Remembering Rosa Parks … And Claudette Colvin
Today is the fifty-fifth anniversary of the day that Rosa Parks was asked to move to the back of a Montgomery city bus, and refused. (When the driver told her that if she didn’t get up he would have to call a cop, she replied with marvelous grace and dignity: “You may do that.”)
Rosa Parks is well worth remembering, of course, and she is well remembered. But it’s also worth remembering Claudette Colvin, who took the same stand earlier that year.
In the spring of 1955, Claudette Colvin was a junior at Booker T. Washington High School in Montgomery. On March 2 of that year, on her way home from school, she was told to move to the back of the bus to allow a white person to take her seat.
Like Rosa Parks nine months later, she refused. Like Rosa Parks, she was arrested.
So why do we know Parks’ name and no
