Claudette Colvin (20 page)

C
LAUDETTE:
How did it feel? Awesome. Wonderful. It felt like young people hadn't abandoned the cause, like they really wanted to know what we went through. They appreciated what we did to try to clear the way for them. A black girl and a white girl stood on either side of me and we had our photograph taken together. I told them that years ago it would have been unheard of for a white student and a black student to be standing together, and learning together on an equal basis. It seemed unbelievable that this had come to pass.

We had a question-and-answer session, and they asked what I would say to them, looking back from my years. I told them: Don't give up. Keep struggling, and don't slide back. Grab all the resources that are available for you, and get yourselves ready to compete. I told them to take their education seriously.

I know that segregation isn't dead—just look at schools and neighborhoods and
workplaces, and you can see that it's still all over America. And yes, we are still at the very beginning economically. But at least those degrading signs, “White” and “Colored,” are gone. We destroyed them. There are laws now that make segregation illegal. We forced white people to take a different view. They had to change their attitude toward blacks. The civil rights movement cleared the way legally so we could progress. It opened the doors for the younger generation. I'm glad I was a part of that.

When I look back now, I think Rosa Parks was the right person to represent that movement at that time. She was a good and strong person, accepted by more people than were ready to accept me. But I made a personal statement, too, one that she didn't make and probably couldn't have made. Mine was the first cry for justice, and a loud one. I made it so that our own adult leaders couldn't just be nice anymore. Back then, as a teenager, I kept thinking, Why don't the adults around here just
say
something? Say it so they know we don't accept segregation? I knew then and I know now that, when it comes to justice, there is no easy way to get it. You can't sugarcoat it. You have to take a stand and say, “This is not right.”

And I did.

I
n the year 2000, while I was writing my book
We Were There, Too!: Young People in U.S. History
, someone told me that a fifteen-year-old African-American girl had taken the same defiant stand as Rosa Parks, in the same city, but almost a year earlier. As the story went, this girl's refusal to give up her seat on a city bus to a white passenger had helped inspire the famous Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott of 1955 and 1956. But instead of being honored, she had been shunned by her classmates, dismissed as an unfit role model by adult leaders, and later overlooked by historians.

An Internet search led me to the name Claudette Colvin. I found that, indeed, in March 1955, this high school junior had been arrested, dragged backwards off the bus by police, handcuffed, and jailed for refusing to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger. Her protest had taken place almost nine months to the day before Rosa Parks had famously taken the same stand.

Reading on, I discovered that Claudette Colvin didn't give up after she was arrested and tried. A year later, she and three other women
sued
the city of Montgomery and the state of Alabama, challenging the laws requiring segregated seating on
buses. Only after they won, in a case known as
Browder v. Gayle
, were the city's buses integrated.

Is Claudette Colvin still alive? I asked myself. If so, where is she? Further research turned up a 1995 article about her in
USA Today
, framing Ms. Colvin as an important but nearly forgotten civil rights pioneer. Her obscurity, said the writer, was the product of “shyness, missed communications and a historical bum rap.” The article said Ms. Colvin was now fifty-six years old and living in New York City, where she worked at a private nursing home.

I telephoned the reporter, Richard Willing, who said yes, he was still in touch with Ms. Colvin. After we talked, he agreed to contact her to see if she would be interested in working with me on a book about her early life.

For the next four years, Mr. Willing called Claudette Colvin occasionally on my behalf. Always the message relayed back to me was “Maybe when I retire.” I had all but given up when, one night in the fall of 2006, I saw the red light blinking on my answering machine. It was Richard Willing. His message was brief: “Claudette says I can give you her phone number,” he said. “Here it is. Good luck.”

Soon after that night, I rang the bell of Claudette Colvin's apartment in a New York high-rise apartment building. The door was pulled open by a caramel-colored woman who greeted me with a shy smile as she inspected me closely through wide-framed glasses. She had a nest of curls on top of her head. We walked—she with the aid of a cane—to a restaurant that had a quiet room where we could talk over a meal. She laughed easily and spoke in a tuneful voice that still had plenty of Montgomery in it but had also taken on a Caribbean lilt, since some of her New York neighbors were Jamaicans. We decided to work together.

During the following year Claudette shared the personal history of a dramatic social revolution. Having played a central role in events that helped destroy the legal basis for racial segregation in the United States, she still remembered not only what happened but how it felt. She could still describe the inside of her cell, the sound of a jailer's key, and the view from a witness box in a packed federal courtroom. She could also remember the rage she felt when the adults in her life complained at home about segregation but accepted it outside.

In fourteen long interviews during the next year—three in New York and the others
by telephone—I asked Claudette thousands of questions. Only a very few times did she gesture for me to turn the tape recorder off, or say she would prefer to keep something to herself. She gave me the telephone numbers of friends and family members, and encouraged them to talk to me. She was wonderfully open and generous.

More than any other story I know, Claudette Colvin's life story shows how history is made up of objective facts and personal truths, braided together. In her case, a girl raised in poverty by a strong, loving family twice risked her life to gain a measure of justice for her people. Hers is the story of a wise and brave woman who, when she was a smart, angry teenager in Jim Crow Alabama, made contributions to human rights far too important to be forgotten.

I consulted hundreds of Web sites, articles, and books in writing about Claudette. These titles were among the most helpful.

Branch, Taylor.
Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63
. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.

Garrow, David J.
Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
. New York: Vintage Books, 1986.

Gray, Fred D.
Bus Ride to Justice: Changing the System by the System
. Montgomery, Ala.: Black Belt Press, 1995. In this autobiography, Claudette's lawyer, Fred Gray, offers his account of using the law to “destroy everything segregated I could find.”

Halberstam, David.
The Fifties
. New York: Villard Books, 1993.

Hampton, Henry, and Steve Fayer.
Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement
. New York: Bantam Books, 1990. This book contains interviews with Montgomery residents who led or took part in the boycott.

Hare, Kenneth M., ed.
They Walked to Freedom: The Story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott
. Champaign, Ill.: Spotlight Press L.L.C., 2005. This book was published by the
Montgomery Advertiser
to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Montgomery bus boycott. Profiles, photos, and news stories of the time are included.

King, Martin Luther, Jr.
Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
. New York: Harper & Row, 1958. Dr. King's account of the bus protest.

Levine, Ellen.
Freedom's Children: Young Civil Rights Activists Tell Their Own Stories
. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1993. Ms. Levine interviewed Claudette as part of this excellent volume.

Newman, Richard, and Marcia Sawyer.
Everybody Say Freedom: Everything You Need to Know about African-American History
. New York: Penguin Books, 1996.

Robinson, Jo Ann Gibson.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It
. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987. This wonderful book is especially valuable in documenting the abuse that blacks experienced while simply getting from place to place during the bus boycott.

Sikora, Frank.
The Judge: The Life and Opinions of Alabama's Frank M. Johnson, Jr
. Montgomery, Ala.: Black Belt Press, 1992. Sikora, a former reporter for
The Birmingham News
, has done a great deal to keep Claudette's name from simply disappearing. He tracked her parents down during the 1970s and wrote the first newspaper story about her contributions to U.S. history. In
The Judge
, he recovered and published parts of the transcript of the
Browder v. Gayle
hearing, allowing us to hear Claudette's actual words and filling in Judge Johnson's impressions of her testimony. He provided the basis for my book's
Chapter 9
.

Williams, Donnie, with Wayne Greenhaw.
The Thunder of Angels: The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the People Who Broke the Back of Jim Crow
. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2006. This book offers a very good portrait of a troubled Montgomery in the months after the bus boycott ended.

Williams, Juan.
Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954–1965
. New York: Penguin Books, 1988.

Garrow, David J. “The Origins of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.”
Southern Changes
7, no. 5 (1985): 21–27.

Johnson, Robert E. “Bombing, Harassment Don't Stop Foot-Weary Negro Boycotters.”
Jet
, February 16, 1956, 8–13.