Tag Archives: Browder V. Gayle

Newswire : Claudette Colvin, who refused to move before the nation was ready, dies at 86

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Claudette Colvin

By Stacy M. Brown
NNPA Newswire Senior National Correspondent

History often remembers movements by their most recognizable moments. It less often remembers the teenagers who moved first.
Claudette Colvin, whose refusal to surrender her seat on a segregated Montgomery bus came months before the moment that would enter textbooks, died Tuesday at 86. Her death was confirmed by the Claudette Colvin Legacy Foundation, which said she died of natural causes in Texas.
On March 2, 1955, Colvin was 15 years old and riding home from school when the bus driver ordered Black passengers to give up their seats to white riders. Three students stood. Colvin did not. Police arrested her, charged her under segregation laws, and placed her on probation. She later said she was thinking about the Constitution and the rights she believed belonged to her.
Colvin’s arrest came at a time when Montgomery’s Black community was already pressing against the daily restraints of Jim Crow. Her stand did not ignite a boycott that day, but it did register. It landed in conversations, church meetings, and legal strategy sessions that would soon follow.
“This nation lost a civil rights giant today,” Tafeni English-Relf, Alabama state director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, said. “Claudette Colvin’s courage lit the fire for a movement that would free all Alabamians and Americans from the woes of southern segregation.”
Unlike others whose names became shorthand for the era, Colvin paid a quieter price. She was young and outspoken and was later judged by standards that did not apply to older leaders. She was never elevated as the public face of the movement. Her life unfolded mostly outside the spotlight she helped create.
Yet Colvin’s role proved decisive.
She became one of four plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, the federal lawsuit that reached the Supreme Court and ended bus segregation in Montgomery and across Alabama. The case dismantled the legal framework that made her arrest possible.
“At age 15, Ms. Colvin was arrested on March 2, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, for violating bus segregation ordinances, nine months before Rosa Parks,” Phillip Ensler wrote. “In 2021, it was the privilege of a lifetime to serve on the legal team that helped Ms. Colvin clear her record from the conviction.”
“As we worked on the court motion, I had the honor of spending time with Ms. Colvin to hear her story and get to know her,” Ensler wrote.
“Today we lost an unsung yet significant hero of the civil rights movement,” Sen. Rev. Raphael Warnock said. “Her courage paved the way for Rosa Parks’ decision and the launching of a movement that would end segregation.”
“History did not always give Claudette Colvin the credit she deserved, but her impact is undeniable,” Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said.
“Her life reminds us that progress is shaped not only by moments, but by sustained courage and truth,” Bernice King said.

 

Newswire: Rosa Parks: Remembering her resilience, resistance in the face of racism

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By:  Clarissa Hamlin, Newsone

Rosa Parks seated on bus; Rosa Parks mugshot after arrest

Rosa Parks, befittingly called the “Mother of the Modern Day Civil Rights Movement,” sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott with one special move 65 years ago: staying in her seat.
Her move, simple in delivery but stellar in impact, represented a refusal to relinquish her seat to a white passenger when bus driver James F. Blake demanded that she do so in Montgomery, Alabama, on Dec. 1, 1955. Blacks were known as colored, and inferiority was the superior thought about African Americans at the time of Parks’ burgeoning resistance. She, like so many Black people, was tired of being resigned to second-class status because of racism.
On that day, Parks’ resistance was right. Yet, the courageous woman, 42, was arrested and briefly locked up, handcuffed by the stigmatization of segregation. Parks’ revolution was racialized and publicized. Threats and caveats alike were thrown her way, but proved futile.
The activist summed up her feelings about that heavily documented day in her “Rosa Parks: My Story” autobiography in 1992: “I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was 42. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”
Parks, the secretary of the Montgomery NAACP chapter at the time, was not the first woman to refuse to vacate her seat. Claudette Colvin, Susie McDonald, Mary Louise Smith and other women were arrested for their resistance of the segregated bus system. A small boycott snowballed into a major boycott that lasted more than 300 days, starving revenue for the Alabama buses operations.

Colvin, Parks and the other female protesters, along with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in solidarity with one another, supported a major legal case, Browder V. Gayle, that caused a reversal in course pertaining to bus segregation in 1956. Black folks won the agency to sit in whatever seats they wanted, a right that should have been there’s from the start.

Parks, who died in 2005 at the age of 92 in Detroit, Michigan, will forever be remembered for her role in the revolution in Montgomery. There is a statue of her at the base of Dexter Avenue, six blocks from the Alabama State Capito and a museum downtown to honor her.