A Tale of Two Civil Rights Pioneers
Quick answer: Who was Claudette Colvin?
Claudette Colvin was a 15-year-old Montgomery, Alabama, student who was arrested on March 2, 1955, for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger, nine months before Rosa Parks did the same. She later became a plaintiff in Browder v. Gayle, the case that struck down bus segregation in Montgomery.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. She had sat in the section for Black riders, but when the whites-only section filled, the driver told her and several others to move. The others did. Parks stayed and was arrested. Her arrest launched a year-long bus boycott that ended with bus segregation ruled unconstitutional. Some said she stayed seated because she was tired. "I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day," Parks said. "No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in." But she wasn't the first. On March 2, 1955, Claudette Colvin, 15, was arrested in Montgomery for refusing to give up her seat to a white woman on a crowded bus. "Young people think Rosa Parks just sat down on a bus and ended segregation, but that wasn't the case at all," Colvin said later. Civil rights leaders chose not to build their campaign around her, in part because she became pregnant shortly afterward. Even Parks said that if the white press had found out, "they'd call her a bad girl, and her case wouldn't have a chance." Colvin went on to be one of the plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, which ended bus segregation in Montgomery. In 2005 she told the Montgomery Advertiser, "I feel very, very proud of what I did. I do feel like what I did was a spark and it caught on." When the National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in 2016, her family asked that she be given more prominent recognition. "All we want is the truth," said her sister, Gloria Laster.
Why it matters for leaders: History tends to remember one name, but most change starts with several people willing to take the same risk.
Q: When was Claudette Colvin arrested?
A: On March 2, 1955, nine months before Rosa Parks.
Q: What was Browder v. Gayle?
A: The federal case, with Colvin among the plaintiffs, that ruled Montgomery's bus segregation unconstitutional in 1956; the Supreme Court affirmed it that year.
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By John Fenzel, founder and CEO of Heroes' Path Foundation