Claudette Colvin, Civil rights pioneer and hidden figure of Montgomery Bus Boycott, dies at 86

Colvin’s act helped lead to the 1956 Supreme Court case that ultimately desegregated the Montgomery buses.

Claudette Colvin, the civil rights pioneer who was arrested at age 15 on a Montgomery bus after she refused to move from her seat months before Rosa Parks did, has died. She was 86.

Colvin’s act helped begin the Civil Rights Movement, later accelerated in December of 1955 after Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat. Colvin’s death was announced by the Claudette Colvin Legacy Foundation. A representative from the organization confirmed Colvin died in Texas.

On March 2, 1955, a Montgomery bus driver called the police, alleging that two Black girls were sitting close to two white girls, a violation of Jim Crow laws in the region. While the other girl moved to the back of the bus, Colvin refused and was promptly arrested. At 15, she was later named a plaintiff in the lawsuit that ultimately ended segregation on Montgomery buses.

“I recited Edgar Allan Poe, Annabel Lee, the characters of Midsummer’s Night Dream, the Lord’s Prayer, and the 23rd Psalm,” Colvin recalled about her arrest, thinking that the officers who arrested her would have attempted to sexually assault her.

Colvin was eventually found guilty of assaulting the officers who arrested her, but only after a judge presiding over her case dropped the charges of disturbing the peace and violating the segregation law. Rumor persisted that the elder individuals behind the Civil Rights Movement did not back Colvin and make her the face of the movement because she was pregnant, which she was not when she was arrested or during her trial.

Although she became pregnant after her case and the initial bus incident, she was deemed not the right face, and that distinction ultimately went to Parks, who had long been trained for civil disobedience and was one of the lone adults who kept in contact with her throughout the summer of 1955.

“They didn’t think teenagers would be reliable,” Colvin told NPR in 2009 regarding the choice of the 42-year-old Parks as the face of the movement. “Her skin texture was the kind that people associate with the middle class. She fit that profile.”

Colvin’s story persisted. In 2021, her arrest record was expunged after 66 years, a move that she felt was bigger than a symbolic gesture.

“My reason for doing it is I get a chance to tell my grandchildren, my great-grandchildren, what life was like living in segregated America, in segregated Montgomery,” she said at the time. “The laws, the hardship, the intimidation that took place during those years and the reason why that day I took a stand and defied the segregated law.”