Claudette Colvin, US civil rights activist arrested for refusing to give up seat to white person on bus, di£s at 86

US civil rights activist, Claudette Colvin, arrested at age 15 for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white woman in Montgomery, Alabama, did on Tuesday, January 13, at age 86. Colvin was arrested 9 months before Rosa Parks gained international fame for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated bus in a similar but more famous act of defiance. Although Colvin remained a largely unsung figure in the civil rights movement for decades, Colvins 1955 act of rebellion inspired Parks and others and helped form the basis for the federal lawsuit that outlawed racial segregation in US public transportation. Colvin did under hospice care in Texas, Ashley Roseboro, a spokesperson for her family and the Claudette Colvin Foundation, confirmed. In one of the first publicized acts of civil disobedience against Montgomerys Jim Crow rules governing city bus seating by race, Colvin refused to relinquish her seat for a white woman, as ordered by the driver, and stayed put until she was dragged off the bus by police. According to accounts of her testimony in court, Colvin recalled she had been studying anti-slavery abolitionist heroes in school, and felt that she had Harriet Tubman on one shoulder, Sojourner Truth on the other, and history had me glued to the seat. But Rosa Parks, an older seamstress who was secretary of the local NAACP chapter, was seen as a more dignified, sympathetic figure to rally behind as civil rights leaders organized what became the year-long bus boycott that thrust the Rev Martin Luther King Jr to the national stage. In the lead-up to the boycott, which started in December 1955, issues of social class and even colorism Colvin came from a poorer background and Parks was lighter skinned led civil rights leaders to shy away from the teenager as a standard bearer for the movement, according to Roseboro. About a year after her arrest, she also became pregnant by a married man from an encounter that she later described as statutory rape. Nevertheless, Colvin went on to become one of several plaintiffs and a principal witness in the Browder v Gayle lawsuit challenging the citys Jim Crow bus policies. The case eventually led to the landmark 1956 US supreme court decision banning segregation in public transit as unconstitutional. Colvin lived in obscurity for decades afterward, working as a caregiver and nurses aide and struggling as a single mother, though historians and others have since brought to light the pivotal role she played in the early civil rights movement. Fred Gray, the attorney behind Browder v Gayle, credited Colvin with helping to ignite the battle against segregation in the deep south. I dont mean to take anything away from Mrs. Parks, but Claudette gave all of us the moral courage to do what we did, the Washington Post quoted Gray as saying. In recent years, Colvin succeeded in having her juvenile arrest record expunged, Roseboro saidThe post Claudette Colvin, US civil rights activist arrested for refusing to give up seat to white person on bus, dis at 86 appeared first on Linda Ikeji Blog.