Before Rosa Parks, Alabama Teen Protested Bus Segregation
Claudette Colvin got little support in 1955 when she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., bus for a white woman.
Colvin was only 15 when she refused to budge from her seat, and many classmates shunned her after her arrest, the Associated Press reports. Black leaders didn’t think the feisty teen projected the right image to garner support for a bus boycott that they were considering, and Colvin won little attention when she became a plaintiff the next year in the civil rights suit that ended segregation on buses.
It was Rosa Parks’ similar act of defiance nine months after Colvin’s arrest that led to the bus boycott. Colvin’s actions and her role in the case, Browder v. Gayle, “remained mostly in the shadows of the civil rights movement,” according to a story in the Montgomery Advertiser.
Now Colvin is finally getting some attention in a new book by author Phillip Hoose called Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice. Hoose spent years tracking down Colvin, and another four years trying to get an interview, the Montgomery Advertiser says.
“This is a story of a teenage girl who risked her life for her people,” Hoose told the Montgomery newspaper.
