Remembering Claudette Colvin
Today is the fifty-sixth anniversary of the day that Rosa Parks was asked to move to the back of a Montgomery, Alabama city bus, and refused, sparking a movement that would change America.
But Claudette Colvin is worth remembering too.
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 nine months later, she was arrested.
So why do we know Parks’ name and not Colvin’s?
Because where Parks was a 42-year-old civil rights activist, Colvin was a 15-year-old schoolkid.
