Credit: Wikimedia Commons / Creative Commons / By The Visibility Project, Public Domain

At 15 years old, Claudette Colvin, who’d been studying Black history at school, knew who she was. She knew her rights and the respect she deserved.

So when a Montgomery, Ala., bus driver demanded in the spring of 1955 that the teenager move her seat so a White woman could be more comfortable – about nine months before Rosa Parks defied a similar order – Colvin refused to budge. She was subsequently arrested and sentenced to indefinite probation.

“I could not move because history had me glued to the seat,” she told Democracy Now! in a 2013 interview. “It felt like Sojourner Truth’s hands were pushing me down on one shoulder and Harriet Tubman’s were pushing me down on another shoulder, and I could not move, and I yelled out: ‘It’s my constitutional right.’” 

Colvin, an unsung hero of the Civil Rights Movement, whose story of bravery and defiance largely went untold, died on January 13 in Texas. She was in hospice care, according to the New York Times. The Claudette Colvin Legacy Foundation, which was created to inspire and recognize young people who contribute to their communities, announced her death on its website. She was 86. 

Although Colvin’s name is not heralded as Parks’s or others from the Civil Rights Movement, historians say it should be.

So why wasn’t it? Why wasn’t she the symbol of the movement? 

In Colvin’s own words, she was darker, a teenager from a poor neighborhood, and, after the arrest, she became pregnant. She was “not respectable.” In a strategic move, she was not the choice of the Black middle class to carry the banner. 

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, a Harvard professor who coined the term “politics of respectability” in her study of early 20th-century Black women, wrote that Black women believed respectable behavior earned “esteem from white America.” During the Civil Rights Movement, the Black elite leaders of the movement — concerned about how Colvin would appeal to a broader audience — employed respectability politics when they chose Parks, a light-skinned, older, and well-dressed seamstress returning home from work, to advance their agenda.

The strategy has been debated more recently, particularly during the Black Lives Matter movement. 

Glenn Loury, a conservative economics professor, came under fire in 2015 when he made a statement during a panel discussion that “Mike Brown is no Rosa Parks, and he ain’t Emmett Till either,” a remark that many perceived as an example of respectability politics. Brown was shot dead by a police officer in Missouri in 2014. 

But modern-day activists argue that trying to appeal to broader — read: whiter — audiences doesn’t actually change the way those audiences think about Black people, and that Black people should be valued simply as humans, not because of how they are dressed, speak or behave.

After all, as the Rev. Bernice King wrote of her father, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “My father was assassinated wearing a suit.” 

Colvin’s action and example during the movement weren’t as widely known at the time, but did inspire and motivate Civil Rights Movement organizers.    

“I don’t mean to take anything away from Mrs. Parks,” civil rights lawyer Fred Gray, who represented both Colvin and Parks, told The Washington Post, “but Claudette gave all of us the moral courage to do what we did.” 

Colvin was sitting with three other Black students in the “colored section” of the bus when the driver told her to move to accommodate a White woman who didn’t want to sit adjacent to her. The other students moved. 

Colvin remained in her seat. 

She later said she was also thinking, at the time, of her classmate, Jeremiah Reeves, who was caught having sex with a White woman and accused of raping her, as she remained in her seat. (Reeves, 16, was tortured into giving a false confession and was sentenced to death.) 

Born September 5, 1939, in Birmingham, Ala., Colvin would spend much of her life living between Alabama and New York. After obtaining her GED, she ultimately retired as a nurses’ aide, caring for elderly patients. 

Asked on CBS Mornings in 2022 if she thought of herself as an important figure in history, Colvin said: “No, I think of myself as a survivor of the civil rights struggle.” 

Colvin is survived by a son, who is an assistant professor at Texas A&M University-Kingsville, five grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren, according to the foundation website. Her oldest son passed away in 1993. “She can say that she has reaped the fruits of her labor through them,” the website reads.

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