The Activist Before Rosa Parks
Now is a more important time than ever to recognize Claudette Colvin.
“My mother told me to be quiet about what I did. Let Rosa be the one: white people aren’t going to bother Rosa, they like her,” Claudette Colvin said.
Rosa Parks and her refusal to give up her seat on the bus to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, is one of the most memorialized parts of the Civil Rights Movement — but what few people know is that Rosa Parks was not the first person to refuse.
That honor belongs to Claudette Colvin, then a 15-year-old girl who was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated bus to a white woman. It happened nine months before Rosa Parks, secretary of the local NAACP, did it, which sparked the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott.
We have been reading a non-fiction book about Claudette Colvin titled Claudette Colvin: Twice Towards Justice in my eighth-grade class. Today was our last day of school, and our unit in the curriculum was called “Teens as Change Agents”, suggesting that teenagers as young as 15-year-olds can change the world through their actions and activism.
However, the staff at The Guardian asked a crucial question: why is Claudette Colvin denied her place in history? Why was it that…
