Claudette Colvin had more courage, in my opinion, than any of the [other] persons involved in the movement.
—Fred Gray
February 2005, Booker T. Washington Magnet High School, Montgomery, Alabama
TWO HUNDRED JUNIORS AND SENIORS—about half white and half black, with a smattering of students from other racial and ethnic backgrounds—file into the school auditorium for a midmorning assembly. They settle into seats and squint at the stage, where a small group of black women are seated.
Lights dim, and a youthful figure wearing a simple dress and horn-rimmed glasses takes center stage. The actress and storyteller Awele Makeba transforms the auditorium into a packed city bus, the scene of a tense standoff between a determined black girl and several uniformed white men. Students in the audience lean forward, absorbed, maybe asking themselves if they would have taken such risks, and wondering how they would have held up under such pressure.
When the performance is finished, the principal turns to a woman who has not moved throughout the performance and invites her forward. She rises slowly and takes a few steps up to the microphone and into the light. The students of Booker T. Washington High, blacks and white together, rise to cheer her. Though the woman smiles warmly, there are no tears.
“Do you have any questions?” Claudette Colvin asks the students.
It has been a long way back home.
In 1957, the year after Browder v. Gayle, Claudette passed her G.E.D. and then enrolled at Alabama State College. Dissatisfied with the courses offered, she dropped out after a year.
Unable to find work in Montgomery, in 1958 Claudette followed Velma to New York City, reluctantly leaving Raymond in the care of her mom. At first she felt caged in by New York. “I would wake up in the night in Velma’s tiny little apartment thinking I was in that cell in Montgomery,” she remembers. “Sometimes I thought I could hear the jailer’s key.”
Claudette gave birth to a second son, Randy, in 1960. Unsure about how best to help her boys—trying to raise them on a maid’s salary in Montgomery or sending money home from her New York job as a live-in family caregiver—she went “back and forth like a yo-yo” until, in 1968, she finally settled in New York. Claudette received nurse’s training and took a job as a nurse’s aide in a Catholic hospital in New York, where she cared for elderly patients, often at night. She worked there for many years.
During the 1960s, Claudette kept up with the civil rights movement in the news but stayed on the sidelines. Caution had become a habit; she told no one of her activist past. Decade by decade, she watched Rosa Parks’s fame grow as the person who had ignited the movement by refusing to surrender her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Sometimes she wondered if anyone back home even remembered her arrest and testimony. Browder v. Gayle, overshadowed by the more famous school case, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, was rarely mentioned in histories of the movement. The names of the four women who took down the bus segregation laws seemed to have been forgotten. The door to her place in history seemed closed forever.
And then, unexpectedly, it cracked open. In 1975 Frank Sikora, a Birmingham newspaper reporter writing a story on the Montgomery bus boycott, thought he remembered there had been someone before Rosa Parks. Library research brought up a name: Claudette Colvin. Flipping through the Montgomery phone book, Sikora found a Q. P. Colvin still listed at the address mentioned in one of the old stories. He grabbed his notebook, drove to King Hill, and pulled up to a small frame house. “I was met at the door by a woman of about seventy, slender and with a face full of dignity,” he remembers. “It was Mary Ann Colvin, the woman who raised Claudette. I interviewed her and asked if she had a picture of Claudette. She dug out a little school snapshot, and scribbled down a phone number in New York City.”
Sikora telephoned a surprised Claudette and wrote a story about her. A few more stories followed, as well as chapters in two books about children of the civil rights movement. Her name began to appear in histories of the movement, though Claudette Colvin was usually presented as a feisty, immature teenager who got arrested before Rosa Parks but was “not the right person” to be a boycott leader. Many accounts said that Claudette was pregnant at the time she was arrested. “That would have been the first thirteen-month pregnancy in history,” Claudette observes. She kept her phone number unlisted and turned down most offers to speak.
But she did accept the offer of a ticket back home in 2005. The Montgomery Advertiser was sponsoring a fiftieth anniversary commemoration of the Montgomery bus boycott. People really seemed to want her to come. Friends would be there, as well as many of the activists still alive. And so it was that now, as part of that remembrance, she found herself standing before the students of Booker T. Washington, the very school from which she had been expelled a half century before.
CLAUDETTE: How did it feel? Awesome. Wonderful. It felt like young people hadn’t abandoned the cause, like they really wanted to know what we went through. They appreciated what we did to try to clear the way for them. A black girl and a white girl stood on either side of me and we had our photograph taken together. I told them that years ago it would have been unheard of for a white student and a black student to be standing together, and learning together on an equal basis. It seemed unbelievable that this had come to pass.
We had a question-and-answer session, and they asked what I would say to them, looking back from my years. I told them: Don’t give up. Keep struggling, and don’t slide back. Grab all the resources that are available for you, and get yourselves ready to compete. I told them to take their education seriously.
I know that segregation isn’t dead—just look at schools and neighborhoods and workplaces, and you can see that it’s still all over America. And yes, we are still at the very beginning economically. But at least those degrading signs, “White” and “Colored,” are gone. We destroyed them. There are laws now that make segregation illegal. We forced white people to take a different view. They had to change their attitude toward blacks. The civil rights movement cleared the way legally so we could progress. It opened the doors for the younger generation. I’m glad I was a part of that.
When I look back now, I think Rosa Parks was the right person to represent that movement at that time. She was a good and strong person, accepted by more people than were ready to accept me. But I made a personal statement, too, one that she didn’t make and probably couldn’t have made. Mine was the first cry for justice, and a loud one. I made it so that our own adult leaders couldn’t just be nice anymore. Back then, as a teenager, I kept thinking, Why don’t the adults around here just say something? Say it so they know we don’t accept segregation? I knew then and I know now that, when it comes to justice, there is no easy way to get it. You can’t sugarcoat it. You have to take a stand and say, “This is not right.”
And I did.
