Colvin’s arrest for refusing to give up his seat to a white man on a segregated bus sparked the modern civil rights movement in the United States.
Claudette Colvin, who sparked America’s modern civil rights movement by refusing to give up her seat to a white woman on a segregated bus, has died at the age of 86.
Colvin was 15 years old when he was arrested on the Montgomery bus. This was nine months before Rosa Parks achieved international fame for refusing to give up her seat as well.
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Colvin died Tuesday of natural causes in Texas, according to a statement from Colvin’s estate foundation.
Colvin was taken into custody on March 2, 1955, after a bus driver reported to police that two black girls were sitting near two white women, violating segregation laws. Mr. Colvin refused to move when asked, leading to his arrest.
“The woman could have sat across from me, so I stayed seated,” Colvin told reporters in Paris in April 2023.
“She refused because…white people are not supposed to sit near black people,” Colvin said.
“People ask why I refused to move, but I say history has glued me to that seat,” she added.
Colvin was briefly jailed for disturbing the peace. The following year, she was one of four black female plaintiffs to file a lawsuit challenging the segregation of bus seats in Montgomery.
The lawsuit was successful and affected public transportation systems across the United States, including trains, planes, and taxis.
Colvin’s arrest came at a time of growing frustration over the treatment of black people on Montgomery’s bus system. Parks’ arrest in December 1955 sparked the beginning of a year-long Montgomery bus boycott.
The boycott thrust the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. into the national spotlight and is considered the beginning of the modern civil rights movement.
“She left a legacy of courage that changed the course of American history,” the Claudette Colvin Legacy Foundation said in a statement.
“Too often overlooked.”
Montgomery Mayor Stephen Reed said Colvin’s actions “helped lay the legal and moral foundations for a movement that changed America.”
Colvin’s role in sparking the modern civil rights movement has often been overshadowed by Parks’ actions, and Reed said her bravery was “too often overlooked.”
“Claudette Colvin’s life reminds us that movements are built not just by those with the best-known names, but by those who gave courage early on, quietly, and at great personal sacrifice,” Reid added.
Colvin’s arrest helped end racial discrimination in the United States, but there are concerns from civil rights groups that President Donald Trump is rolling back socially progressive policies.
The nation’s largest civil rights organization said Tuesday that President Trump’s claims that civil rights hurt white people are deceptive.
In an interview published by the New York Times last week, President Trump said he believed civil rights-era protections resulted in unfair treatment of white people.
The newspaper said the comment came after Trump was asked whether protections that began with the passage of civil rights laws in the 1960s have resulted in discrimination against white men.
“We accomplished some very great things, but we also hurt a lot of people. People who deserved to go to college, people who deserved to get jobs couldn’t get jobs,” Trump was quoted as saying.
“It was reverse discrimination,” he said.
In response, NAACP President Derrick Johnson said President Trump was “out and out lying.”
“Trump does this all the time. He intentionally invents false realities to lay the foundation for policies that further benefit the top 1 percent by privatizing government services and stripping underserved communities of resources,” Johnson said.
