US civil rights pioneer Claudette Colvin, arrested at age 15 for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white woman in Montgomery, Alabama, nine months before Rosa Parks’ similar, but more famous, act of defiance, died on Tuesday at age 86.
Although she remained a largely unsung figure in the civil rights movement for decades, Colvin’s 1955 act of rebellion inspired Parks and others and helped form the basis of a federal lawsuit that outlawed racial segregation in US public transportation.
Her death, under hospice care in Texas, was confirmed by Ashley Roseboro, a spokeswoman for her family and the Claudette Colvin Foundation.
Photo: AP
In one of the first publicized acts of civil disobedience against Montgomery’s Jim Crow rules governing city bus seating by race, Colvin refused to relinquish her seat for a white woman, as ordered by the driver, and stayed put until she was dragged out of the vehicle by police.
According to accounts of her testimony in court, Colvin said she had been studying anti-slavery abolitionist heroes in school, and felt that she had Harriet Tubman on one shoulder, Sojourner Truth on the other and “history had me glued to the seat.”
Parks, an older seamstress who was secretary of the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People chapter, was seen as a more dignified, sympathetic figure to rally behind, as civil rights leaders organized what became the year-long bus boycott that thrust the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr to the national stage.
In the lead-up to the boycott, which started in December 1955, issues of social class and even “colorism” — Colvin came from a poorer background and was lighter skinned than Parks — led civil rights leaders to shy away from the teenager as a standard bearer for the movement, Roseboro said.
Nevertheless, Colvin went on to become one of several plaintiffs and a principal witness in the Browder v Gayle lawsuit challenging the city’s bus policies. The case eventually led to the landmark 1956 US Supreme Court decision banning segregation in public transit as unconstitutional.
Colvin lived in obscurity for decades afterward, working as a caregiver and nurse’s aide and struggling as a single mother, although historians and others have since brought to light the pivotal role she played in the early civil rights movement.
Fred Gray, the attorney behind the lawsuit, credited Colvin with helping to ignite the battle against segregation in the Deep South.
“I don’t mean to take anything away from Mrs Parks, but Claudette gave all of us the moral courage to do what we did,” the Washington Post quoted Gray as saying.
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