Claudette Colvin Refused to Give Up Her Bus Seat

On March 2, 1955, Claudette Colvin, a fifteen-year-old high-school student, was riding a segregated city bus home in Montgomery, Alabama. When the white section filled and the driver ordered Black riders to move, Colvin refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger. Police were called, and officers forcibly removed and arrested her, charging her with violating segregation law, disturbing the peace, and assaulting an officer.

Her stand came nine months before Rosa Parks made the same refusal famous. Yet community leaders chose not to build a campaign around Colvin, in part because she was a teenager who soon became pregnant, and they feared the case would not rally wide support.

She was just fifteen, and she had already decided segregation was not something she would obey.

Colvin’s courage was not wasted. In 1956 she became one of four plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, the federal lawsuit in which the courts ruled Montgomery’s bus segregation unconstitutional, helping bring the bus boycott to a victorious end.