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In The Shadow Of Rosa Parks: ‘Unsung Hero’ Of Civil Rights Movement Speaks Out
A Publication of the Stanford Graduate Program in Journalism January 20, 2005
By Vanessa de la Torre |
Claudette Colvin could easily be lost in the crowd. Her short hair is neatly curled; she wears eyeglasses and a small pair of gold hoop earrings. She dresses modestly and looks more like someone’s kindly grandmother than the woman who 50 years ago was a catalyst for one of the most famous events in civil rights history. But that, in fact, is who Colvin is. Nine months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger, Colvin had done the same thing, but without any fanfare. She was only 15 at the time, and civil rights leaders had reservations about using her as the symbol of their movement. Instead, Parks, who worked for the NAACP and was inspired by Colvin’s example, became the person whom history would remember. Now, half a century later, Colvin still vividly recalls her emotions on the day when a bus driver summoned the police to arrest her in Montgomery, Ala. It was March 2, 1955. Colvin was a junior at Booker T. Washington High School. She hoped to practice law one day and defend people like Jeremiah Reeves, a black classmate who had been convicted of raping a white woman and sentenced to death. The case had her simmering. It was on her mind that bus ride, she explains. And she was angry that twice a day she rode the same bus and here was the driver, ordering her to stand so a white person could sit. What happened next was impulsive, Colvin says. “I had the spirit of Sojourner Truth inside me, the spirit of Harriet Tubman, telling me, ‘Don’t get up!’” She told a policeman that she was “just as good as any white person” and wasn’t going to give up her seat. “I was very hurt because I didn't know that white people would act like that and I was crying,” Colvin later testified in court. “And (the policeman) said, ‘I will have to take you off.’ So I didn’t move. I didn’t move at all … So he kicked me and one got on one side of me and one got the other arm and they just drug me out.” The police said Colvin was “clawing and scratching” as they hauled her off the bus. What Colvin has admitted is screaming again and again, “It’s my constitutional right.” She had paid her bus fare. Colvin was charged with misconduct, resisting arrest and violating city and state segregation laws. (Eventually she was convicted and sentenced to probation.) E.D. Nixon, then a leader of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, had been waiting for a test case to challenge bus segregation and vowed to help Colvin after her father posted bail. But then came the second-guessing: Colvin’s father mowed lawns; her mother was a maid. Churchgoing people, but they lived in King Hill, the poorest section of Montgomery. The police, who took her to the city hall and then jail, also accused the teenager of spewing curse words, which Colvin denied, saying that in fact the obscenities were leveled at her (“The intimidation, the ridicule,” she often says now). Some blacks believed she was too young, and too dark-skinned to be an effective symbol of injustice for the rest of the nation. Then, as local civil rights leaders continued to debate whether her case was worth contesting, that summer came the news that Colvin was pregnant — by a married man. E.D. Nixon would later explain in an oral history, “I had to be sure that I had somebody I could win with.” Rosa Parks, for a decade the NAACP secretary who took special interest in Colvin’s case, was “morally clean, reliable, nobody had nothing on her.” On December 1, 1955, Parks would board a bus at the same stop as had Colvin, and go on to become the symbol Nixon had been seeking. In contrast to Colvin, when policemen came to lead Parks away, she asked, calmly, “Why do you all push us around?” Recently, as the country honored what would have been Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 75th birthday, televisions replayed scenes from the era of burning crosses, hooded Klansmen, “Whites Only” signs, clashes between Southern policemen and peaceful protestors, the “I Have a Dream speech,” and King’s assassination. But second to Reverend King is the image of serene dignity: Rosa Parks, the unassuming seamstress who galvanized the movement after a long day’s work, because she refused to give her seat to a white person. The legend goes that her feet were tired. She became one of TIME magazine’s 100 Most Important People of the Century. When someone Googles Claudette Colvin, on the other hand, the first item is a dated news release about fourth graders in Milwaukee who made a six-minute film titled, “Claudette Who?” Over the years, Colvin, now 65, has grown accustomed to anonymity. After her arrest in 1955, Colvin did become a plaintiff in the NAACP’s federal lawsuit to desegregate buses. But the following year she gave birth to a son Raymond, who was so fair-skinned (like his father) that people frequently accused her of having a white baby. She left Alabama for New York in 1958, and for over 30 years worked the night shift at a Catholic nursing home. Aside from a handful of articles in the mainstream press about Colvin and other obscure names who preceded Rosa Parks — “It was four women who made the bus boycott successful, otherwise the people would’ve been walking in vain,” she says — being at Stanford University last week was the first time Colvin has ever been publicly recognized, she confirms. ‘Honorable mention’ Claudette Colvin is chatting with two admirers when a record producer tells her to look at the television. The song he co-produced on the Montgomery bus boycott has a music video, he says, and “Your name is in it.” So Colvin watches when “1955” and the name “ROSA PARKS” appear on the black screen, in bold, white letters. She waits. “Rosa the spark,” a rapper says. She waits. Suddenly her name pops up on the screen, and the record producer says “There!” and points, and Colvin stands silently and reads, “When the police arrested her she went kicking and screaming.” “So why not give her an honorable mention,” the rapper suggests. The screen blackens and a new verse begins. Colvin turns her head slightly. She gives a short, muted chuckle. Probably best that she has her back to the TV, a slice of melon in hand, when “Rosa Louise McCauley Parks” emerges on the screen with the title, “Queen of the civil rights movement.” About this time, Colvin starts talking about the past. Back then, “you couldn’t look your madam in the eye,” she says, very close, gazing intensely. And the white children, their innocence was also tainted. Colvin remembers her first job as a sleep-in domestic in New York, how she felt part of the household. Then she heard the little girl say, “Oh mother, that nigger has on a cap just like me.” She also says black people often got caught in legal trouble because they had no money to properly defend themselves — and that they still do to this day. “They have no one to go to.” Colvin contemplates this. Tens of seconds pass. It seems like she might be done talking. “Another thing about racism,” Colvin will suddenly say, and note how her son Randy, an accountant in Atlanta, had to buy his home in a nicer part of town so his children could attend a good school. “If you’re in a poor neighborhood you get an inferior education,” she says. And about single moms in the ghetto: “She’s out trying to survive, working two jobs. She’s never at home, she can’t supervise her kids and tell them to do their homework. And the boys get bored and start selling drugs. They think, ‘I’m not gonna work in McDonald’s and get minimum wage.’” Colvin’s firstborn, Raymond, had become addicted to drugs and alcohol. At 37 he died of a heart attack in her apartment. About her life, her dreams of becoming a lawyer, she says, “Yes, I’m disappointed. But then again, no one knows what’s in store for them. At least my grandkids don’t have to suffer what I had to suffer.” She thanks God that none of her five grandchildren are on drugs. She mentions that one is a D.C. policeman and another is a first-year medical student. The three younger girls all get good grades; one plays the violin. But they all lack an understanding of personal sacrifice, she worries. “They’re fast-forward … What we gained was through blood and tears … And they don’t see that.” Maybe, Colvin says, they are just taught differently nowadays. In her era, adults told children that God was directly over their heads. As an individual she was accountable. Now she can’t tell the kids that God is in the sky, because they know that the universe is infinite, as far as you can see there is space. People don’t know where heaven is, she says. ‘Not the right icon’ Colvin says she is not angry with the NAACP for not taking her case. But she is disappointed that nothing came from a front-page article about her and Mary Ware, another teen to follow Colvin’s bus rebellion before Rosa Parks, which was published ten years ago in USA Today. Colvin thought she would get a response from the black community, but didn’t. “They probably thought I wasn’t the right icon.” Minutes later, a white woman approaches, smiling nervously, saying sorry to bother, excuse me, but, it’d be a great honor if Colvin could sign her book. She extends a ballpoint pen and Threshold of a New Decade, the latest, 703-page volume on the papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. Colvin seems surprised. Her eyes appear tired. But with a steady hand, she takes a couple minutes writing her message in cursive, under a quote from Dr. King: “Claudette Colvin, unsung hero of the civil rights movement. Thank you and keep the faith.” |
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