Claudette Colvin - An Unsung Hero of Black History Month
A century ago, February was just another month. And if some politicians were to get their way, it would go back to being just another month. But despite ignorant, angry, racist-fueled attacks on the teaching and learning of Black history, Black History Month persists; indeed, in some places, the celebration of Black history, culture, and strength has even broken through the barriers of the shortest month of the year to be honored as More Than a Month.
Historian Carter G. Woodson, born in Virginia in 1875 to formerly enslaved parents, first made Black History Month a thing in 1926. Back then, the goal was to allow students - Black and white - and people of all ages to learn about the then-almost-unknown history of the struggle toward freedom and equality.
Since then, whether we’ve given a paltry week, a short month, or a lifetime commitment of study and reflection, Black history has served to instruct, inspire, and move us toward a greater measure of justice.
Inspired by Black History Lessons
On March 2, 1955, nine months before Rosa Parks, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus to a white person. She drew inspiration from what she’d learned about Black history in class that February.
With a white woman standing in the aisle for lack of seating in the “white” section, the teenage girl heard the driver’s shouted command, “Why are you still sittin’ there?” Three of the people in her row got up. Colvin kept her seat. She told the bus driver she knew her constitutional rights, and she wasn’t going to get up.
A pair of police officers handcuffed and dragged her off the bus as her school textbooks spilled from her lap.
Colvin was charged with breaking local segregation laws, disturbing the peace, and assaulting a police officer. Her case went to trial in May that same year, when she became the first Black American known to have retained a lawyer to fight for her right to sit wherever she wanted.
While the judge decided to drop the first two charges, he convicted her of the third. This was likely a predetermined strategy: With only an assault charge to face, Colvin was unable to challenge the constitutionality of segregation on appeal.
About that day on the bus in 1955, Claudette Colvin said later that she’d felt the spirits of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth pushing down on her shoulders to keep her in her seat. She’d studied them as part of learning about Black history the month before.
Lived Experience of History
Colvin had just written a paper at her segregated high school about the injustices of segregation in her hometown. Her class had been talking about the Jim Crow laws and knew they were a form of modern-day slavery in all but name.
She’d also been galvanized into political action after her classmate, Jeremiah Reeves, was imprisoned and forced under torture to confess to the rape of a white woman with whom he’d been having a long-term consensual affair. (Reeves’ tragic case resulted first in a Supreme Court reversal of the death sentence an all-white jury had handed down, then in a second trial in which appeals of his death sentence went unheard. He was executed in 1958.)
When Colvin learned the facts about Black history in her class and from her life, that knowledge gave her the foundation to take action. She later became one of four plaintiffs in the 1956 case of Browder v. Gayle, which successfully overturned segregation laws in the Montgomery and statewide bus systems. By then, Parks’ more famous refusal to give up her seat had ignited the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
A Hidden Figure, Hidden No More
So, why have most people never heard of Claudette Colvin, who, not unlike her successor Rosa Parks, in effect fought racism, sexism, and structural inequality?
For one thing, Colvin was a teen. The NAACP had already been looking for just the right plaintiff to bring forward to challenge bus segregation, and such a young girl didn’t fit their idea of the most persuasive speaker. Parks, an NAACP secretary, was a soft-spoken, mature, and professional woman in her early 40s.
But it also had a lot to do with the color line that still cleaves the Black community. As Colvin later remembered, her own appearance would probably have met with less enthusiasm as the figurehead for a massive movement than that of the light-skinned, smoothly coiffed Parks. (It should be noted that Parks and Colvin knew and admired one another.)
Another strike against the young Colvin in those days was the fact that she’d become pregnant while still in high school and was an unmarried mother.
When we look at Claudette Colvin today, we see one of the reasons the civil rights movement succeeded as well as it did. Belief in herself, the justice of her cause, her determination, and a spirit of defiance should serve as an example to all of us.
This Black History Month that is More Than a Month, let’s also remember that her knowledge of her people’s history was what set the spirits of Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman on Colvin’s young shoulders.