Claudette Colvin (4 page)

There were so many places you couldn't go and so many things you couldn't do if you were black. Oak Park was the nicest park in the city, just down the hill from us, but blacks could only walk through it. If you tried to play ball or even sit down on the benches, the police would run you out.

One year we all got excited because there was going to be a rodeo with Roy Rogers and Dale Evans at the Montgomery Coliseum. They'd do one show for whites
and another for blacks. My parents bought me a cowboy hat and bought cowboy boots for Delphine. Q.P. kept our horse, Mack, in a pen out back, and every day we'd brush him until he shone and we'd take turns getting rides in our new cowboy clothes. And then the word came down that Roy and Dale didn't have time to do two shows after all, so they were cutting ours. That was the South.

C
LAUDETTE EXCELLED
as a student in junior high even though she was younger than her classmates. Her parents bought her a dictionary of her own, giving her an advantage in classroom spelling contests. After school she usually headed for the library or, if her homework was light, to the King Hill Recreation Center, where she learned to crochet. She studied piano, too, until her mother, impatient for her favorite songs and frustrated with Claudette constantly practicing scales, stopped paying for lessons.

Claudette (fifth from left, back row, the tall girl smiling) developed a lifelong love of crocheting through a club that was formed at the King Hill Recreation Center

Late in the summer of 1952, just two weeks before Claudette was to begin her freshman year at Booker T. Washington High School, her sister Delphine came down with a fever Sunday just before church. Her temperature climbed steadily through the afternoon. By nightfall, her body was burning and the bedsheets were soaked with perspiration. Far worse, she couldn't move her arms and legs to get up. The family tried everything to break her fever, but nothing worked. They rushed her to a doctor the next morning.

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LAUDETTE
: Polio came down on a lot of kids that summer. It shriveled the leg of one girl in our congregation and deformed the arm of a little boy. The doctor knew what it was as soon as he saw Delphine. He sent her to St. Jude Hospital and put her in an iron lung to help her breathe. She couldn't move. All she could do was whisper through her breath, that's what my momma said. I used to go in the car with them to visit, but Mom and Q.P. made me wait outside the hospital. They didn't want me to
get sick, too, and they didn't want me to see Delphine like that. Once I tried to slip inside to see my sister, but a nurse caught me and led me back out screaming. I never saw Delphine alive again after the day she left our house to go see the doctor. The next time I saw her she was dead.

After that, I began to question everything: I asked God why He didn't answer my prayers. I asked, “Why would You take my sister? Why did You say no when I asked for my sister's deliverance?” My mom disagreed with my thinking. She said, “You prayed for Delphine's deliverance? Well, let me tell you what I was prayin' for: I was praying for God to take her, because I didn't want the Devil to have the upper hand. I didn't want her to be paralyzed for the rest of her life.” I said, “Mom, I would have taken care of her. I would have gone to school to be a nurse and learned to take care of her.” I would've, too.

Delphine died September 5, 1952. It was my thirteenth birthday.

Hot comb and hair-straightening products typical of the 1950s, when Claudette attended Booker T. Washington High School

“Radical” simply means “grasping things at the root
.”

—Angela Davis

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LAUDETTE LEFT HER HOUSE
on the first day of high school determined to put her mind on her studies. Delphine's funeral—just two weeks before—had been as sad and bewildering a day as she could remember, but now she hoped she could put it behind her. Now it was time to focus.

Booker T. Washington High, whose sports teams were known as the Yellow Jackets, was one of Montgomery's two public high schools for black students, the other being George Washington Carver High. Almost all the sons and daughters of Montgomery's working-class black families went to either Washington or Carver, with a few Catholic students attending St. Jude's and many of the children of Montgomery's black professionals enrolled at other private schools.

Booker T. Washington High was a buff-colored, three-story brick citadel. The glass in the lower windows was painted white so students couldn't look out at the street. Desktops were gouged and book covers cracked. Pages were torn from years of use. There was so little money from city funds that each year the principal put on a fund-raising event to buy desks, books, and equipment for the cafeteria. In the fall of 1952, the air around the building was thick with the dust of construction, as workers
raced to complete a new wing to the school before winter in an effort to keep up with Montgomery's expanding black population.

Claudette in 1952, age twelve

Though being smart was an asset, Claudette soon found that having light skin and straight hair was the surest key to popularity at Booker T. Washington. Many girls woke up early and spent hours applying hot combs to their hair, trying to straighten it to look, as some said, “almost white.” But Claudette's hair wouldn't stay straight or flat no matter how long she pressed it, and her skin was very dark. On top of that, she was from King Hill, a neighborhood she loved but others scorned. And no matter how hard she fought it, Delphine's death had left her feeling raw and lonely, especially when she passed the spot each day where her sister had always waited for her after school. Suddenly alone, Claudette started life as a Yellow Jacket feeling she was at the very bottom of the social heap.

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LAUDETTE
: Right after Delphine died, I became very sensitive. Just about any cruel word or insult could start me crying, even if it was aimed at someone besides me. One thing especially bothered me—we black students constantly put ourselves down. If you were dark-complexioned they'd call you “nappy-headed.” Not “nappy-haired.” Nappy-headed. And the “N” word—we were saying it to each other, to
ourselves
. I'd hear that word and I would start crying. I wouldn't let people use it around me. How could you hear such things and not feel emotional? When girls said things like that, it was bad enough, but when boys said them to you, it really hurt.

For some reason we seemed to hate ourselves. We students put down our hair texture and skin color all the time. Can you imagine getting up in the morning every day and looking in the mirror and saying to yourself, “I have bad hair”? Or “I'm black and nobody likes me”? The football players went for the girls with flowing hair and lighter skin. And who could grow wavy, shoulder-length hair? It'd be a biracial kid. The girls with the darkest complexions never got picked to be queen of anything. Middle-class black girls would always try to separate themselves from dark-skinned girls like me and emulate white girls.