Claudette Colvin, unsung civil rights pioneer, dies at 86

Claudette Colvin, who died January 13 at 86, was a pioneering figure in the civil rights movement. Photo / Getty Images

On March 2, 1955, a 15-year-old black high school junior named Claudette Colvin boarded a segregated city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, taking a window seat near the back. When the driver ordered her to give up her seat so a white woman could be more comfortable, Colvin – who had been studying black history in class, learning about abolitionists like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth – did not budge.

“History had me glued to the seat,” she said later, recalling how it felt as though Tubman and Truth had their hands on her shoulders, giving her “the courage to remain seated”.

History would record that it was Rosa Parks, the longtime secretary of the local NAACP, who helped kick-start the modern civil rights movement by refusing to give up her seat on a crowded Montgomery bus.

Yet it was Colvin, nine months earlier, who engaged in one of the first defiant challenges to the city’s Jim Crow transit system, remaining in her seat until police dragged her backward off the bus.

While Parks’ stand proved far more consequential, leading to a year-long bus boycott that thrust the Reverend Martin Luther King jnr to national prominence, Colvin’s arrest inaugurated what King described as a pivotal period for black people in Montgomery. Community leaders formed a committee to meet with city and bus company officials, calling for improved treatment for black passengers. Those discussions proved fruitless, King recalled in a memoir, but “fear and apathy” gradually gave way to “a new spirit of courage and self-respect”.

Historian David Garrow said in an interview for this obituary that “Colvin’s experience proved a major motivating force for adult black activists” including Jo Ann Robinson, who helped launch and sustain the bus boycott. Another leading figure in the boycott, lawyer Fred Gray, brought the federal lawsuit that overturned bus segregation, with Colvin serving as a plaintiff and star witness.

“I don’t mean to take anything away from Mrs Parks,” Gray said, “but Claudette gave all of us the moral courage to do what we did.”

Colvin, who died January 13 at 86, was almost forgotten in the annals of civil rights. Overshadowed by Parks and other activists, she spent decades in obscurity, caring for elderly patients as a nurse’s aide before gaining late-in-life recognition through the efforts of historians and writers such as Phillip Hoose, whose 2009 biography, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice, won the National Book Award for young people’s literature.

“Young people think Rosa Parks just sat down on a bus and ended segregation, but that wasn’t the case at all,” Colvin told the New York Times in 2009. “Maybe by telling my story – something I was afraid to do for a long time – kids will have a better understanding about what the civil rights movement was about.”

A movie based on her life, Spark, was announced in 2022, with actor Anthony Mackie lined up to make his directorial debut, and Saniyya Sidney slated to star.

In the days after Colvin’s arrest, civil rights leaders in Montgomery wondered if her case might offer a chance to put segregation itself on trial. But, as Robinson later wrote in a memoir, “opinions differed where Claudette was concerned”.

Some deemed her too young and immature, saying she was prone to profane outbursts. (Colvin said she never cursed.) There were also concerns about her class and background: she was looked down upon, Montgomery activist Gwen Patton once recalled with frustration, because she “lived in a little shack”.

The deciding factor was the discovery by labour organiser ED Nixon, the local NAACP president, that Colvin was expecting a child. She later said that she became pregnant in the months after the bus standoff as a result of an encounter with a married man, which she described as statutory rape.

“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,” author Taylor Branch observed in “Parting the Waters,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning civil rights history.

Colvin often said Nixon and other organisers were right to rally around Parks, who exuded a quiet authority, was familiar to activists from her work in the NAACP, and had an appeal that crossed class divisions through her job as a department-store seamstress.

But Colvin remained frustrated by what she described as a lack of support and recognition in the years after she was arrested, when she struggled as a single mother to find work and eventually left Alabama for New York.

“They wanted someone, I believe, who would be impressive to White people. … You know what I mean? Like the main star,” she told the Guardian in 2021. “And they didn’t think that a dark-skinned teenager, low income without a degree, could contribute. It’s like reading an old English novel when you’re the peasant, and you’re not recognised.”

‘I had had enough’

Claudette Austin, as she was then known, was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 5, 1939. Her father, CP Austin, left the family when she was young.

Her mother, Mary Jane Gadson, was unable to support Colvin and her younger sister by herself, and turned the children over to her aunt and uncle, Mary Ann and QP Colvin. The older couple lived on a farm in Pine Level – the rural Alabama community where, by chance, Parks had gone to elementary school – and gave the girls their last name.

When Colvin was 8, the family moved to nearby Montgomery, where her adoptive parents were hired by White families to do home and yard work. Her sister died of polio in 1952, shortly before Colvin started her first year at Booker T Washington High School.

Colvin was still grieving her sister’s death when her neighbour Jeremiah Reeves, an older schoolmate, was arrested and charged with raping a White woman. Following a confession he gave under duress and later retracted, he was convicted by an all-White jury, sentenced to death, and executed in 1958, at age 22.

His arrest “was the turning point of my life”, Colvin said. As she saw it, the case embodied the hypocrisies of the legal system: Reeves was sent to death row as a juvenile because of a false confession, but when a white man raped a black girl, “it was just his word against hers, and no one would ever believe her”.

Colvin told Hoose that on the day the bus driver asked her to give up her seat, “rebellion was on my mind”.

She was sitting in a row near the rear exit, joined by three schoolmates as the bus started filling up, and passengers stood in the aisle. Before long, a white woman was standing over Colvin and her peers. The driver asked for all four of their seats, so that the woman wouldn’t have to sit in the same row as a black passenger.

“I might have considered getting up if the woman had been elderly, but she wasn’t,” Colvin recalled. “She looked about 40. The other three girls in my row got up and moved back, but I didn’t. I just couldn’t.”

Colvin remained seated as the driver grew exasperated – “Gimme that seat! Get up, gal!” – and hailed a transit policeman, who in turn summoned a squad car. Colvin said that as the police arrived, she began crying but remained defiant, telling the officers, “It’s my constitutional right to sit here as much as that lady. I paid my fare, it’s my constitutional right!”

By her account, one of the officers kicked her as she was pulled off the bus. (One of the officers alleged that it was the other way around.) She was placed in handcuffs and put in a squad car, where, according to Colvin, the officers took turns trying to guess her bra size.

Bailed out of jail by her minister, she returned home to fears of retaliation. Her adoptive father didn’t sleep that night, staying awake with a shotgun in case the Ku Klux Klan arrived. At school, classmates began to consider her a troublemaker, describing her as “that crazy girl off the bus”.

Colvin was charged with assault and disorderly conduct in addition to violating the segregation law. Tried in juvenile court because of her age, she was found guilty of assault (a judge dismissed the other two charges), placed on indefinite probation and ordered to pay a small fine.

Over the next few months, other black women defied Montgomery’s segregated bus policy. The group included Lucille Times, who staged a one-woman boycott after an altercation with a driver, and 18-year-old Mary Louise Smith, who was arrested, convicted and fined after refusing to give up her seat.

As with Colvin, organisers worried that Smith wasn’t right for a marquee case: her father was said to be an alcoholic, and the family was deemed too low-class. It wasn’t until Parks’s arrest on December 1, 1955, that a citywide bus boycott was organised.

As the boycott progressed, Colvin became one of several plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, a federal lawsuit brought by Gray that challenged the city and state laws enforcing bus segregation in Montgomery. The case reached the US Supreme Court, which ordered an end to bus segregation in late 1956.

Colvin gave birth to her first son, Raymond, earlier that year. She never publicly identified the father and said she was expelled from high school as a result of her pregnancy.

After passing a high school equivalency exam, she briefly attended Alabama State College in Montgomery and then moved in 1958 to New York, where she got a job as a live-in caregiver.

She had a second son in 1960 and moved back and forth between New York and Montgomery – where her adoptive mother helped care for her children – before settling in New York City in 1968 and receiving training as a nurse’s aide.

“The only thing I am still angry about is that I should have seen a psychiatrist,” she told The Washington Post in 1998, reflecting on her life after the movement. “I needed help. I didn’t get any support. I had to get well on my own.”

Colvin’s death was confirmed by Ashley D Roseboro, a spokesman for the family and for the Claudette Colvin Foundation. He said she died in hospice in Texas but did not share additional details.

Her son Raymond died in 1993. Her younger son, Randy, worked as an accountant. He survives her, as do several sisters and grandchildren.

In 2021, Colvin successfully petitioned to have her juvenile arrest record expunged, a symbolic act recognising the injustice of the segregation laws.

“I’m not doing it for me, I’m 82 years old,” she explained to the Times. “But I wanted my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren to understand that their grandmother stood up for something very important, and that it changed our lives a lot, changed attitudes.”

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