Claudette Colvin, whose challenge to Alabama’s segregation laws nine months before Rosa Parks provided a spark for the modern Civil Rights Movement, died on Tuesday. She was 86 years old.
The Claudette Colvin Foundation announced her death on their website but did not give a cause. A list of survivors was not immediately available.
Colvin was a 15-year-old teenager when on March 2, 1955, she was arrested for refusing to give her seat on a bus to a white passenger. According to a Montgomery Advertiser account published over two weeks later, Colvin was sitting on a segregated bus when a white passenger got on, and she was ordered to move to the rear.
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Colvin declined, even after police boarded the bus and gave her two orders to move. The police then pulled her off the bus.
Colvin told the Montgomery Advertiser in 2019 that while racism was nothing new to her, she had just spent a week in February studying Black history with a teacher who taught her about the contributions Black Americans made to the country and about the injustices in the South.
“For these historical, iconic women I had been taught so much about, I just couldn’t move,” she said. “I just couldn’t move. That’s the only way I knew how to resist, to not move. So they just dragged me off the bus.”
Montgomery Mayor Steven T. Reed said in a statement Tuesday that Colvin “helped lay the legal and moral foundation for the movement that would change America.”
“Claudette Colvin’s life reminds us that movements are built only by those whose names are most familiar, but by those whose courage comes early, quietly and at great personal cost,” the statement said. “Her legacy challenges us to tell the full truth of our history and to honor every voice that helped bend the arc toward justice.”
U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Birmingham, wrote in a Facebook statement that Colvin was “a true civil rights champion.”
“Her story is often overlooked, yet her quiet courage paved the way for generations to claim their rightful place in our democracy,” the statement said.
After being pulled off the bus, Colvin was handcuffed and taken to a local jail.
“In an old Western, when the bandits are put in the jail, you can hear the sound of the key go ‘click,’” Colvin said. “I could hear the sound when the jailer locked it. I knew I was locked in, and I couldn’t get out. I started crying. I started reciting the 23rd Psalm.”
Colvin’s mother and pastor bailed her out a few hours later. Her arrest — particularly the fact that a 15-year-old was handcuffed — sparked anger in Montgomery’s Black community, and several activists, including attorney Fred Gray and E.D. Nixon, the former president of the local NAACP, saw that Colvin’s case could be used to challenge local segregation laws.
At trial, Colvin was convicted of assault, violation of segregation laws and disorderly conduct. But on appeal, a judge dismissed the segregation and disorderly conduct charges, leaving only the assault charge (police claimed she attacked them while being removed; Colvin said she did not remember doing so). She was sentenced to “indefinite probation.”
Gray, who represented Colvin, had wanted to push her case further, but as historian Taylor Branch wrote, the judge’s dismissal of the segregation charge against Colvin made a federal case against the city’s Jim Crow laws more difficult. Branch also wrote that some leaders in Montgomery’s Black community were concerned that Colvin, who was pregnant, would be “an extremely vulnerable standard bearer.”
Nine months later, Rosa Parks, who had over 15 years of experience as an activist, was arrested on charges similar to Colvin’s. But unlike Colvin, Parks faced a single charge of violating Montgomery’s segregation laws, allowing a federal court challenge to proceed. Colvin, who knew Parks through the NAACP’s youth organization, did serve as a plaintiff in Browder v. Gayle, the federal case that struck down Montgomery’s bus segregation laws in 1956, after the 381-day Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Gray said in 2019 that Colvin’s action “gave the moral courage” to many local activists to push on.
“A 15-year-old girl who did what she did, and was willing to take whatever consequences, not knowing what was going to happen — when you compare it, Claudette had a lot more courage than many of us involved,” he told the Advertiser.
Colvin said she felt stigmatized in the wake of the arrest and found it hard to see other people get recognition for similar actions.
She later moved to New York and worked for decades as a nursing aide. Recognition slowly came to her: In 2017, Montgomery proclaimed March 2 “Claudette Colvin Day.”
In 2021, Colvin moved to have her “indefinite probation” stricken from the books. Rep. Phillip Ensler, D-Montgomery, who represented Colvin in her action, said in an interview Tuesday that Colvin and her family feared that the conviction meant that she could be jailed for any violation.
“Every time she would come back to Montgomery to visit family, she always feared that the police would pull her over for some sort of pre-textual reason and use it as an excuse to throw her in jail,” he said. “She lived with all this fear for so long, and her family lived with that fear.”
Colvin’s record was expunged that December. She joked that “that really means that I’m no longer, at 82, a juvenile delinquent.”
But Colvin also said that she could not have left the bus.
“Living in a segregated society, I wasn’t going out of my boundaries looking for trouble,” Colvin said in 2019. “I didn’t have the support. Nobody asked me to do this. I was ostracized after I had a child out of wedlock. I just went on my own, and I knew I had to take care of myself. I’m a self-made woman. You have to have strong courage, strong faith and belief in yourself.”
Anna Barrett and Andrea Tinker contributed to this report.
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