Claudette Colvin, whose 1955 arrest for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated Montgomery bus helped spark the modern civil rights movement, has died, AP reported.
The Claudette Colvin Legacy Foundation announced her death on Tuesday. Ashley D. Roseboro of the group said she died of natural causes in Texas.
Who was Claudette Clovin?
Colvin, at age 15, was arrested nine months before Rosa Parks gained international fame for also refusing to give up her seat on a segregated bus.
Colvin had boarded the bus on 2 March 1955, on her way home from high school. The first rows were reserved for white passengers. Colvin sat in the rear with other Black passengers. When the white section became full, the bus driver ordered Black passengers to relinquish their seats to white passengers. Colvin refused.
“My mindset was on freedom,” Colvin said in 2021 of her refusal to give up her seat.
“So I was not going to move that day,” she said. “I told them that history had me glued to the seat.”
When Colvin was arrested, anger was already rising over the treatment of Black riders on Montgomery’s buses. That October, another Black teenager, Mary Louise Smith, was arrested and fined for refusing to surrender her seat to a white passenger.
But it was the 1 December 1955 arrest of Rosa Parks, a local NAACP activist, that ultimately triggered the yearlong Montgomery Bus Boycott.
The boycott propelled the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. into the national limelight and is considered the start of the modern civil rights movement, AP reported.
Colvin was one of the four plaintiffs in the landmark lawsuit that outlawed racial segregation on Montgomery’s buses. Her death comes just over a month after Montgomery celebrated the 70th anniversary of the Bus Boycott.
Montgomery Mayor Steven Reed said Colvin's action “helped lay the legal and moral foundation for the movement that would change America.”
Colvin was never as well-known as Parks, and Reed said her bravery “was too often overlooked.”
“Claudette Colvin’s life reminds us that movements are built not only by those whose names are most familiar, but by those whose courage comes early, quietly, and at great personal cost," Reed said.
“Her legacy challenges us to tell the full truth of our history and to honor every voice that helped bend the arc toward justice.”
In 2021, Colvin moved to erase her decades-old court record, a request a judge later granted.
“When I think about why I’m seeking to have my name cleared by the state, it is because I believe if that happened, it would show the generation growing up now that progress is possible, and things do get better," Colvin said at the time.
“It will inspire them to make the world better.”
