Unlearned History Episode 3 Claudette Colvin

Video on Youtube can be found here: https://youtu.be/BKNv5OYxU24

Claudette Colvin Unlearned History Episode 3

Did you know 9 months before Rosa Parks another black young lady had been kicked off the bus? She in fact inspired Rosa Parks to do the same in December of 1955.

The young lady at the time is Claudette Colvin. She was 15 years old and refused to get off the bus in Montgomery and her story is particularly wonderful. So let’s give some context: Stores are segregated and something as simple as buying shoes bears the sting of segregation. Black people had to put their foot on a paper bag and outline it in order to buy shoes as they were not allowed to try them on first. There were still signs up in the stores at this time and daily life was marked along a clear line of race

So that fateful day after learning a lot of black history and fed up with injustice she just snapped. A white woman told her to move and she said “No, I paid my fare and this is my constitutional right” Of course, the driver escalated and she steadfastly refused. She said at one time “It was like Harriet Tubman was on one shoulder and Sojourner Truth was on the other keeping me in that seat” Later she was taken off by police and tossed into an adult prison.

Picture it, prison 1955 as well as being 15 and pregnant. That last part is cited as the reason that the NAACP didn’t want to have her as the fact of her movement. Now, this part I can kind of understand because optics matter that’s a cruel fact of life and court. They want to show upstanding citizens that are likely beyond reproach because the Court has to be able to sympathize with the Plaintiffs. This must be the biggest reason that Rosa Parks was chosen. They couldn’t say “Hey look at the troublemaking child and if that don’t beat all she’s a pregnant teenager”

But don’t count her out just yet. Colvin joined the court case that gave the Montgomery Bus Boycott its legal weight called Browder vs. Gayle. She was one of four Plaintiffs who were black women thrown off the bus and supported the bus boycott.

After a time she moved to NYC largely because after the boycott people would recognize her and fire her in Montgomery and maybe to distance herself from her past and get grounded in the future.

Many years have passed and it seems that her story is getting a lot of traction because of how it’s been largely forgotten or untold. If you look on Youtube, you can check out her Democracy Now interview with Amy Goodman and even a Drunk History episode. She is an amazing woman who was at the crossroads of history and thankfully she joined Browder v. Gayle even though the NAACP didn’t use her as the face of their bus boycott. I hope to see a biopic on Colvin—there may be one I don’t know about—she is the subject of a book by Phillip Hoose called Twice toward Justice

This is a snippet but I hope this gets you curious enough to look up more about the people behind the Civil Rights Movement that are often overlooked like Bayard Rustin, A Phillip Randolph and a myriad of others. You’d be surprised what you find out about Black History when you go searching