Claudette Colvin, March 2, 1955
Claudette Colvin, March 2, 1955
Claudette Colvin, c. 1953
In 1952, at the age of thirteen, Claudette Colvin left her childhood behind when a schoolmate, Jeremiah Reeves, aged 16, was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for raping a white woman in Montgomery, Alabama. “That was when I and a lot of other students really started thinking about prejudice and racism….That put a lot of anger in me. I stayed angry about Jeremiah Reeves for a long time.” The U.S. Supreme Court overthrew Reeves’s conviction in December 1954 and demanded a new trial. (Following his conviction and death sentence in a second trial and after coming of age, Reeves was executed in March 1958.)
On March 2, 1955, Colvin and some friends were on a city bus on their way home from school when the bus driver told her and three friends to move to the rear even though there were no free rear seats, so that a white woman could sit down in a row with no Black passengers in it. Colvin had been studying the Constitution and Black history, and she knew the City Code made it “unlawful for any passenger to refuse or fail to take a seat among those assigned to the race to which he belongs,…if there is such a seat vacant” [my emphasis]. As Colvin later 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.”
The driver drove on until he saw a police car. Colvin was dragged off the bus, crying, “It’s my constitutional right to sit here as much as that lady!” On the way to the police station, she was ridiculed, cursed, and insulted, and she was frightened of being raped. After being booked and driven to the city jail, she was released on bail to her pastor and her mother. At a juvenile court hearing on March 18, charged with breaking the state segregation law, disturbing the peace, and assaulting a police officer, Colvin was found guilty on all counts, placed on indefinite probation, declared a ward of the state, and released to the custody of her parents.
E. D. Nixon, head of the Montgomery NAACP chapter, and the lawyer Fred Gray hoped to use this case to challenge segregation, but their appeal in May was undermined by the circuit court judge, who dismissed the segregation charge and the disorderly conduct charge and imposed only a very light fine on the assault charge. Colvin became pregnant that summer and was expelled from school in the fall. However, after the arrest of Rosa Parks on December 1 and the ensuing Montgomery bus boycott, Fred Gray included Colvin’s case in the landmark Browder v. Gayle lawsuit through which the U.S. Supreme Court declared segregation on buses to be illegal, even if they don’t cross state lines.
Colvin earned a GED and briefly attended Alabama State College. Finding it difficult to hold a job once her employers found out who she was, she moved to live with her sister in New York, where she worked for thirty-six years in a Manhattan nursing home.
On December 17, 2021, more than sixty-six years after her arrest, Claudette Colvin’s arrest record was finally expunged. In 2023 she and her family established the Claudette Colvin Foundation “to inspire and recognize youth and young adults for their service in significantly improving life in communities across America,” (See https://www.claudettecolvinfoundation.com/.)