All You Need To Know About Claudette Colvin, The Woman Behind The Montgomery Bus Boycott

History classes always share Rosa Parks’ story, but often overlook Claudette Colvin, the 15-year-old civil rights activist who refused to give up her seat nine months before Parks did. Now, after her passing on Tuesday, Jan. 13, The Root is committed to keeping her story alive.

Born Sept. 5, 1939, in Birmingham, Alabama, Claudette Colvin was only 15 years old when she helped to ignite the flames of the civil rights movement. On March 2, 1955, she boarded a Montgomery city bus with a group of friends and took a seat behind the section reserved for white folks. But after more white folks boarded the bus, the driver shouted to Colvin and her pals that he needed them to move, according to Mother Jones. Colvin’s friends complied, but Colvin did not.

She refused to budge from her seat for a couple of stops before police arrived to drag her off the bus. As she was dragged away, Colvin shouted multiple times that sitting in that seat was her constitutional right, per Mother Jones. She later testified in court that she felt inspired by the slave abolitionists she had read about and said she had Harriet Tubman on one shoulder and Sojourner Truth on the other, and history glued her to the seat, according to The Guardian.

Other than her knowledge of Black history, the young civil rights activist was influenced by her involvement in her school’s NAACP Youth Council and the recent arrest of her friend, Jeremiah Reeves, for sleeping with a white woman who claimed he raped her, according to The New York Times. Her growing frustration with daily life in segregated America helped build the impassioned 15-year-old’s stance on the bus that March day.

Despite her bravery, civil rights leaders deemed Rosa Parks a less problematic face to propel the Montgomery bus boycott compared to Colvin, who came from a poor background and was charged with resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer, according to Mother Jones.

Even though Colvin was not placed on the front lines of the movement, she was still a vital figure who went on to be one of four plaintiffs and a principal witness in the Browder v. Gayle lawsuit, which led to segregation in public transport being banned, according to The Guardian.

After the historic legal victory, Colvin, then a single mother to a son born in 1956, moved to the Bronx in 1958, where she lived a quiet life as a domestic servant. In a 2009 interview with The New York Times, she admitted that her mom had convinced her to keep quiet about her involvement in the Montgomery bus boycott.

“My mother told me to be quiet about what I did,” she said. “She told me, ‘Let Rosa be the one. White people aren’t going to bother Rosa — her skin is lighter than yours, and they like her.’”

In the same interview, she added that it was time for her to begin telling her story so younger generations have a clear picture of the civil rights movement.

“Maybe by telling my story — something I was afraid to do for a long time — kids will have a better understanding about what the civil rights movement was about,” she told The New York Times.

In December 2021, 66 years after her 1955 protest, Colvin had her record expunged by an Alabama judge, according to The Root. Having a sense of humor about that historic day, she joked that she would no longer be an 82-year-old juvenile delinquent.

Colvin is survived by her son, Randy; seven grandchildren; eight great-grandchildren; and her sisters Mary Ellen Russell, Joann Coretta Lawson, Theresa Diane Lovejoy Johnson, Carolyn Russell, Gloria Jean Laster and Bernice Foster Chambliss, per The New York Times.