Unsung Heroine, Claudette Colvin

[msgadget]

MONTGOMERY, Ala. -- In the segregated South of 1955, she refused to give up her bus seat to a white person in Montgomery, was arrested and convicted. Later, a boycott of buses by blacks helped launch the modern civil rights movement.

As the 50th anniversary of the boycott approaches, Claudette Colvin's name and act of courage remain almost unknown -- a lost footnote to Rosa Parks' more famous defiance on a city bus that same year.
...

...Colvin was coming home from school on March 2, 1955, when she got on a Capital Heights bus downtown at the same place Parks boarded another bus months later.

Colvin was sitting about two seats from the emergency exit when four whites boarded and the driver ordered her, along with three other blacks, to get up. She refused and was removed from the bus by two police officers, who took her to jail.

"The bus was getting crowded and I remember him (the bus driver) looking through the rearview mirror asking her to get up out of her seat, which she didn't," said a classmate at the time, Annie Larkins Price. "She didn't say anything. She just continued looking out the window. She decided on that day that she wasn't going to move."

Price testified on her behalf in the juvenile court case, where Colvin was convicted of violating the segregation law and assault.

...

Nearly a year later, on Feb. 1, 1956, Colvin was one of four black women who served as plaintiffs in a federal court suit, known as Browder vs. Gail, that became the legal vehicle when the U.S. Supreme Court declared bus segregation unconstitutional in December 1956. The Parks arrest case, while sparking the boycott, was a state case

http://www.hollandsentinel.com/stories/020605/new_020605044.shtml|Civil rights heroine still forgotten>

Edit to add additional text and pic.

[GOPFighter]

1. Sadly, kids today...

,,,don't know just how much courage an act of defiance like this took. Fewer and fewer of us remember the violence that was directed at anyone who dared challenge the system.

Who knows how many other unsung heroes there are who finally decided their dignity was more important than their safety.

[msgadget]

2. I know,

many of today's kids are angry and defiant but the repercussions of her actions could've far exceeded a beating or jail.