Claudette Colvin (1939- )

It's #WonderWomxnWednesday, and today we're learning about the forerunner of Civil Rights on Public Transportation, Claudette Colvin. Below are excerpts from articles across the internet. Enjoy!

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"Claudette Colvin was born on September 5, 1939, in Montgomery, Alabama. Months before Rosa Parks, Colvin stood up against segregation in Alabama in 1955, when she was only 15 years old. She also served as a plaintiff in the landmark legal case Browder v. Gayle, which helped end the practice of segregation on Montgomery public buses.

Growing up in one of Montgomery's poorer neighborhoods, Colvin studied hard at school. She earned mostly As in her classes and even aspired to become president one day. On March 2, 1955, Colvin was riding home on a city bus after school when a bus driver told her to give up her seat to a white passenger. She refused, saying, "It's my constitutional right to sit here as much as that lady. I paid my fare, it's my constitutional right." Colvin felt compelled to stand her ground. "I felt like Sojourner Truth was pushing down on one shoulder and Harriet Tubman was pushing down on the other—saying, 'Sit down girl!' I was glued to my seat," she later told Newsweek" - Biography Website

"It was Negro history month, and at her segregated school they had been studying black leaders like Harriet Tubman, the runaway slave who led more than 70 slaves to freedom through the network of safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. They were also studying about Sojourner Truth, a former slave who became an abolitionist and women's rights activist.

The class had also been talking about the injustices they were experiencing daily under the Jim Crow segregation laws, like not being able to eat at a lunch counter.

"We couldn't try on clothes," Colvin says. "You had to take a brown paper bag and draw a diagram of your foot ... and take it to the store. Can you imagine all of that in my mind? My head was just too full of black history, you know, the oppression that we went through. It felt like Sojourner Truth was on one side pushing me down, and Harriet Tubman was on the other side of me pushing me down. I couldn't get up."

Colvin also remembers the moment the jail door closed. It was just like a Western movie, she says.

"And then I got scared, and panic come over me, and I started crying. Then I started saying the Lord's Prayer," she says." - Margot Adler from NPR

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Excerpts:

Biography.com

NPR.com