Claudette Colvin (11 page)

I
T WAS DURING ONE OF THOSE SUMMER VISITS
across town that Claudette met someone who actually listened—or seemed to. While watching a baseball game in a park, Claudette was joined by a light-skinned black man. She judged him to be maybe ten years older than she was, married, he said, but separated from his wife and living with
his mother. He said he was a Korean War veteran, and backed up his claim with lively stories from places in distant parts of the world.

C
LAUDETTE:
I liked talking to him. He was the first person to understand my hair. Everyone else kept saying I was crazy, or “mental,” but he got it. He said it was impossible for black people to have really straight hair anyway; he had seen Asian women with straight hair all the way down to their feet. No black woman could ever grow hair like that no matter how she tried. He kept telling me to ignore what people were saying about me. I really needed to hear that. He was easy to talk to. I could relate to him. I would say things like “The revolution is here—we need to stand up!” and he would agree. But all the time I knew that I was getting in over my head. He was so much older than me, and had so much more experience. I knew I was getting into a situation I couldn't handle, but it was hard to stop.

T
HE SLOW, SULTRY SUMMER
finally came to an end when, just after Labor Day, Claudette celebrated her sixteenth birthday and returned to Booker T. Washington High for her senior year. Her legal case had died with the appeal decision, and Claudette had lost contact with all the adult black leaders except Rosa Parks. Still, riding the bus continued to anger and humiliate blacks throughout Montgomery, and impatience was mounting. Leaders such as E. D. Nixon and Jo Ann Robinson kept looking for the catalyst—the “right” person or event—that would spark citywide action.

Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Bradley

On October 21, a second teenager, eighteen-year-old Mary Louise Smith, defied a Montgomery bus driver's command. She had left home early that morning to collect the twelve dollars owed her by the white family for whom she had worked the week before. But when she finally reached their house on the other side of town, they weren't home. Now she was out not only her wage, which her family needed,
but also the twenty cents for round-trip bus fare. A week of work and a trip across town for nothing: that's what she was thinking on the bus ride home when a redhaired woman appeared in the aisle by her seat and ordered her to get up and move back.

Mary Louise Smith, graduation photo, 1955

At St. Jude School, the nuns had taught Mary Louise and her siblings to respect all people regardless of their skin color, and she did. But she was angry that day. She was thinking, It's the bus driver's job to ask, and to ask politely. Muttering a rare profanity, she crossed her legs, squirmed down in her seat, and made herself very still. She heard the bus driver's command to move, but she refused. And refused again. Next came the driver's radio call, and within minutes, a policeman entered the bus and arrested her.

Mary Louise was taken downtown, booked, and jailed. She was released two hours later, when her father arrived and paid the fourteen-dollar fine. It happened so quickly and quietly that there was no newspaper publicity. By the time E. D. Nixon and other black leaders heard about Mary Louise Smith, her fine had already been paid and it was too late to mount a legal challenge.

But that didn't stop people from talking. Another teenage girl had been arrested on the bus. Who was she? Where was she from? What church did her family go to? Who were her parents? Where did they live? Soon the rumor mill was spinning out gossip that the Smith girl's father was a drunk and the family lived in a squalid shack.

The truth was much different. Mary Louise later said she never in her life saw her father drunk. For one thing, he was too busy working to drink much. After Mary Louise's mother died, in 1952, Frank Smith took a second job to support his six children. Hardly a shack, the Smith home was a two-story, three-bedroom frame house in a working-class neighborhood. But Mary Louise Smith, the second teenager with the nerve to face down Jim Crow on a city bus, was, like Claudette, branded “unfit” to serve as the public face of a mass bus protest.

During the summer and fall of 1955, Montgomery's adult black activists thought hard about the buses—which looked increasingly like Jim Crow's Achilles' heel. Each considered what to do in his or her own way. Jo Ann Robinson, E. D. Nixon, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and others continued to meet with city and bus officials, consistently pressing for black drivers, courteous treatment, and a revised seating plan.
Every polite refusal increased their resolve. Dr. King thought the officials were digging their own grave. “The inaction of the city and bus officials after the Colvin case would make it necessary for them . . . to meet another committee, infinitely more determined,” he later wrote.

Rosa Parks and Fred Gray met for lunch nearly every day, often talking about what could be learned from Claudette's case that could end segregation on the buses. In July, Mrs. Parks slipped away for a two-week workshop on interracial relations at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. Here, for the first time, she saw blacks and whites treated as equals. She returned saying it had changed her life.

The time was ripe for change. There was a growing impatience with segregation. Claudette had crossed a line, proclaiming that at least one young Alabaman would
not
share her future with Jim Crow. Seven months later, Mary Louise Smith had joined her. Now, a year and a half after
Brown v. Board of Education
, a few brave young people were demanding a different future. Education may have been the way up, but transportation was the way out. If they were branded “uncontrollable” or “emotional” or even “profane,” so be it. Claudette and now Mary Louise Smith had shown through their courage that at least some young people were ready to act.

Rosa Parks with E. D. Nixon (at left). At last the African-American community of Montgomery was united and ready for action

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise
.

—Maya Angelou, “Still I Rise”

O
N
D
ECEMBER
2, 1955,
tens of thousands of black Montgomery residents studied an unsigned leaflet bearing a brief typewritten message. It began: “Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown in jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down. It is the second time since the Claudette Colbert [
sic
] case that a Negro woman has been arrested for the same thing. This has to be stopped.” It concluded:

We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial. Don't ride the buses to work, to town, to school or anywhere on Monday. You can afford to stay out of school for one day if you have no other way to go except by bus. You can also afford to stay out of town for one day. If you work, take a cab, or walk. But please, children and grown-ups, don't ride the bus at all on Monday. Please stay off the buses Monday.