Claudette Colvin (9 page)

Rosa Parks worked as a department store seamstress and served for many years as the secretary of Montgomery's branch of the NAACP. Pleasant and soft-spoken, she was a steely foe of racial segregation

We did all sorts of things to raise money for my lawyer. Rosa's mother baked and sold cookies. I was always eating them, and Rosa would come up and say, “Claudette, don't eat all the cookies or we won't have any to sell.” Rosa put me up for Miss NAACP, Montgomery Chapter. I finished second, but it didn't matter; all the money from the contest went to pay my lawyer anyway.

C
LAUDETTE'S LAWYER
wasn't much older than she was. Bespectacled, serious, sporting a pencil-thin mustache, and usually seen in a neatly pressed suit, twenty-four-year-old Fred Gray was just six months out of law school in March 1955. The youngest of five children, he had grown up riding the Montgomery city buses in a triangle between school and home and his job with a newspaper. He had never himself been beaten or threatened on a bus, but he had heard more than enough insults and witnessed more than enough abuse of black passengers to last a lifetime. Like Claudette, he had vowed to study law in the North and then return home to “destroy everything segregated I could find.”

After high school, Gray worked his way rapidly through Alabama State College
and then went off to law school in Ohio. True to his pledge, he returned to Montgomery soon after graduation, passed the Alabama bar exam, and opened his practice in a tiny downtown office, finding his first clients though black churches and NAACP meetings. He had lunch almost every day with Rosa Parks, who worked across the street at the Montgomery Fair department store. When E. D. Nixon suggested he take the Claudette Colvin case, Gray leaped at the chance. Since Claudette had been charged with breaking the city and state segregation laws, Gray hoped he could use the case to show they were unconstitutional. There had never been a chance before, since no one except Claudette Colvin had ever pleaded not guilty to breaking the segregation laws in a bus arrest.

Claudette's lawyer, Fred Gray—young, smart, and “determined to destroy everything segregated I could find”

One March evening, Gray and his secretary, Bernice Hill, drove out to King Hill to meet Claudette and her parents. They sat around the Colvins' small kitchen table sipping coffee and talking, while Hill took notes. Since Claudette was still a legal minor, one of her parents would have to file the lawsuit on her behalf. Given its importance, both parents would have to strongly support it. Gray took an instant liking to the entire family, sizing them up as brave and self-reliant. For her part, Claudette admired Fred Gray as the first person she had ever met who was doing what she herself wanted to do someday.

Gray urged all three to consider the hazards of contesting the charges in court. By pleading not guilty, Claudette would be doing more than just talking back to whites: she would be challenging Jim Crow dead-on. Her name would almost certainly be in the paper. Homes had been bombed, jobs lost, and people lynched for less. All three Colvins simply looked back at him, unshaken. Gray turned to Claudette and asked if she was sure.

“Yes, I am,” she replied.

Her quick response and the family's unity of purpose sent Fred Gray off King Hill with a sense of hope. Whatever was to come, at least the Colvins were not people who would back down.

There had been thirteen black students on the Highland Gardens bus the day Claudette was arrested, most of them her classmates at Booker T. Washington. Gray
arranged for the high school principal to issue passes for students willing to testify at Claudette's hearing. Just before the trial, he spoke to them as a group, coaching them about what they might be asked and how best to answer.

In the days before Claudette's hearing, black leaders rallied around her. The Citizens Coordinating Committee, a group of prominent black men and women, mimeographed a leaflet and passed it around Montgomery. Entitled “To Friends of Justice and Human Rights,” it described Claudette's arrest and demanded that she be acquitted of charges. It also called for punishment of the bus driver and insisted on clarification of the long-standing city bus rule—constantly ignored by drivers—that said no rider had to give up a seat unless another was available.

Claudette's hearing was held on March 18, 1955, late in the morning. A cousin drove Claudette, Q.P., and their neighbor Annie Larkin off the Hill and down to Montgomery County's juvenile court. Claudette felt certain her troubles would be over by nightfall. “I thought Fred Gray was a very good lawyer,” she remembers. “He seemed to have prepared very well. I was confident.”

Because Claudette's plea of not guilty to breaking the segregation law was important to every black bus rider in Montgomery, several leaders attended the hearing, including Jo Ann Robinson and the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, pastor of the First Baptist Church. It was nearly noon when Claudette and Fred Gray were summoned into the small courtroom to appear before Juvenile Court Judge Wiley Hill, Jr. Students remained in the hall, straining to hear what was going on behind the door and waiting for their names to be called.

Claudette faced three separate charges: violating the segregation law, disturbing the peace, and “assaulting” the policemen who had pulled her off the bus. Judge Hill heard testimony from Patrolmen Paul Headley and T. J. Ward, the arresting officers. Ward testified that when he'd placed Claudette under arrest, she had “fought” the officers, kicking and scratching them. “She insisted she was colored and just as good as white,” Ward informed the judge. The two officers were able to show a letter written by a white passenger on the bus that day, praising them as “gentlemen almost to the point of turning the other cheek” who spoke to Claudette in “tones so soft that I doubt if any of the other passengers aboard the bus even heard them.” When called,
Fred Gray's student witnesses offered a very different story, of two police officers confronting a teenage girl with frightening force on a packed bus. Gray challenged the laws themselves, contending that the provisions of Alabama's laws and Montgomery's city ordinances requiring racial segregation were unconstitutional.

Just before lunchtime, Judge Hill delivered his blunt ruling: guilty of all charges. Claudette would be placed on probation, was declared a ward of the state, and was released to the custody of her parents. He cracked his gavel, dismissing the case. As the words washed over Claudette, she felt a wave of anguish, and then everything she had been holding inside for the past two weeks came pouring out. “Claudette's agonized sobs penetrated the atmosphere of the courthouse,” wrote Jo Ann Robinson. “Many people brushed away their own tears.”

C
LAUDETTE:
Now I was a criminal. Now I would have a police record whenever I went to get a job, or when I tried to go to college. Yes, I was free on probation, but I would have to watch my step everywhere I went for at least a year. Anyone who didn't like me could get me in trouble. On top of that I hadn't done anything wrong. Not everyone knew the bus rule that said they couldn't make you get up and stand if there was no seat available for you to go to—but I did. When the driver told me to go back, there
was
no other seat. I hadn't broken the law. And assaulting a police officer? I probably wouldn't have lived for very long if I had assaulted those officers.

When I got back to school, more and more students seemed to turn against me. Everywhere I went people pointed at me and whispered. Some kids would snicker when they saw me coming down the hall. “It's my constitutional right! It's my constitutional right!” I had taken a stand for my people. I had stood up for our rights. I hadn't expected to become a hero, but I sure didn't expect this.

I cried a lot, and people saw me cry. They kept saying I was “emotional.” Well, who wouldn't be emotional after something like that? Tell me, who wouldn't cry?

The newspaper article on the facing page appeared in the
Alabama Journal
on March 19, 1955

I had crossed the line. I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land
.

—Harriet Tubman

Spring and Summer 1955

T
HE MORNING AFTER HER HEARING
, an article about Claudette's conviction appeared in the
Montgomery Advertiser
. Headlined “Negro Guilty of Violation of City Bus Segregation Law,” the story reminded readers that, according to the city code, “a bus driver has police power while in charge of a bus and must see that white and Negro passengers are segregated.”

As word spread, an atmosphere of tension settled over Montgomery. “The verdict was a bombshell,” Jo Ann Robinson later wrote. “Blacks were as near a breaking point as they had ever been. Resentment, rebellion and unrest were evident in all Negro circles. For a few days, large numbers refused to use the buses . . . Complaints streamed in from everywhere.

“The question of boycotting came up again and loomed in the minds of thousands of black people,” Robinson continued. “On paper, the Women's Political Council had already planned for fifty thousand notices calling people to boycott the buses; only the specifics of time and place had to be added . . . But some members were doubtful; some wanted to wait. The women wanted to be certain the entire city
was behind them, and opinions differed where Claudette was concerned. Some felt she was too young to be the trigger that precipitated the movement.”

Was she too young? Could a rebellious teen be controlled? Who
was
this girl anyway? Robinson's WPC lieutenants probed into Claudette's background, since few adult leaders in Montgomery had ever heard of her. They already knew that her mother and father were not part of the elite social set that revolved around Alabama State College and the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Investigation showed that Claudette Colvin was being raised by her great-uncle and great-aunt, respectively a “yard boy” and a “day lady,” as maids were called. The Colvins lived in King Hill, a neighborhood that meant “poor” or “inferior” to most who didn't live there. And the Hutchinson Street Baptist Church, which Claudette faithfully attended, was a church for the working poor.