Feminist to Know: Claudette Colvin

Claudette Colvin is best known for preceding Rosa Parks in staging a resistance to racist Jim Crow bus segregation. In Montgomery, Alabama, 1955, fifteen-year-old Colvin was on the bus home when she refused to give up her seat for a white woman. She was struck by the injustice of the moment and spontaneously decided to perform an act of civil disobedience by simply staying seated––even as her classmates moved to the back of the bus. 

Colvin credits her decision to having just learned about the Constitution in class, remarking further that “I wanted the young African-American girls also on the bus to know that they had a right to be there, because they had paid their fare just like the white passengers. This is not slavery. We shouldn’t be asked to get up for the white people just because they are white. I just wanted them to know the Constitution didn’t say that.” Colvin was arrested for her civil disobedience, and spent a brief stay in jail. What is particularly remarkable was that, unlike later acts of resistance against segregation, Colvin’s refusal to act in accordance with Jim Crow was done without personal or structural support of leading figures like the NAACP.

Rosa Parks’s now-famous protest was indeed inspired by Colvin’s personal bravery. By contrast, Parks’ resistance had the backing and assiduous preparation of the NAACP, which was looking for a figurehead and spark to incite the Montgomery bus boycotts. Colvin’s story comes full circle in that she would later be a plaintiff in Browder v. Gayle, the Supreme Court Case which deemed segregation on private buses unconstitutional. Colvin’s story is both a testament to the facts that anyone can participate in acts of resistance and that movements are often larger and more dimensional than the historical narrative we are taught.

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