Claudette Colvin - Biography

Biography

Colvin lived in Montgomery, Alabama. In 1955, at the age of 15, she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white person, in violation of local law. Her arrest preceded that of Rosa Parks by nine months.

In 1955 Colvin was a student at Booker T. Washington High School in Montgomery. She was returning from school on March 2, 1955 when she got on a Capital Heights bus downtown (at the same place Parks boarded another bus nine months later). Colvin's family owned a car, but she relied on the city's buses to get to school.

She sat in the section where, if a white person was standing, the blacks would have to get up and move to the back. When a white woman got on the bus and was standing, the bus driver, Robert W. Cleere, ordered Colvin and two other black passengers to get up and change seats. When Colvin refused, she was removed from the bus and arrested by two police officers.

When she refused to get up, she was still thinking about a school paper that she had written that day. It was about the prohibition against blacks' trying on clothing in department stores. They were prohibited from using the dressing rooms.

"The bus was getting crowded and I remember the bus driver looking through the rear view mirror asking her to get up out of her seat, which she didn't," said a classmate at the time, Annie Larkins Price. "She had been yelling it's my constitutional right. She decided on that day that she wasn't going to move." Colvin was handcuffed, arrested and forcibly removed from the bus. She shouted that her constitutional rights were being violated. "Price testified on Colvin's behalf in the juvenile court case, where Colvin was convicted of violating the segregation law and assault." "There was no assault," Price said.