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In The Shadow Of Rosa Parks: ‘Unsung Hero’ Of Civil Rights Movement Speaks Out
By
Vanessa de la Torre
January 20, 2005
Claudette Colvin could easily be lost in the crowd. Her short
hair is neatly curled; she wears eyeglasses and a small pair
of gold hoop earrings. She dresses modestly and looks more like
someone’s kindly grandmother than the woman who 50 years
ago was a catalyst for one of the most famous events in civil
rights history.
But that, in fact, is who Colvin is.
Nine months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat
to a white passenger, Colvin had done the same thing, but without
any fanfare. She was only 15 at the time, and civil rights leaders
had reservations about using her as the symbol of their movement.
Instead, Parks, who worked for the NAACP and was inspired by
Colvin’s example, became the person whom history would
remember.
Now, half a century later, Colvin still vividly recalls her
emotions on the day when a bus driver summoned the police to
arrest her in Montgomery, Ala.
It was March 2, 1955. Colvin was a junior at Booker T. Washington
High School. She hoped to practice law one day and defend people
like Jeremiah Reeves, a black classmate who had been convicted
of raping a white woman and sentenced to death. The case had
her simmering. It was on her mind that bus ride, she explains.
And she was angry that twice a day she rode the same bus and
here was the driver, ordering her to stand so a white person
could sit.
What happened next was impulsive, Colvin says. “I had
the spirit of Sojourner Truth inside me, the spirit of Harriet
Tubman, telling me, ‘Don’t get up!’” She
told a policeman that she was “just as good as any white
person” and wasn’t going to give up her seat.
“I was very hurt because I didn't know that white people
would act like that and I was crying,” Colvin later testified
in court. “And (the policeman) said, ‘I will have
to take you off.’ So I didn’t move. I didn’t
move at all … So he kicked me and one got on one side
of me and one got the other arm and they just drug me out.”
The police said Colvin was “clawing and scratching” as
they hauled her off the bus. What Colvin has admitted is screaming
again and again, “It’s my constitutional right.” She
had paid her bus fare.
Colvin was charged with misconduct, resisting arrest and violating
city and state segregation laws. (Eventually she was convicted
and sentenced to probation.)
E.D. Nixon, then a leader of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP,
had been waiting for a test case to challenge bus segregation
and vowed to help Colvin after her father posted bail. But then
came the second-guessing: Colvin’s father mowed lawns;
her mother was a maid. Churchgoing people, but they lived in
King Hill, the poorest section of Montgomery. The police, who
took her to the city hall and then jail, also accused the teenager
of spewing curse words, which Colvin denied, saying that in fact
the obscenities were leveled at her (“The intimidation,
the ridicule,” she often says now).
Some blacks believed she was too young, and too dark-skinned
to be an effective symbol of injustice for the rest of the nation.
Then, as local civil rights leaders continued to debate whether
her case was worth contesting, that summer came the news that
Colvin was pregnant — by a married man.
E.D. Nixon would later explain in an oral history, “I
had to be sure that I had somebody I could win with.” Rosa
Parks, for a decade the NAACP secretary who took special interest
in Colvin’s case, was “morally clean, reliable, nobody
had nothing on her.”
On December 1, 1955, Parks would board a bus at the same stop
as had Colvin, and go on to become the symbol Nixon had been
seeking.
In contrast to Colvin, when policemen came to lead Parks away,
she asked, calmly, “Why do you all push us around?”
Recently, as the country honored what would have been Martin
Luther King, Jr.’s 75th birthday, televisions replayed
scenes from the era of burning crosses, hooded Klansmen, “Whites
Only” signs, clashes between Southern policemen and peaceful
protestors, the “I Have a Dream speech,” and King’s
assassination.
But second to Reverend King is the image of serene dignity:
Rosa Parks, the unassuming seamstress who galvanized the movement
after a long day’s work, because she refused to give her
seat to a white person. The legend goes that her feet were tired.
She became one of TIME magazine’s 100 Most Important People
of the Century.
When someone Googles Claudette Colvin, on the other hand, the
first item is a dated news release about fourth graders in Milwaukee
who made a six-minute film titled, “Claudette Who?”
Over the years, Colvin, now 65, has grown accustomed to anonymity.
After her arrest in 1955, Colvin did become a plaintiff in the
NAACP’s federal lawsuit to desegregate buses. But the following
year she gave birth to a son Raymond, who was so fair-skinned
(like his father) that people frequently accused her of having
a white baby. She left Alabama for New York in 1958, and for
over 30 years worked the night shift at a Catholic nursing home.
Aside from a handful of articles in the mainstream press about
Colvin and other obscure names who preceded Rosa Parks — “It
was four women who made the bus boycott successful,
otherwise the people would’ve been walking in vain,” she
says — being at Stanford University last week was the first
time Colvin has ever been publicly recognized, she confirms.
‘Honorable mention’
Claudette Colvin is chatting with two admirers when a record
producer tells her to look at the television. The song he co-produced
on the Montgomery bus boycott has a music video, he says, and “Your
name is in it.”
So Colvin watches when “1955” and the name “ROSA
PARKS” appear on the black screen, in bold, white letters.
She waits.
“Rosa the spark,” a rapper says. She waits.
Suddenly her name pops up on the screen, and the record producer
says “There!” and points, and Colvin stands silently
and reads, “When the police arrested her she went kicking
and screaming.”
“So why not give her an honorable mention,” the
rapper suggests. The screen blackens and a new verse begins.
Colvin turns her head slightly. She gives a short, muted chuckle.
Probably best that she has her back to the TV, a slice of melon
in hand, when “Rosa Louise McCauley Parks” emerges
on the screen with the title, “Queen of the civil rights
movement.” About this time, Colvin starts talking about
the past.
Back then, “you couldn’t look your madam in the
eye,” she says, very close, gazing intensely. And the white
children, their innocence was also tainted. Colvin remembers
her first job as a sleep-in domestic in New York, how she felt
part of the household. Then she heard the little girl say, “Oh
mother, that nigger has on a cap just like me.”
She also says black people often got caught in legal trouble
because they had no money to properly defend themselves — and
that they still do to this day.
“They have no one to go to.” Colvin contemplates
this. Tens of seconds pass. It seems like she might be done talking.
“Another thing about racism,” Colvin will suddenly
say, and note how her son Randy, an accountant in Atlanta, had
to buy his home in a nicer part of town so his children could
attend a good school. “If you’re in a poor neighborhood
you get an inferior education,” she says.
And about single moms in the ghetto: “She’s out
trying to survive, working two jobs. She’s never at home,
she can’t supervise her kids and tell them to do their
homework. And the boys get bored and start selling drugs. They
think, ‘I’m not gonna work in McDonald’s and
get minimum wage.’”
Colvin’s firstborn, Raymond, had become addicted to drugs
and alcohol. At 37 he died of a heart attack in her apartment.
About her life, her dreams of becoming a lawyer, she says, “Yes,
I’m disappointed. But then again, no one knows what’s
in store for them. At least my grandkids don’t have to
suffer what I had to suffer.”
She thanks God that none of her five grandchildren are on drugs.
She mentions that one is a D.C. policeman and another is a first-year
medical student. The three younger girls all get good grades;
one plays the violin. But they all lack an understanding of personal
sacrifice, she worries.
“They’re fast-forward … What we gained was
through blood and tears … And they don’t see that.” Maybe,
Colvin says, they are just taught differently nowadays. In her
era, adults told children that God was directly over their heads.
As an individual she was accountable. Now she can’t tell
the kids that God is in the sky, because they know that the universe
is infinite, as far as you can see there is space. People don’t
know where heaven is, she says.
‘Not the right icon’
Colvin says she is not angry with the NAACP for not taking her
case. But she is disappointed that nothing came from a front-page
article about her and Mary Ware, another teen to follow Colvin’s
bus rebellion before Rosa Parks, which was published ten years
ago in USA Today. Colvin thought she would get a response from
the black community, but didn’t.
“They probably thought I wasn’t the right icon.”
Minutes later, a white woman approaches, smiling nervously,
saying sorry to bother, excuse me, but, it’d be a great
honor if Colvin could sign her book. She extends a ballpoint
pen and Threshold of a New Decade, the latest, 703-page
volume on the papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Colvin seems surprised. Her eyes appear tired. But with a steady
hand, she takes a couple minutes writing her message in cursive,
under a quote from Dr. King: “Claudette Colvin, unsung
hero of the civil rights movement. Thank you and keep the faith.”
Contact Vanessa de la Torre at vdlt@stanford.edu