“I paid my fare … It’s my constitutional right!”
Montgomery, Alabama, 1955
The Civil War may have ended slavery, but it did not end racial prejudice. In the decades after, whites passed hundreds of laws to keep whites and blacks from living, playing, working, and riding buses or trains together, and even from being buried in the same cemeteries. Called Jim Crow laws, after a character in an old song, these rules were often enforced by violence. Jim Crow was strongest in the South, but it swaggered through the North, too. In Indianapolis, for example, nearly all black residents lived in one swampy area on the northwest side of town. There were separate parks for colored residents and a high school just for black students and teachers.
One of the first successful challenges to Jim Crow came in Montgomery, Alabama. There, in December 1955, forty-two-year-old Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus. She was arrested and soon freed on bail.
Her stand sparked a boycott of the Montgomery buses that lasted more than a year.
But few people know that nine months before, a defiant fifteen-year-old girl did the same thing in the same bus system. And later, this same girl stood up for freedom in a historic lawsuit that ended legal segregation in Montgomery.
Claudette Colvin got on the Highland Gardens bus in downtown Montgomery at about 4 P.M. on March 2, 1955, and settled in for the long ride home to her neighborhood on the north side. She knew the seating rules well—everyone did. You paid your fare in the front and then walked around to the back door so you wouldn’t brush up against white people. There were ten seats in the front for whites and ten in the back for blacks. In the middle were sixteen seats where black riders could sit unless a white rider came on and the driver told you to get up. Then you had to move back. Whites and blacks couldn’t sit in the same row.
When Claudette got on, there were no whites on the bus. The riders were mostly students like her, going home. Claudette slid into a seat in the middle section, next to the window. It had been a long day, and she was tired. She was daydreaming as the bus
began to fill up with white passengers. A white lady took a seat across the aisle from her. As more and more white people got on and began to stare at her, she realized she was supposed to move. Any other day she might have changed seats, but this time she didn’t feel like it. She found herself getting angry. Claudette was a tough-minded, smart girl, already a year ahead of others her age in school. She hated racial segregation and she despised the bus laws in particular. “I knew I had to take a stand sometime,” she later recalled. “I just didn’t know where or when.”
The driver looked through the rearview mirror and ordered Claudette to get up. She didn’t speak or move. All conversation stopped. “Hey, get up!” the driver yelled. Claudette remained in her seat. The driver told the crowd that he would not drive on until that girl got up. Now other riders started in. “Why don’t you get up?” one said. A black student answered from the back, “She doesn’t have to. Only thing she’s got to do is stay black and die.”
The driver got out and hailed a police officer. A traffic patrolman boarded the bus and stood over Claudette. “Aren’t you going to get up?” he demanded. And then she faced him. “No,” she said loudly. “I do not have to get up. I paid my fare … It’s my constitutional right!” Words began to pour out fast. Tears formed. She spoke of her rights under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The traffic cop went for help. Two more officers entered the bus and each grabbed one of Claudette’s wrists, sending her books flying to the floor. She struggled with all her might, flailing her arms and legs and screaming at them that they had no right to do this to her. They shoved her into a police car, pinned her arms back, and slapped handcuffs on her. They insulted her all the way to city hall.
Hours later, Claudette’s father bailed her out, but now she was in big trouble. She was charged with violating the segregation law, disorderly conduct, and even “assaulting” the two policemen who had dragged her off the bus. A few days later a judge threw out the first two charges but made her family pay a fine for the assault charge. She was placed on probation for a year. Claudette was furious. She wanted to fight.
She didn’t know it, but a group of black leaders in Montgomery had been searching for someone brave enough to do just what she had done. They wanted to challenge Montgomery’s segregation laws in court. Now, suddenly, a schoolgirl had been arrested. They debated: Should they use Claudette Colvin’s arrest as the test case? In the end, the leaders, including the new minister in town, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., backed away from her. Why? People remember it in different ways. Some thought Claudette’s arrest had happened too suddenly for the community to prepare well. When asked, some of the other black passengers who had been on Claudette’s bus said they wouldn’t appear as witnesses for Claudette in court because they were frightened of what might happen to them. Some leaders thought a girl who had been dragged kicking and screaming from the bus would be too hard to control in court. As one historian later summed it up: “Blacks weren’t ready to give up their reliance on their buses for a teenager’s troubles.”
ALBERTA SCHENCK: OUTSPOKEN ALASKAN
The experience of black soldiers in World War II began to change attitudes toward racial segregation. At the beginning of the war, black soldiers in the navy could serve only in the mess halls. But as the war unfolded and more soldiers were needed to replace the dead and injured, the army let soldiers of color fight alongside whites in integrated fighting units for the first time in history.
Their bravery raised a question back home: If people of color were good enough to die for their country, weren’t they also good enough to eat, swim, study, ride, and shop anywhere they liked? The question spread all the way to a movie theater in Nome, Alaska. One night in 1943, a seventeen-year-old half-Inupiaq girl named Alberta Schenck sat down with her soldier boyfriend in the “white” section of Nome’s downtown movie house. An usher told her, “Get over there with the Eskimos!” Alberta refused, and her boyfriend, who was white, insisted that Alberta was his guest in the section. Police lifted her from her seat and hauled her off to jail. Furious, Alberta wrote a telegram of outrage to Alaska’s governor. The words seem to scream: “My father was a soldier in World War I. I have two brothers in the army in this war.” Her stand led to the passage of an anti-discrimination act in Alaska in 1945.
Signs like this one in a Florida bus station greeted generations of blacks throughout the South and in some northern cities.
Claudette thought she was overlooked because her family was poorer than the black leaders in town. “We weren’t in the inner circle,” she later said. “The middle-class blacks didn’t want us as a role model.” And her parents were terrified. “[They] didn’t sleep at night,” she later recalled. “They expected some response from the white community.”
Claudette went back to Booker T. Washington High and tried to get on with her junior year. She joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Youth Council and gave speeches to other students about what had happened to her. Some listened, but not many. She became discouraged. “The kids in school wanted to avoid me because they said, ‘She’s the girl that was in the bus thing.’ Sometimes I felt I did something wrong … I lost a lot of friends,” she later said.
In December, nine months after Claudette’s arrest, Rosa Parks also refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. She, too, was arrested and released. Now ready, Montgomery’s black leaders rallied around Mrs. Parks and quickly organized a boycott of the city buses. Black elementary and high school students passed out thirty-five thousand flyers, telling people to stay off the buses and use car pools instead.
But the bus boycott alone would not end the segregation laws—it was more than just the buses. A young NAACP lawyer named Fred Gray decided to sue the city in federal court, claiming that the segregation laws were unconstitutional. He combed Montgomery for blacks who would testify in court how they had been mistreated on the buses. It would take real courage, because violence was a serious possibility. Gray decided not to use Rosa Parks
in this case, because she was already challenging her own arrest in court. After weeks of searching, Gray could find only four blacks in all of Montgomery willing to stand up to the city in court: three women and Claudette Colvin.
The court hearing took place on the sparkling morning of May 11, 1956. The case was called Browder v. Gayle, after Mrs. Aurelia Browder—one of the four litigants—and W. A. Gayle, Montgomery’s mayor.
Claudette wore a fine blue dress to the hearing. When she heard her name called, she walked to the witness stand and raised her right hand, her eyes sweeping over the three white judges. The city’s lawyer attacked right away, trying to trap Claudette into saying that Dr. King and other leaders had manipulated Montgomery’s blacks into boycotting the buses against their will.
“Who are your leaders?” the city’s lawyer demanded.
“Just we, ourselves,” Claudette answered evenly. “We are just a group of people.”
“Don’t make speeches,” snapped one of the judges, so Claudette answered the next few questions with only one word. She kept that up until the lawyer asked her, “Why did you stop riding on December fifth?” Then her eyes narrowed and steel entered her voice: “Because we were treated wrong, dirty and nasty,” she replied.
The hearing lasted five hours. A local reporter later wrote, “If there was a star witness … it had to be Claudette Colvin.” A month later, the judges issued a shocking decision: Montgomery’s segregation laws were unconstitutional. Montgomery’s lawyers appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the decison was upheld, leaving Montgomery with no choice but to integrate buses and other facilities.
In court and on the bus, Claudette Colvin’s courage as a Montgomery teenager set the stage for the first major victory of the Civil Rights movement. As she later put it, “I was just saying ‘enough is enough.’”
DON’T RIDE THE BUS TO SCHOOL
“Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown into jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus and give it to a white person. It is the second time since the Claudette Colvin case that a Negro woman has been arrested for the same thing [seven months after Claudette Colvin, a second teen, Mary Louise Smith, was also arrested for refusing to move to the back of the bus] … We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the buses on Monday … Don’t ride the buses to work, to town, to school … You can afford to stay out of school for one day if you have no other way to go except by bus.”
—From a flyer written and distributed December 5, 1955, just after Rosa Parks was arrested
She moved to New York City in 1958, where she now lives. She is a caregiver in a nursing home and is the mother of two sons. “I’m glad I did it,” she has said. “My generation was angry.”
FLESH
Signs of racial discrimination were in toys and games, too. Starting in 1949, Crayola crayon boxes included a color called Flesh, which was pinkish orange. Bowing to the Civil Rights movement, the crayon manufacturer renamed it Peach in 1962.