Claudette Colvin was born on Claudette Austin; September 5,1939 and is an American pioneer of the 1950s civil rights movement and retired nurse aide.
37 Facts About Claudette Colvin
2.
Not long after, in September 1952, Colvin started attending Booker T Washington High School.
3.
Claudette Colvin was a member of the NAACP Youth Council, where she formed a close relationship with her mentor, Rosa Parks.
4.
In 1955, Colvin was a student at the segregated Booker T Washington High School in the city.
5.
Claudette Colvin relied on the city's buses to get to and from school because her family did not own a car.
6.
Claudette Colvin was a member of the NAACP Youth Council and had been learning about the civil rights movement in school.
7.
Claudette Colvin sat in the colored section about two seats away from an emergency exit, in a Capitol Heights bus.
8.
Claudette Colvin was forcibly removed from the bus and arrested by the two policemen, Thomas J Ward and Paul Headley.
9.
Claudette Colvin did not receive the same attention as Parks for a number of reasons: she did not have "good hair", she was not fair-skinned, she was a teenager, she was pregnant.
10.
When Claudette Colvin refused to get up, she was thinking about a school paper she had written that day about the local customs that prohibited blacks from using the dressing rooms in order to try on clothes in department stores.
11.
Claudette Colvin decided on that day that she wasn't going to move.
12.
Claudette Colvin shouted that her constitutional rights were being violated.
13.
Price testified for Claudette Colvin, who was tried in juvenile court.
14.
Claudette Colvin was initially charged with disturbing the peace, violating the segregation laws, and battering and assaulting a police officer.
15.
Claudette Colvin said in the 2009 book Claudette Colvin: Twice Towards Justice, by Phillip Hoose, that one of the police officers sat in the back seat with her.
16.
Claudette Colvin was bailed out by her minister, who told her that she had brought the revolution to Montgomery.
17.
Claudette Colvin was convicted on all three charges in juvenile court.
18.
When Claudette Colvin's case was appealed to the Montgomery Circuit Court on May 6,1955, the charges of disturbing the peace and violating the segregation laws were dropped, although her conviction for assaulting a police officer was upheld.
19.
Claudette Colvin dreamed of becoming the President of the United States.
20.
Together with Aurelia S Browder, Susie McDonald, Mary Louise Smith, and Jeanetta Reese, Colvin was one of the five plaintiffs in the court case of Browder v Gayle.
21.
Claudette Colvin gave birth to a son, Raymond, in March 1956.
22.
Claudette Colvin left Montgomery for New York City in 1958, because she had difficulty finding and keeping work following her participation in the federal court case that overturned bus segregation.
23.
Claudette Colvin stated she was branded a troublemaker by many in her community.
24.
Claudette Colvin withdrew from college, and struggled in the local environment.
25.
Claudette Colvin began a job in 1969 as a nurse's aide in a nursing home in Manhattan.
26.
Claudette Colvin worked there for 35 years, retiring in 2004.
27.
Raymond Claudette Colvin died in 1993 in New York of a heart attack at age 37.
28.
Claudette Colvin's son Randy is an accountant in Atlanta and father of Colvin's four grandchildren.
29.
Claudette Colvin was a predecessor to the Montgomery bus boycott movement of 1955, which gained national attention.
30.
Claudette Colvin was not the only woman of the Civil Rights Movement who was left out of the history books.
31.
In 2005, Claudette Colvin told the Montgomery Advertiser that she would not have changed her decision to remain seated on the bus: "I feel very, very proud of what I did," she said.
32.
Claudette Colvin has often said she is not angry that she did not get more recognition; rather, she is disappointed.
33.
Claudette Colvin was not invited officially for the formal dedication of the museum, which opened to the public in September 2016.
34.
In 2021 Claudette Colvin applied to the family court in Montgomery County, Alabama to have her juvenile record expunged.
35.
The judge ordered that the juvenile record be expunged and destroyed in December 2021, stating that Claudette Colvin's refusal had "been recognized as a courageous act on her behalf and on behalf of a community of affected people".
36.
Former US Poet Laureate Rita Dove memorialized Colvin in her poem "Claudette Colvin Goes To Work", published in her 1999 book On the Bus with Rosa Parks; folk singer John McCutcheon turned this poem into a song, which was first publicly performed in Charlottesville, Virginia's Paramount Theater in 2006.
37.
In 2022, a biopic of Colvin titled Spark written by Niceole R Levy and directed by Anthony Mackie was announced.