Greene County Democrat

Tag: Claudette Colvin

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

    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 : Legendary civil rights attorney Fred Gray honored with statue at Alabama State Bar

    Civil Rights Attorney Fred Gray, right, and his wife Carol Gray look on during the unveiling ceremony of a statue of Fred Gray at the Alabama State Bar Association building in downtown Montgomery, Ala., on Thursday April 24,2025. (Mickey Welsh / Advertiser)

    By Safiyah Riddle, Philadelphia Tribune

    MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Legendary attorney Fred Gray — once deemed the “chief counsel” of the Civil Rights Movement by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — was honored with a statue outside the Alabama State Bar Association on April 24, 2025.
    “Growing up in Montgomery on the west side, I never thought that one day my image would be in stone to honor my professional career,” the 94-year-old said in an impassioned speech at the statue unveiling in downtown Montgomery.
    Gray represented prominent civil rights leaders like King, Rosa Parks and John Lewis throughout the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, allowing activists to intentionally leverage mass arrests and civil disobedience to push for equal rights. Gray also represented participants in Selma-to-Montgomery marches in March 1965, which led to the Voting Rights Act in August later that year.
    On Thursday, Gray emphasized his gratitude for the countless other people he represented who aren’t often recognized — including Claudette Colvin, who was arrested in 1955 when she was a teenager after she refused to give up her seat on a segregated Montgomery bus, months before Parks earned worldwide appreciation for doing the same.
    “I humbly accept this award for all those unknown heroes and clients whose names never appear in print media, whose faces never appear on television. They are the persons who laid the foundation so that you can honor me here today,” Gray said.
    The statue is engraved with the words “lawyers render service,” a phrase coined by Gray that is now championed by the Alabama Bar Association. Gray was the first Black president of the statewide organization in 2002.
    Gray’s role in the Civil Rights Movement was the first of many accomplishments in his 70 years practicing law. In 1970, he became one of Alabama’s first Black state legislators after Reconstruction.
    Around the same time, Gray represented Black men who filed suit after the government intentionally let their illnesses go untreated in the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study. His work eventually led to an official apology from President Bill Clinton on the government’s behalf in 1997.
    Gray is currently involved in a lawsuit seeking to remove a Confederate monument from a square at the center of mostly Black Tuskegee.
    In 2022, Gray received the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
    Gray, who is an ordained minister, attributed his successful career to his faith in God and the support of his family, many of whom were in the audience as he spoke.
    He acknowledged Thursday that the court “system doesn’t always deliver justice” but said that he would continue to keep working “until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a stream.”

     

  • Newswire : Claudette Colvin, who refused to give up bus seat to a white person in 1955, has juvenile record expunged

    Claudette Colvin

     

    By Marlene Lenthang, NBC News

    The juvenile record of civil rights pioneer Claudette Colvin has been expunged, 66 years after she refused to give up her seat on an Alabama bus to a white woman. 
    Colvin was just 15 when a bus driver asked her and other students to give up their seats on March 2, 1955. The act of defiance was nine months before Rosa Parks’ similar bus protest.
    After Colvin refused to budge, she was arrested and charged violating the city’s segregation law, disorderly conduct and assaulting an officer, Associated Press reported. The first two charges were dropped, but the assault charge remained on her record. 
    Colvin, now 82, filed a petition in October to have the record of the arrest cleared.  Montgomery County Juvenile Judge Calvin Williams signed the order to expunge her records on Nov. 24, his office confirmed to NBC News. 
    Williams granted the petition for good cause “for what has since been recognized as a courageous act on her behalf and on behalf of a community of affected people,” he wrote in the order.
    Speaking on the decision, Williams told NBC News: “It’s really a full circle moment for me to sit on the bench, when there were no judges of African American descent on the bench to right a wrong that was perpetrated on her at the time.”
    “I appreciate the Judge’s decision to do it and that means that, I’m no longer, at 82, a juvenile delinquent,” Colvin said in a press conference Tuesday.
    “My reason for doing it is because I get a chance to tell my grandchildren, my great grandchildren what life was like in segregated America … The hardship and intimidation that took place in those years and the reason I took a stand to defy the segregated law,” she said. 
    In an affidavit attached to the petition to clear her records, Colvin revealed why she refused to move on that fateful day.  “History had me glued to the seat,” she said in the affidavit. “Sitting there, it felt to me as though Harriet Tubman’s hand was on one shoulder pushing me down and Sojourner Truth’s hand was on the other.”
    Colvin revealed that she took that city bus by chance that day because school was let out early. She normally took a special bus designated only for Black children, according to the affidavit. She also said she was thinking of Black History Month and what she learned in class when she refused to give up her seat in the colored section of the bus. 
    Colvin was sentenced to probation pending good behavior, but was never told when her probation ended, the affidavit said. Her notorious bus arrest changed her life — but also besmirched her name in Montgomery. She said she was fired from jobs “over and over again” after her bosses “found out that I was ‘that girl’ who had sat on the bus,” she said in the affidavit. “I was notorious and employing me was a liability,” she said. 
    Her arrest also left her family terrorized. Even after she moved to New York, her family would worry when she came home to visit because “they were afraid of the consequences of having her there,” she said in the affidavit. 
    Colvin continued to fight for civil rights throughout her life. She was one of four plaintiffs, along with Rosa Parks, in the landmark Browder V. Gayle Supreme Court decision in 1956 that ended bus segregation in Alabama.
    “A measure of justice was served. And it’s important to note that it’s a very late measure of justice,” Leah Nelson, an investigator in Colvin’s case for expungement, told NBC News. “There’s no way to give Ms. Colvin back what was taken from her. But it matters that the Court is holding itself accountable publicly. And I hope we’ll see more of that in Alabama.”

  • Newswire: Civil rights pioneer Claudette Colvin wants to clear her court record in Montgomery

    Claudette Colvin at 15 and now

    By: Brad Harper, Montgomery Advertiser

    Claudette Colvin was 15 was she was arrested and given indefinite probation for refusing to surrender her seat on a segregated Montgomery city bus, nine months before Rosa Parks.
    Now she’s 82 and a resident of an assisted living facility in Birmingham, and she’s lived her life with that probation, which was never lifted.
    That could be about to change. Colvin plans to file a petition Tuesday in Montgomery Juvenile Court to have the records associated with her 1955 arrest expunged, attorney Phillip Ensler said. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down segregated busing the year after Colvin’s arrest, and she was one of four plaintiffs in that case.
    Fred Gray, her original attorney, will be beside Colvin as she files the petition Tuesday.
    Ensler said the push has been led by Colvin’s sister, Gloria Laster. He said because she was placed on “indefinite probation,” her family was always fearful when she came back to visit Montgomery and did not realize the probation ended. Ensler said they want the court to formally clear her name.

    “No one ever told her or her family once she became an adult, ‘Hey you’re no longer on probation,’ ” Enser said. “… It made her and her family feel like she’s always going to be under the eye of the government.”
    Montgomery Mayor Steven Reed, Montgomery County District Attorney Daryl Bailey and state Rep. Merika Coleman all plan to be on hand at the filing, Ensler said.
    Colvin was charged at the time with assaulting an officer as she was forcibly removed from the bus. She told the Montgomery Advertiser in 2019 that she didn’t remember attacking police, but she remembers other details — like white officers debating her bra size and the sound of the key locking her in the cell.
    “As a teenager, that’s when I became really scared,” Colvin said at the time. “In an old Western, when the bandits are put in the jail, you can hear the sound of the key go ‘click.’ I could hear the sound when the jailer locked it. I knew I was locked in, and I couldn’t get out. I started crying. I started reciting the 23rd Psalm.”
    Before filing to clear her record, Colvin will join Gray at the Tuesday dedication of a Montgomery street that’s being renamed in his honor.
    Colvin’s former attorney grew up on Jeff Davis Avenue in Montgomery, a street named for the president of the Confederacy. The Montgomery City Council unanimously voted in October to rename it Fred D. Gray Avenue, despite potentially violating a state law that was enacted in 2017 to protect Confederate monuments.

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

    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.