In the year 2000, while I was writing my book We Were There, Too!: Young People in U.S. History, someone told me that a fifteen-year-old African-American girl had taken the same defiant stand as Rosa Parks, in the same city, but almost a year earlier. As the story went, this girl’s refusal to give up her seat on a city bus to a white passenger had helped inspire the famous Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott of 1955 and 1956. But instead of being honored, she had been shunned by her classmates, dismissed as an unfit role model by adult leaders, and later overlooked by historians.
An Internet search led me to the name Claudette Colvin. I found that, indeed, in March 1955, this high school junior had been arrested, dragged backwards off the bus by police, handcuffed, and jailed for refusing to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger. Her protest had taken place almost nine months to the day before Rosa Parks had famously taken the same stand.
Reading on, I discovered that Claudette Colvin didn’t give up after she was arrested and tried. A year later, she and three other women sued the city of Montgomery and the state of Alabama, challenging the laws requiring segregated seating on buses. Only after they won, in a case known as Browder v. Gayle, were the city’s buses integrated.
Is Claudette Colvin still alive? I asked myself. If so, where is she? Further research turned up a 1995 article about her in USA Today, framing Ms. Colvin as an important but nearly forgotten civil rights pioneer. Her obscurity, said the writer, was the product of “shyness, missed communications and a historical bum rap.” The article said Ms. Colvin was now fifty-six years old and living in New York City, where she worked at a private nursing home.
I telephoned the reporter, Richard Willing, who said yes, he was still in touch with Ms. Colvin. After we talked, he agreed to contact her to see if she would be interested in working with me on a book about her early life.
For the next four years, Mr. Willing called Claudette Colvin occasionally on my behalf. Always the message relayed back to me was “Maybe when I retire.” I had all but given up when, one night in the fall of 2006, I saw the red light blinking on my answering machine. It was Richard Willing. His message was brief: “Claudette says I can give you her phone number,” he said. “Here it is. Good luck.”
Soon after that night, I rang the bell of Claudette Colvin’s apartment in a New York high-rise apartment building. The door was pulled open by a caramel-colored woman who greeted me with a shy smile as she inspected me closely through wide-framed glasses. She had a nest of curls on top of her head. We walked—she with the aid of a cane—to a restaurant that had a quiet room where we could talk over a meal. She laughed easily and spoke in a tuneful voice that still had plenty of Montgomery in it but had also taken on a Caribbean lilt, since some of her New York neighbors were Jamaicans. We decided to work together.
During the following year Claudette shared the personal history of a dramatic social revolution. Having played a central role in events that helped destroy the legal basis for racial segregation in the United States, she still remembered not only what happened but how it felt. She could still describe the inside of her cell, the sound of a jailer’s key, and the view from a witness box in a packed federal courtroom. She could also remember the rage she felt when the adults in her life complained at home about segregation but accepted it outside.
In fourteen long interviews during the next year—three in New York and the others by telephone—I asked Claudette thousands of questions. Only a very few times did she gesture for me to turn the tape recorder off, or say she would prefer to keep something to herself. She gave me the telephone numbers of friends and family members, and encouraged them to talk to me. She was wonderfully open and generous.
More than any other story I know, Claudette Colvin’s life story shows how history is made up of objective facts and personal truths, braided together. In her case, a girl raised in poverty by a strong, loving family twice risked her life to gain a measure of justice for her people. Hers is the story of a wise and brave woman who, when she was a smart, angry teenager in Jim Crow Alabama, made contributions to human rights far too important to be forgotten.