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. 'You had to take a brown paper bag and draw a diagram of your foot.

'We couldn't try on clothes,' Colvin says. 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. They were also studying about Sojourner Truth, a former slave who became an abolitionist and women's rights activist. 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. 'All I remember is that I was not going to walk off the bus voluntarily,' Colvin says. Her school books went flying off her lap. Two police officers put her in handcuffs and arrested her. The bus driver ordered her to get up and she refused, saying she'd paid her fare and it was her constitutional right. She remembers taking the bus home from high school on March 2, 1955, as clear as if it were yesterday. Now a 69-year-old retiree, Colvin lives in the Bronx. Most of the women were quietly fined, and no one heard much more.Ĭolvin was the first to really challenge the law. Most people know about Parks and the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott that began in 1955, but few know that there were a number of women who refused to give up their seats on the same bus system. Two police officers handcuffed and arrested her.Ĭourtesy of Birmingham Public Library Department of Archives and Manuscriptsįew people know the story of Claudette Colvin: When she was 15, she refused to move to the back of the bus and give up her seat to a white person - nine months before Rosa Parks did the very same thing. When the driver of the segregated bus, like the one shown above, ordered Colvin to get up, she refused, saying she'd paid her fare and it was her constitutional right.

Parks bus