Claudette Colvin’s courage now comes to light
Thousands of Americans this week paid tribute to Rosa Parks under the dome of the Capitol Rotunda. She is the first woman to share an homage bestowed upon former presidents and other national leaders. Parks, who died last week at 92, was arrested in 1955 for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man, an incident that motivated the Civil Rights Movement.
What I am uneasy about is that it took the death of Rosa Parks for historians, educators and news outlets to acknowledge the facts regarding the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
The internet, news services and several academic institutions are now telling the story of Claudette Colvin. Nine months before Rosa Parks, Claudette Colvin refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger; she was 15 years old and was arrested. Now the story is being told.
In her book In the Shadow of Rosa Parks: ‘Unsung Hero’ Of Civil Rights Movement Speaks Out, Vanessa De La Torre writes about March 2, 1955 when Colvin was a junior at Booker T. Washington High School in Montgomery, Ala. Colvin was angry that twice a day she rode the same bus and here was the driver, ordering her to stand so a white person could sit. When she refused, the bus driver summoned the police to arrest her. She told a policeman that she was “just as good as any white person” and wasn’t going to give up her seat. The police said Colvin was “clawing and scratching” as they hauled her off the bus.
It is now coming to light how Rosa Parks was chosen as the test case over Colvin to spark the boycott. Several sources report that E.D. Nixon, then a leader of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, had been waiting for a test case to challenge bus segregation and vowed to help Colvin after her father posted bail.
But then came the second-guessing. Colvin’s father mowed lawns; her mother was a maid. Some blacks believed she was too young and too dark-skinned to be an effective symbol of injustice for the rest of the nation. Local civil rights leaders continued to debate whether her case was worth contesting, because that summer it was revealed that Colvin was pregnant.
E.D. Nixon would later explain in an oral history, “I had to be sure that I had somebody I could win with.” Rosa Parks, for a decade the NAACP secretary who took special interest in Colvin’s case, was “morally clean, reliable, nobody had nothing on her.”
On December 1, 1955, Parks would board a bus at the same stop as had Colvin, and go on to become the symbol Nixon had been seeking. Parks, who was inspired by Colvin’s example, became the person whom history would remember.
There are several websites highlighting the events surrounding the heroic deed of Claudette Colvin. One suggests that “Claudette Colvin could easily be lost in the crowd. Her short hair is neatly curled; she wears eyeglasses and a small pair of gold hoop earrings. She dresses modestly and looks more like someone’s kindly grandmother than the woman who 50 years ago was a catalyst for one of the most famous events in civil rights history. Where is she in the history books?”
Now 65 years old, she’s retired and lives in the Bronx in New York. She calls herself “a footnote in history.”
That is the problem. Most of our true history does not depict even a footnote.
This by no means diminishes the action of Rosa Parks, but Colvin should also be remembered. What do you think?