MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) - She remembers wearing a light blue sweater and navy blue skirt when she was dragged off the city bus at the intersection of Bibb and Commerce streets in downtown Montgomery.
She remembers the obscene comments made by white police officers at City Hall - grown men debating a 15-year-old’s bra size.
She remembers the sound of the key turning in the lock when the jailer left her alone in an empty cell.
Claudette Colvin was arrested 65 years ago today for refusing to vacate a City Lines bus seat for a white passenger. The 15-year-old - forcibly arrested on March 2, 1955 - was charged with assault and battery, disorderly conduct and violation of city segregation laws in a case that predated Rosa Parks’ famed civil rights stand by nine months. Today, the 79-year-old remembers the day vividly.
“I didn’t get up and stand up. I just sat there. When people ask me why I didn’t get up and move, I tell them history had me glued to the seat. Emotionally, it felt as though Harriet Tubman’s hands were pushing me down on one shoulder and Sojourner Truth was pushing me down on the other,” said Colvin from her New York home last year.
“For these historical, iconic women I had been taught so much about, I just couldn’t move. I just couldn’t move. That’s the only way I knew how to resist, to not move. So they just dragged me off the bus.”
Though Colvin was not the first black Montgomery resident to refuse to follow the city’s bus segregation rules, the Booker T. Washington student refused to plead out to her charges or pay a fine. But she “agitated” for a trial, said Phillip Hoose, author of an award-winning young adult biography of Colvin.
“She wanted a lawyer. She wanted to contest it,” said Hoose. “There had been other men and women who had refused to surrender their seats to white passengers. They took the buyout, the fine. But she was a frustrated rebel.”
Colvin became one of the four plaintiffs - along with Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald and Mary Louise Smith - to fight bus segregation through the United States court system. In 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor in Browder v. Gayle, finding Alabama’s segregated busing unconstitutional.
But for a time, Colvin stood alone. The high school student wasn’t a trained civil rights protester, and she didn’t know what might happen when she refused to stand on March 2.
Discrimination and racism was nothing new to Colvin, having grown up in the Jim Crow South. But Colvin said March 1955 was a little different, having just spent a week in February studying about black history in school.
An unconventional teacher had brought in materials to teach her classes about the “significant contributions African-Americans had made to this country.” Her classes discussed injustices in the South and across the country.
“I had been talking about so many things, how unfairly African-Americans were treated,” Colvin said. “My mother said they picked the wrong day to pick on me. If it had happened any other time of the year, we might have just gotten off the bus.”
But Colvin didn’t get off the bus. Not of her own volition. Though white-owned newspaper accounts say Colvin kicked and scratched her arresting officers, she doesn’t recall that. She does remember getting handcuffed through the window of a police car. She remembers one officer rolling his hazel eyes at her. She remembers the sexually charged comments of the men at city hall, “but they never respected black women, so I wasn’t surprised.”
And she remembers the fear that came when the chaos faded, and she was alone in a jail cell.
“As a teenager, that’s when I became really scared,” Colvin said. “In an old Western, when the bandits are put in the jail, you can hear the sound of the key go ’click.’ I could hear the sound when the jailer locked it. I knew I was locked in, and I couldn’t get out. I started crying. I started reciting the 23rd Psalm.”
Colvin spent several hours in the cell, enough time for her schoolmates to get home and find her mother at work. She and the family pastor came to bail her out. Later that month, a juvenile court judge found her guilty of violating the city segregation law “by refusing to move to the rear of a City Lines bus when requested by the driver.”
An Advertiser report of the hearing described her as a “bespectacled, studious looking high school student” who accepted the court’s sentencing of indefinite probation with “the same cool aloofness she had maintained throughout” an hourslong hearing.
Famed civil rights attorney Fred Gray was 24 years old when he represented Colvin at her hearing. Gray would later include her in the Browder v. Gayle case, which he filed with Charles D. Langford.
“They had to literally drag her off the bus. They charged her with being a delinquent, but she was an honors student at Booker T. Washington,” Gray said. “If Claudette had not done what she did, nine months before (Ms. Parks) … She gave the moral courage to Jo Ann Robinson, to E.D. Nixon, to Dr. King. (You had) a 15-year-old girl who did what she did, and was willing to take whatever consequences, not knowing what was going to happen. When you compare it, Claudette had a lot more courage than many of us involved.”
But despite this, Colvin did not receive the swell of support that the bus boycott leaders who followed her did. The months that followed her arrest were painful and lonely.
“It was difficult because people looked at me differently,” Colvin said. “The people who didn’t know me said that I was a crazy. That I was causing trouble. Some of the parents didn’t want their children to be associated with me.”
She missed out on record hops, where she loved to learn new dances. Friends distanced themselves. A few months later, the 15-year-old became pregnant. She wasn’t the right face for the civil rights movement, leaders said.
So the studious teen turned back to what drove her to protest in the first place, her studies and history and books. She enjoyed reading Edgar Allan Poe at the time, “eerie” work that examined “good and evil.”
“There was a dark shadow in my life, a darkness,” Colvin said.
“She did dangerous things and was incredibly courageous, and they didn’t acknowledge it,” Hoose said.
Colvin said it was difficult and disappointing to see other receive recognition while she struggled with stigmatization.
“It was the Browder v. Gayle case that went to to the Supreme Court that made the boycott a success,” Colvin said. “I think that people should know that there were four women that made the Montgomery Bus Boycott successful, which gave Dr. (Martin Luther) King (Jr.) notoriety. I wasn’t seeking notoriety. But shouldn’t the four women in that Supreme Court case be known?”
Colvin left the South for good in 1968, after the assassination of King. She settled in New York, in the Bronx, where she worked as a nursing aide for decades. She raised two sons and proudly lists out her five grandchildren - a doctor, a nurse, an international businesswoman and military veterans. She has also welcomed five great-grandchildren into her family.
In her hometown, recognition did come, though it was delayed. In 2017, Colvin was publicly thanked by Mayor Todd Strange, with March 2 officially proclaimed Claudette Colvin Day. The street she went home when she left jail 64 years ago has been renamed from East Dixie Drive to Claudette Colvin Drive.
Life is complicated, Colvin said. But she knew her heart then, as she knows her heart now, and her conscience wouldn’t let her sleep if she walked off that bus 64 years ago.
“Living in a segregated society, I wasn’t going out of my boundaries looking for trouble,” Colvin said. “I didn’t have the support. Nobody asked me to do this. I was ostracized after I had a child out of wedlock. I just went on my own, and I knew I had to take care of myself. I’m a self-made woman. You have to have strong courage, strong faith and belief in yourself.”
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