make white people feel superior and colored people feel inferior.
I didnt have to prepare for it. You learnI learned it at a very early age. My first encounter was in a general store, when a little white boya little white kid about my age and his friends relatives came into the store, and they were laughing. And they were laughing about me. And the little boy, to another little child, said, “Hold up your hands. Let me see! Let me see!” And I held up my hands to his hand, and my mother gave me a backhand slap on the forehead.
they asked me to get up, and I refused. And one of the policemen was a traffic policeman at Court Square. And he yelled to the bus motorman that he had no jurisdiction here, and he got off. So the bus driver moved the bus to Bibb and Commerce, and then two squad car policemen came on the bus. And theyI became more defiant. And when they asked me the same question, and the gal, “Why are you sitting there?” I said, “Its my constitutional right. I paid my fare; its my constitutional right.” And he said, “Constitutional rights?” And then one kicked at me, and when oneand he knocked the books out of my handout of my lap. And then one grabbed one arm, and one grabbed the other, and they manhandled me off the bus. And after I got into the squad car, they handcuffed me through the window and took me to booking and then tonot to a juvenile facility, but to an adult jail. And I stayed in jail threeapproximately three hours, until my pastor, Reverend H.H. Johnson, and my mother came and bailed me out.
I wasnt afraid. I was a teenager. I wasnt in NAACP when I got arrested. I was inE.D. Nixon is like our Al Sharpton, and I was introducedhe introduced Mrs. Parks to my family. Thats how I learned about Mrs. Parks, through E.D. Nixon.
my family knew about it. They knew about how I felt, because since Mrs. Josie Lawrence was teaching us about Africa, I went to school with my hair in braids. And at that time, you had to do the best you could do with a hot comb and pomade. So I said, “Why put yourself through that trouble?” You know. So, when I went to school like that, they said, oh, I was crazy and that I would lose all myI would lose my boyfriend.
this happened March 2nd, 1955. It would be nine months before Rosa Parks would sit down on the bus and do exactly the same thing.
Jeanne Theoharis talking:
Brown v. Board of Education, its May 1954. The Supreme Court rules that school segregation is illegal, that separate cannot be equal. Shortly after that, Jo Ann Robinsonshes a professor at Alabama State College, shes also the head of the Womens Political Councilwrites a letter to the bus company saying, “If you dont change, were going to boycott.” So we are in a new moment in Montgomery. There had been people before 1954 that had resisted on the bus. There had been particularly more people in the decade since World War II. But 1954, were in a new moment. The Womens Political Council had been organizing, the NAACP. E.D. Nixon and Rosa Parks, in particular, are the more activist part of the NAACP. They are growing frustrated with the continuing situation both on the bus and then in schools in Montgomery.
So then, March 1955, Claudette Colvin makes her historic act, and there is outrage in the community. I think theres no way to understand why people galvanized behind Parks without understanding Colvins arrest and what that does for many people in Montgomery. So, no, we do not see a movement. We do not see, you know, that same kind of reaction. But had Colvin not made that stand, Iyou know, I dont think we would have necessarily seen what happened in December of that year. And then, you know, midway, in October, like we were talking about, Mary Louise Smith makes a similar stand. Again, there is no movement around that. And then we get to December 1st, 1955.
there are these meetings of civil rights leaders over the summer with the city around bus segregation. Promises are made. Interestingly, Rosa Parks refuses to attend those meetings. Shes done. She says, “Im not going to, you know, come to city officials with a paper in hand asking for my rights.” But other civil rights leaders in the community do meet with bus officials. There are promises made. The city makes promises. Those promises are not kept. So, many people, again, in December, when Parks makes her stand, are also very aware that promises have been broken. And if you look at the leaflet that circulates, right, that calls for the one-day boycott, that leaflet very much locates Parkss stand in this broader history of Colvins stand.
the historian Douglas Brinkley has written that the delay between Claudette Colvin, our guest today, her act and Rosa Parks arrest allowed Dr. Martin Luther King to emerge as a leader. He most likely would not have led the bus boycott if it had occurred in the spring, after Claudette Colvins arrest, instead of the following winter. Brinkley writes, “He might have ended up as just another Montgomery preacher.”
Rosa Parkss case is in state court. And one of thethey had experience with cases in state court, a case in 1944, Viola White, and so there was memory and history within Montgomerys black community that one of the tactics often taken to kind of squash any kind of protest was holding up cases in state court. And so, they decide to file a new case into federal court. That case is Browder v. Gayle, and Claudette Colvin is one of the plaintiffs. Mary Louise Smith is one of the plaintiffs. There are five women initially. One woman, a day later, is intimidated to take her name off the case.
Rosa Parks is not on that case, for a couple of reasons. First, they were worried that the case would just get thrown out because she has this separate case in state court and that it could muddymuddy the complaint. Second, I think there were concernsRosa Parks does have this long political history, her work with the NAACP. The NAACP is increasingly getting redbaited in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education.
And she had been active, again, in that decade before. So, that political history could become a liability. Youll recall, by June of 1956, the NAACP has been outlawed in Alabama. So there is a new case that Fred Gray files into federal court. Colvin is one of those plaintiffs. That is another incredible act of courage, right, to be willing to be on that case. And it is that case, not the state case that Rosa Parks had, that wends its way, as you said, up to the Supreme Court. And its the Supreme Court that decides, that ultimately then desegregates Montgomerys buses in December of 1956.
its this organized mass movement that then is brought to the nation, in part because of the kind of increased importance of the media, of mass media, so people around the country get to see it. In part they get to see it because many of the leaders, and Rosa Parks herself, basically spend that year traveling to make this local movement into a national movement. It also launches, as we just noted, the career of Martin Luther King as a sort of civil rights leader. And so, this young 26-year-old is kind of brought to the nation, and so this will begin, again, this historic next 13 years that we have with King. And so, thatits sort of the beginning act of Kings sort of career as a civil rights leader.
— source democracynow.org