B{+} Thanks Claudette Colvin

February 1, 2012 Posted by MelanieM in Be Inspired, Community

Claudette Colvin (9/5/1939-present)

B. Positive Magazine would like to recognize Claudette Colvin for her active role in putting an end to segregation laws in the South. She was the first woman to resist bus segregation in Montgomery, Alabama.

Claudette Colvin In 1955, Colvin was a student at Booker T. Washington High School in Montgomery. She was returning from school on March 2 when she got on a Capital Heights bus downtown. She sat in the section where, if a white person was standing, the blacks would have to get up and move to the back. When a white woman got on the bus and was standing, the bus driver, Robert W. Cleere, ordered Colvin and two other black passengers to get up and change seats. When Colvin refused, she was removed from the bus and arrested by two police officers.

When asked what was going through her mind as she gained the courage to stand up for her constitutional rights, Colvin said that she had just recently written a school paper about the prohibition against blacks’ trying on clothing in department stores, and how they were prohibited from using the dressing rooms.

Colvin’s classmate, Annie Larkins Price, recalls the situation, “The bus was getting crowded and I Claudette Colvin remember the bus driver looking through the rear view mirror asking her to get up out of her seat, which she didn’t. She had been yelling it’s my constitutional right. She decided on that day that she wasn’t going to move. Colvin was handcuffed, arrested and forcibly removed from the bus. She shouted that her constitutional rights were being violated.” Price testified on Colvin’s behalf in the juvenile court case, where Colvin was convicted of violating the segregation law and assault; however, Price said, “there was no assault.”

Even though Colvin was not at the forefront of the bus boycott movement and did not receive much recognition, she stated, “Let the people know Rosa Parks was the right person for the boycott. But also let them know that the attorneys took four other women to the Supreme Court to challenge the law that led to the end of segregation.”

Thank you Claudette Colvin for being a pioneer in the fight for our equal rights,

With much gratitude,

B. Positive Magazine

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