STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
In 1955, Rosa Parks famously refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus. She was not the first. Months earlier, a Black teenager, Claudette Colvin, was arrested for not offering her seat to a white passenger. Colvin has died at age 86, and NPR’s Debbie Elliott is with us. Debbie, good morning.
DEBBIE ELLIOTT, BYLINE: Good morning, Steve.
INSKEEP: What was her story?
ELLIOTT: Well, this was back in March of 1955, and Colvin was just a 15-year-old high school student. She was riding in the back of a Montgomery bus where Black passengers were supposed to be sitting when a white bus driver ordered her to give up her seat to a white woman. She refused. She told NPR in a 2009 interview that she’d paid her bus fare and had a right to her seat.
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CLAUDETTE COLVIN: All I do remember is that I wasn’t going to walk off the bus voluntarily.
ELLIOTT: Police were called in and took her off of the bus in handcuffs. So, no, she did not walk off that bus voluntarily. She was jailed for violating bus segregation ordinances, disturbing the peace and assaulting an officer. She remembered hearing the jail door slam and then crying behind bars before she was eventually bailed out. It would be nine months later that Rosa Parks was arrested for the same thing, refusing to give up her bus seat. That act inspired the Montgomery bus boycott, famously led by an up-and-coming young pastor, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
INSKEEP: Now, as I recall, people gave a lot of thought to the Rosa Parks case - is this the perfect person to make this case to the country about segregation? But this makes me wonder, how was it that Colvin came to challenge the segregated bus system in Alabama before that?
ELLIOTT: This is what is so interesting to me. Colvin told NPR in that 2009 interview that she was inspired by what she had just learned during Black History Month in school and the students’ discussions about the unjust conditions for Black citizens in the Jim Crow South. Here’s what she said.
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COLVIN: Just like when my head was just too full of Black history, you know, the oppression that we went through. So, I tell everybody, I said, you know what - how it felt? I said, it felt like Sojourner Truth was on one side pushing me down, and Harriet Tubman was on the other side of me pushing me down. I couldn’t get up.
ELLIOTT: She felt the weight of that history on her shoulders.
INSKEEP: Amazed to hear the way she expresses that too all those years later. So having heard this story, how should Claudette Colvin be remembered?
ELLIOTT: Well, even though she might have been lesser known, she was a key player in dismantling racial segregation in public transportation. You know, even as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. were making waves and gaining international attention with the Montgomery bus boycott, Colvin was one of the plaintiffs in what became a landmark federal lawsuit filed by civil rights attorney Fred Gray. Her testimony was instrumental in that case. A federal court ruled bus segregation to be unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed. That was 1956. So she was certainly a teenage pioneer right there at the start of the Civil Rights Movement. Gray has said she gave the movement moral courage. Colvin later moved to New York and worked as a nurse’s aide and wasn’t really recognized for her contributions until decades later. In 2021, she got her juvenile arrest record expunged. A memorial note on her foundation website says that she leaves a legacy of courage that helped change the course of American history.
INSKEEP: Amazing. NPR’s Debbie Elliott. Always a pleasure hearing from you. Thank you so much.
ELLIOTT: You’re welcome.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED”)
MAVIS STAPLES: (Singing) We shall not be moved like a tree... Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
