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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, Ms. Colvin — who had been studying Black history in class, learning about abolitionists like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth — did not budge.
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 Ms. 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...
“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.”
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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 Ms. 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...
“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.”
Civil Rights legend Claudette Colvin dies at 86
Civil Rights pioneer Claudette Colvin has died, her family and foundation confirmed Tuesday afternoon.
