Now the gray-haired Colvin seeks delayed justice, addressing the Juvenile Court for Montgomery County. “We were all seeking one thing,” she said. Colvin, whose skin is a beautiful shade of chocolate, said the bias still stings, but she let go of anger a long time ago. “Rosa Parks had the right background and the right skin color,” she said. I interviewed Colvin in March 2020, and offstage she told me she believed there was another reason her story was shunted aside. She was also charged with a felony for assaulting a police officer who said she had kicked and scratched him. She is also, in a carefully detailed 30-point affidavit, addressing something else: the fact that her story was largely expunged because civil rights leaders didn’t see her as an appropriate symbol for the movement.Ĭolvin got pregnant not long after her arrest. Today, Colvin goes back to Montgomery to petition for her record to be cleared. That needs to change - and perhaps now it will. What’s worse, Colvin, who is now 82, was never taken off probation.

Gayle, the Supreme Court case that overturned Montgomery’s bus segregation laws, her role in challenging the Jim Crow system has been largely overshadowed. What about Colvin? Though she was one of four female plaintiffs in Browder v. Parks, who died in 2005, went on to become an icon, widely celebrated as the “mother of the civil rights movement.” This was March 1955 - nine months before Rosa Parks was arrested for violating Alabama’s racial segregation laws after refusing to give up her seat to a White man, an act that sparked the year-long Montgomery Bus Boycott. Claudette Colvin was 15 years old when she was arrested in Montgomery, Ala., and placed on indefinite probation, after refusing to vacate her seat on a bus so a young White woman could sit down.

Claudette colvin and rosa parks