AILSA CHANG, HOST:
More than 70 years ago, a Black teenager pushed against racial boundary lines in Montgomery, Alabama. She had learned about Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth at her segregated high school, and the lessons stuck with her. On March 2, 1955, Claudette Colvin refused to give her seat to a white passenger on a public bus. This was months before Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, but Colvin's name is largely left out of the history books. Claudette Colvin died this week at the age of 86, and today, we're resharing part of a Radio Diaries-produced story about that moment in 1955.
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CLAUDETTE COLVIN: My name is Claudette Colvin, and I was 15 years old when I was arrested for violating the Montgomery segregation law. Well, I was the kind of teenager that wore my hair in braids. Everybody else was battling with the straightening comb and pomade, and I didn't mind being different.
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COLVIN: Montgomery, it's a nice little Southern town, but everything was segregated. This is for colored folks and this is for white folks. Couldn't try on clothes in the store. Couldn't go to the movie theater when a good movie come in town. You know, things that teenagers like to do. So I knew that this was a double standard. This was unfair.
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PHILLIP HOOSE: My name is Phillip Hoose, and I wrote a book titled "Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice." March 2, 1955 was a Wednesday. Claudette got onto the bus with three other students, and they all settled themselves into a row in the middle of the bus. The rule back in Montgomery at that time was 10 seats in the front of the bus were for whites only, and the whites always had to be in front.
COLVIN: I knew that rule by heart. I was sitting near the window - the last seat that was allowed for the colored people. And so as the bus proceeded on downtown, more white people got on the bus. Eventually, the bus got full capacity, and a young white lady was standing near the four of us. She was expecting me to get up.
HOOSE: The bus driver looked in the mirror and saw the situation and said, I need those seats. And three of the girls got up and walked to the back of the bus. And Claudette didn't.
COLVIN: I just couldn't move. History had me glued to this seat.
HOOSE: And people started yelling in the bus, come on. Let's go. Let's move.
COLVIN: Hear those white people complaining to each other, talking, talking, talking, talking, talking. I could see them all moving and talking to each other. I didn't know what was going to happen.
HOOSE: The bus driver called for a police officer, and a police officer boarded the bus and confronted Claudette.
COLVIN: Gal, why are you sitting there? You didn't know the law? And I said, I paid my fare and it's my constitutional right. But I remember they dragged me off the bus because I refused to walk.
CHANG: Colvin wanted to fight. Her family contacted a lawyer to file a federal lawsuit to desegregate the buses. But because of her age and lack of training in the movement, the larger Civil Rights community felt that the timing just wasn't right.
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COLVIN: They thought I would have been too militant for them. They wanted someone mild and genteel like Rosa. They didn't want to use a teenager.
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COLVIN: To me, it doesn't bother me not being named, as long as we have someone out there so we can tell our story.
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CHANG: In 1956, about a year after Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat, her lawyer filed the landmark federal lawsuit Browder vs. Gayle. The case ended segregation in public transportation in Alabama, and the star witness was Claudette Colvin. Colvin's death was announced Tuesday by the Claudette Colvin Legacy Foundation.
(SOUNDBITE OF JAY MCSHANN'S "BLUE TURBULENCE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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