Although she was a pivotal figure in the US civil rights movement, Claudette Colvin, who has died aged 86, never received the full recognition she deserved for her courageous and groundbreaking protest against segregation.
On 2 March 1955 Colvin, aged 15, was riding a bus home from school in Montgomery, Alabama, with seats in the front reserved for white passengers, while those in the rear were designated for black people. She was in a “neutral” zone from which, as the bus filled up, the driver could order black passengers to move to the back. When she refused to give up her seat to a white woman, the driver called the police, and Colvin was arrested. Soon afterwards she appeared before a juvenile court. Charges of violating segregation laws and disturbing the peace were eventually dropped on appeal, but her conviction for assaulting a police officer was upheld.
Nine months later, on 1 December, Rosa Parks, a seamstress and an organiser within the local branch of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), similarly refused a driver’s order to move to the back of the bus.
Her conviction (and $10 fine) four days later prompted the start of a bus boycott by Montgomery’s black community, which attracted national attention, and the support of the Rev Martin Luther King.
Two months later, in February 1956, a civil rights attorney, Fred Gray, filed suit in federal district court; Colvin, by then 16, and eight months pregnant, was one of four plaintiffs testifying in Browder v Gayle. The district court ruled 2-1 that Montgomery’s segregation on public transport violated the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment, and the supreme court upheld the ruling.
This brought the bus boycott to an end, though Parks, a respectable housewife unlikely to seem threatening to white people, and with more respect in the black community, by now had become the public face of the movement, not a poor black teenager with a child.
Colvin quoted her mother as telling her: “Let Rosa be the one. White people aren’t going to bother Rosa, her skin is lighter than yours and they like her.”
Claudette was born in Birmingham, Alabama, to Mary Jane Gadson and CP Austin. She was still an infant when her father abandoned the family. Her mother, unable to support Claudette and her younger sister, Delphine, sent them to live with her uncle, Quentiss Colvin and his wife, Mary Ann (nee Vaughn), in Pine Level, a small town in Montgomery County. Claudette took the Colvins’ name, and later the family moved to King Hill, a black section of Montgomery.
Claudette started her secondary education at the segregated Booker T Washington high school, but in her early teens found adjusting to Delphine’s death from polio difficult. Although she was a good student and active in the NAACP youth council (Parks was one of the group’s mentors), she felt distanced from her fellow students.
Her son Raymond was born in March 1956, but, with a juvenile conviction on her record, and a perception that she was a troublemaker, Claudette found few opportunities in Montgomery. Two years later she moved to New York, where she lived with her cousin Velma, the Colvins’ only daughter, in the Bronx. She worked in domestic service, and in 1960 gave birth to a second son, Randy. In 1969 she began working as a nurse’s aide in a care home in Manhattan, and retired as a nurse 35 years later.
Parks was an exception in a civil rights movement that was largely driven by men, as was the black power era that followed, and recognition of Colvin’s role came slowly. The poet Rita Dove included a poem, Claudette Colvin Goes to Work, in her 1999 collection On the Bus With Rosa Parks; and a book by Philip Hoose, Claudette Colvin: Twice Towards Justice, recounting her experiences, won a National Book award in 2009.
But in 2005, when Troy State University in Montgomery opened a Rosa Parks museum, Colvin turned down an invitation to appear in a video and tell her story. She said: “I feel very, very proud of what I did. I do feel like what I did was a spark and it caught on … I’m not disappointed. Let the people know Rosa Parks was the right person for the boycott. But also let them know that the attorneys took four other women to the supreme court to challenge the law that led to the end of segregation.”
In 2010 the street in Montgomery on which the Colvins lived was renamed Claudette Colvin Drive. When a statue of Parks was dedicated in Montgomery in 2019, Colvin and her three fellow plaintiffs in Browder v Gayle were honoured with granite markers nearby. In December 2021, a Montgomery judge ordered that Colvin’s juvenile record should be expunged; the county district attorney Daryl Bailey called her actions of 1955 “conscientious, not criminal”. “I guess you can say that now I am no longer a juvenile delinquent,” she said.
In an interview with the writer Paul Hendrickson in 1998, she had summed up her moment in history perfectly. “I was tired of hoping for justice. When the moment came I was ready.”
Colvin is survived by her son Randy. Raymond died of a heart attack in 1993.
• Claudette Colvin, civil rights activist and nurse, born 5 September 1939; died 13 January 2026
