15 year old Claudette fights the law and wins

Most people know the story of Rosa Park’s refusal to give up her seat and move to the back of the bus. Few people know the courage of Claudette Colvin.

Claudette Colvin was ONLY 15 when she refused to move to the back of the bus and give up her seat. This was nine months before Rosa Parks did the same thing catapulting the civil rights movement forward.

Most people know about the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, but little known is that many women refused to give up their seats. Most women were fined and quietly went away.

Claudette Colvin did NOT quietly go away.

Claudette had been learning in her school about slavery and the Underground Railroad.  Heroes like Harriet Tubman sparked conversations about current day 1955 segregation laws. These stories would help her summon the courage to do something when riding home on the bus one day.  

These injustices and her own experiences inspired her that fateful day.

The bus driver told her to move and she refused. She shook as the bus stopped and they waited as the driver summoned the police. When the police arrived they hauled her off the bus, her schoolbooks scuttling to the ground in the process. She would spend her first night in jail.

All of this for exercising the same constitutional rights she was being taught at the school she was going home on the bus from.

Colvin would later join three other women and challenge the segregation laws in court.  Their court case would successfully overturn bus segregation laws in all of Alabama.

Courage isn’t always bravery on a battlefield or rescuing someone from a burning building. Sometimes courage is defined by standing up, or in Claudette’s case sitting down, for yourself and what’s right.

By: Jeremy Bader




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