Civil rights pioneer Claudette Colvin has died. She was 86.
Colvin died on the morning of Tuesday, Jan. 13, of natural causes, according to a spokesperson for her family.
“They’re grieving her loss but remembering the legacy she left and hoping that through [her] foundation they can continue to live out that legacy,” the spokesperson, Ashley D. Roseboro, said.
“While Claudette was a civil rights hero, they remember her as Claudette Colvin — the mother, the grandmother,” Roseboro added.
Colvin was just 15 years old when, on March 2, 1955, she refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus — nine months before Rosa Parks’ more widely known act of resistance.
That day, a bus driver called police to complain that two Black girls were sitting near two White girls, in violation of segregation laws, according to the Associated Press. While one of the girls moved toward the rear of the bus, Colvin refused and was arrested.
“I said, ‘I’m not getting up,’” she later recalled. “It felt as though Harriet Tubman’s hands were pushing me down on one shoulder, and Sojourner Truth was pushing down on another. History had me glued to the seat.”
Following her arrest, Colvin was made a ward of the State and placed on indefinite probation, according to the Claudette Colvin Foundation’s website.
Colvin went on to play a key role in the fight against segregated buses in Montgomery, Ala. She and three other Black female plaintiffs — Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald and Mary Louise Smith — filed the landmark Browder v. Gayle lawsuit challenging segregated bus seating, according to the Supreme Court Historical Society. In 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court held that segregation on Alabama’s public buses was unconstitutional.
The decision effectively ended the Montgomery Bus Boycott by upholding a lower court ruling that segregation violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause and, in practice, undercut the “separate but equal” doctrine from Plessy v. Ferguson, according to the Supreme Court Historical Society.
In 2021, an Alabama family court judge granted Colvin’s petition to expunge her record.
Colvin is survived by her son Randy, as well as her sisters, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Her older son, Raymond, died in 1993.
Her funeral will be scheduled in Birmingham, Ala., at a later date.
