Claudette Colvin

Claudette Colvin is an American civil-rights pioneer whose March 2, 1955 refusal to give up her Montgomery, Alabama bus seat to a white passenger — nine months before Rosa Parks's December 1, 1955 same act — produced one of the foundational legal-test cases of the early American civil-rights movement. She was born Claudette Austin on September 5, 1939, in Montgomery, Alabama. Her birth-mother Mary Jane Gadson and her birth-father C.P. Austin gave her up to her great-aunt Mary Anne Colvin and her great-uncle Q.P. Colvin for adoption in early childhood (from which she acquired the Colvin surname).

Her education at Booker T. Washington High School in Montgomery — where she was a 15-year-old high-school junior in March 1955 — was shaped by her February 1955 Black History Month studies of Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman. Her March 2, 1955 Montgomery City Lines bus-seat refusal — when she refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery city bus — produced her March 2, 1955 arrest and conviction on charges of disturbing the peace, violating the Montgomery segregation ordinance, and assaulting a police officer.

Her March 1955 case was considered by the early Montgomery civil-rights movement (under the leadership of NAACP attorney Fred Gray, future Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and E.D. Nixon) as a potential bus-segregation legal-test case — but the case was rejected by the early Montgomery civil-rights movement leadership in favor of the December 1, 1955 Rosa Parks case. The rejection — shaped by Colvin's age (15), her unmarried-and-pregnant 1955 status (she gave birth to her son Raymond on March 29, 1956), and her dark-skinned working-class background — shaped her later biographical recognition.

Her May 1956 inclusion as one of the four plaintiffs in the federal-court case Browder v. Gayle — and the subsequent November 13, 1956 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that found Alabama's bus-segregation laws unconstitutional — produced her American civil-rights movement legal contribution. Her later 21st-century recognition has included the 2009 Phillip Hoose biographical book Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice (which won the 2009 National Book Award) and her 2021 Montgomery, Alabama juvenile-court record expungement.

Her name Claudette derives from the French feminine diminutive of Claude (from the Latin Claudius meaning "lame"). Claudette was a popular American girls' name through the 1940s and 1950s.