Claudette Colvin

Claudette Colvin (born September 5, 1939, Birmingham, Alabama, U.S.) is an American woman who was arrested as a teenager in 1955 for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white woman. Her protest was one of several by Black women challenging segregation on buses in the months before Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat. Parks’s action, however, is more well known, having precipitated the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama that helped spark the American civil rights movement.

Claudette Colvin was born Claudette Austin, the eldest of two daughters, to Mary Jane Gadson and C.P. Austin in Birmingham, Alabama. C.P. Austin left the family, and the two girls grew up on a farm owned by an aunt and uncle, Mary Anne and Q.P. Colvin, in Pine Level, Alabama. At this time, Claudette and her sister, Delphine, adopted the last name of their guardians. When Claudette Colvin was eight years old, the family moved to Montgomery. In 1952 her sister died from polio, days before Colvin was to start high school. She attended Booker T. Washington, a school for African American students. There she and her classmates discussed the many forms of segregation they faced in their daily lives. She was also inspired by the biographies of such significant African Americans as Harriet Tubman, who escaped enslavement and led dozens of enslaved people to freedom along the Underground Railroad, and Sojourner Truth, who was freed from enslavement and became a leader in the abolitionist and women’s rights movements.

On March 2, 1955, when Colvin was 15 years old, she was riding a bus in Montgomery when the driver asked her to give up her seat to a white person. Colvin refused, saying that she had paid her fare and had a constitutional right to sit there. Her action, however, went against the segregation laws of Montgomery, and two police officers dragged Colvin off the bus, put her in handcuffs, and took her to jail. In court, she pleaded not guilty to the three charges against her: disturbing the peace, violating the city’s segregation laws, and assaulting the police officers. She was convicted on all three and was sentenced to indefinite probation and declared a ward of the state. She appealed, and two charges were dropped, but the assault charge was upheld.

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Although some members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) thought that Colvin’s case could bring attention to the injustice of segregation, others thought that Colvin was too young and unreliable to represent the fight for civil rights. Ultimately, Parks became the symbol of the struggle, with some calling her the “mother of the civil rights movement.” Still, Colvin challenged bus segregation laws in court. In 1956 she and four other African American women, Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, Jeanetta Reese, and Mary Louise Smith, participated in the class action lawsuit Browder v. Gayle, which reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Later that year the Court ruled in favor of the women, making segregation on buses illegal.

Colvin later moved to New York City, where she worked in a nursing home for 35 years before retiring. Her story was largely forgotten until 2009, when a book about her life—Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice, by Phillip Hoose—won the National Book Award for young people’s literature. In 2021 Colvin petitioned to have her record expunged, and her request was granted soon thereafter.

In a 2021 interview with the Guardian, Colvin recalled vividly why she refused to give up her seat.

• “History had me glued to the seat. It felt as if Harriet Tubman’s hand was pushing me down on the one shoulder, and Sojourner Truth’s hand was pushing me down on the other. Learning about those two women gave me the courage to remain seated that day.”