Claudette Colvin (19 page)

With that, the bus protest ignited by Claudette's arrest twenty-one months earlier came to an end. It was one of the great human rights victories in U.S. history. But many years later one writer noticed something peculiar about that first bus ride. “It is interesting,” puzzled Frank Sikora in his book
The Judge
, “that Claudette Colvin was not in the group.”

Browder v. Gayle
may have ended legal segregation on the buses, but it did not end racial prejudice. Less than a week after the buses were integrated, five white men jumped out of a car at a Montgomery bus stop and surrounded a fifteen-year-old black girl. Cursing her, they beat her to the ground and sped away. Four days later a second young black woman, named Rosa Jordan, was shot in both legs while riding the Boylston bus by a sniper whose bullets penetrated the vehicle. Around the same time, Aurelia Browder's daughter Manervia ran to answer the phone ringing late in the night. “Your house is gonna be blowed sky high!” a voice said. She became hysterical. Her mother grabbed the phone and told the caller, “Blow it up. I need a new house, anyway!” and slammed the phone down.

A demolitions expert carefully defuses a bomb in the tense aftermath of
Browder v. Gayle

Violence and threats of revenge were everywhere in the first days of integrated buses. Annie Larkin remembers being in a mass meeting at a church soon after the Supreme Court's decision. “We had gotten there at four p.m. to get a good seat. But while the meeting was going on people came and set fire to the cars parked out in front of the church. No one would let us out until it was safe. A guard unit ended up escorting us home about four a.m.”

Montgomery turned into a battle zone on the night of January 10, 1957, as bombs rocked the city's black churches. Claudette's church, Hutchinson Street Baptist, was dynamited, its stained-glass windows blown to pieces. The Bell Street Baptist Church was bombed, too, as was Reverend Abernathy's home. Terrorists once again bombed the home of Reverend Graetz—especially despised by many as a white clergyman who openly supported black rights. All in all, four churches and two houses were damaged by explosives that night. Another bomb tossed onto Dr. King's front yard somehow failed to go off.

It was clear that anyone connected to the boycott, anyone whose name or picture had been in the paper—was now in grave danger. Q. P. Colvin, planted in his chair on King Hill, stayed close to his shotgun. The
Montgomery Advertiser
summed up the first days of 1957 with a blunt editorial: “The issue now has passed beyond segregation. The issue now is whether it is safe to live in Montgomery, Alabama.”

C
LAUDETTE
:
I was afraid, but I couldn't just hide at home. I had to work. I needed money. I decided I would be safer in restaurants than in white people's homes—you never knew who was KKK. But whenever I'd start a job in a cafeteria, word would get around fast about who I was. Sometimes black people would recognize me and come up and embrace me and say, “You the girl!” I got fired from several restaurant jobs when my employers found out I was the one who wouldn't give up her seat. I'd change my name back and forth from Colvin to Austin so I could work, but they'd always find out and that was that. It was hard for me to remain anonymous.

No one with any pull would help me or hire me. Those were hard, fearsome days: In those days, it seemed like I couldn't go anywhere and no one wanted to be near me. I wanted to escape from there.

There was one small good thing that happened right after the boycott ended. One
afternoon Reverend Ralph Abernathy, the pastor of the First Baptist Church, called our house and invited me to a private reception there. Abernathy knew Velma because she was a member. I decided to go. There weren't very many people invited, just a few from ASC, and a reporter, and Velma and I, and the Kings and Abernathys.

Dr. King sat near the door, always surrounded by people. Reverend Abernathy stayed close to him. After a while, I got up and went in the kitchen to help Mrs. Abernathy serve ice cream. I carried a scoop out to Dr. King, still sitting by the door. I had never met him before except to shake his hand in line after a mass meeting. I had always been too shy to approach him. Usually there were too many people around him to get near anyway.

When he saw me, he stood and introduced himself and thanked me for being in the court case. He said, “You're a brave young lady.” I told him I was trying to get back to school, and he listened with interest. It wasn't a long conversation; I moved on quickly. But it was important to me. How could you not respect him? King put his life on the line and didn't have to. Because he stood up, his life was always in danger, more so than the other ministers'. His speeches at the mass meetings kept people walking and kept things from getting out of control.

Meeting Dr. King didn't pay my bills or stop people from gossiping about me and Raymond. It sure didn't make me any safer. But I have to say those few words of praise from him on that evening felt very good.

Claudette Colvin, February 2005, speaking to students at Booker T. Washington Magnet High School

Claudette Colvin had more courage, in my opinion, than any of the [other] persons involved in the movement
.

—Fred Gray

February 2005, Booker T. Washington Magnet High School, Montgomery, Alabama

T
WO HUNDRED JUNIORS AND SENIORS
—about half white and half black, with a smattering of students from other racial and ethnic backgrounds—file into the school auditorium for a midmorning assembly. They settle into seats and squint at the stage, where a small group of black women are seated.

Lights dim, and a youthful figure wearing a simple dress and horn-rimmed glasses takes center stage. The actress and storyteller Awele Makeba transforms the auditorium into a packed city bus, the scene of a tense standoff between a determined black girl and several uniformed white men. Students in the audience lean forward, absorbed, maybe asking themselves if they would have taken such risks, and wondering how they would have held up under such pressure.

When the performance is finished, the principal turns to a woman who has not moved throughout the performance and invites her forward. She rises slowly and takes a few steps up to the microphone and into the light. The students of Booker T. Washington High, blacks and white together, rise to cheer her. Though the woman smiles warmly, there are no tears.

“Do you have any questions?” Claudette Colvin asks the students.

It has been a long way back home.

In 1957, the year after
Browder v. Gayle
, Claudette passed her G.E.D. and then enrolled at Alabama State College. Dissatisfied with the courses offered, she dropped out after a year.

Unable to find work in Montgomery, in 1958 Claudette followed Velma to New York City, reluctantly leaving Raymond in the care of her mom. At first she felt caged in by New York. “I would wake up in the night in Velma's tiny little apartment thinking I was in that cell in Montgomery,” she remembers. “Sometimes I thought I could hear the jailer's key.”

Claudette gave birth to a second son, Randy, in 1960. Unsure about how best to help her boys—trying to raise them on a maid's salary in Montgomery or sending money home from her New York job as a live-in family caregiver—she went “back and forth like a yo-yo” until, in 1968, she finally settled in New York. Claudette received nurse's training and took a job as a nurse's aide in a Catholic hospital in New York, where she cared for elderly patients, often at night. She worked there for many years.

During the 1960s, Claudette kept up with the civil rights movement in the news but stayed on the sidelines. Caution had become a habit; she told no one of her activist past. Decade by decade, she watched Rosa Parks's fame grow as the person who had ignited the movement by refusing to surrender her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Sometimes she wondered if anyone back home even remembered her arrest and testimony.
Browder v. Gayle
, overshadowed by the more famous school case,
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka
, was rarely mentioned in histories of the movement. The names of the four women who took down the bus segregation laws seemed to have been forgotten. The door to her place in history seemed closed forever.

And then, unexpectedly, it cracked open. In 1975 Frank Sikora, a Birmingham newspaper reporter writing a story on the Montgomery bus boycott, thought he remembered there had been someone
before
Rosa Parks. Library research brought up a name: Claudette Colvin. Flipping through the Montgomery phone book, Sikora found a Q. P. Colvin still listed at the address mentioned in one of the old stories. He
grabbed his notebook, drove to King Hill, and pulled up to a small frame house. “I was met at the door by a woman of about seventy, slender and with a face full of dignity,” he remembers. “It was Mary Ann Colvin, the woman who raised Claudette. I interviewed her and asked if she had a picture of Claudette. She dug out a little school snapshot, and scribbled down a phone number in New York City.”

Sikora telephoned a surprised Claudette and wrote a story about her. A few more stories followed, as well as chapters in two books about children of the civil rights movement. Her name began to appear in histories of the movement, though Claudette Colvin was usually presented as a feisty, immature teenager who got arrested before Rosa Parks but was “not the right person” to be a boycott leader. Many accounts said that Claudette was pregnant at the time she was arrested. “That would have been the first thirteen-month pregnancy in history,” Claudette observes. She kept her phone number unlisted and turned down most offers to speak.

But she did accept the offer of a ticket back home in 2005. The
Montgomery Advertiser
was sponsoring a fiftieth anniversary commemoration of the Montgomery bus boycott. People really seemed to want her to come. Friends would be there, as well as many of the activists still alive. And so it was that now, as part of that remembrance, she found herself standing before the students of Booker T. Washington, the very school from which she had been expelled a half century before.