Showing posts with label Claudette Colvin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Claudette Colvin. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 21, 2021

Claudette Colvin's juvenile record has been expunged

The juvenile court records of Claudette Colvin, a civil rights pioneer who refused in 1955 to give up her seat to a White person on an Alabama bus, have been sealed, destroyed and expunged following a judge's ruling.

Colvin, now 82, was arrested when she was 15 for refusing to give up her seat to a White person on a bus in Montgomery. The incident came nine months before Rosa Parks' far more famous arrest for a similar act of civil disobedience in the Jim Crow era.

Colvin was charged with two counts of violating Montgomery's segregation ordinance and one felony count of assaulting a police officer. She was convicted on all counts in juvenile court, and the segregation convictions were overturned on appeal.

Placed on an "indefinite probation" after her conviction on the assault charge, Colvin was never informed her probation had ended, her legal team said.

An Alabama family court judge in November granted Colvin's petition the prior month to expunge her record. Montgomery County Juvenile Judge Calvin Williams on November 24 signed the order for the records to be destroyed, including all references to the arrest.

He granted Colvin's motion to seal for good cause and fairness for "what has since been recognized as a courageous act on her behalf and on behalf of a community of affected people," Williams said.

Saturday, February 01, 2020

Before there was Rosa Parks, there was Claudette Colvin

Most people think of Rosa Parks as the first person to refuse to give up their seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. There were actually several women who came before her; one of whom was Claudette Colvin.

It was March 2, 1955, when the fifteen-year-old schoolgirl refused to move to the back of the bus, nine months before Rosa Parks’ stand that launched the Montgomery bus boycott. Claudette had been studying Black leaders like Harriet Tubman in her segregated school, those conversations had led to discussions around the current day Jim Crow laws they were all experiencing. When the bus driver ordered Claudette to get up, she refused, “It felt like Sojourner Truth was on one side pushing me down, and Harriet Tubman was on the other side of me pushing me down. I couldn't get up."

Claudette Colvin’s stand didn’t stop there. Arrested and thrown in jail, she was one of four women who challenged the segregation law in court. If Browder v. Gayle became the court case that successfully overturned bus segregation laws in both Montgomery and Alabama, why has Claudette’s story been largely forgotten? At the time, the NAACP and other Black organizations felt Rosa Parks made a better icon for the movement than a teenager. As an adult with the right look, Rosa Parks was also the secretary of the NAACP, and was both well-known and respected – people would associate her with the middle class and that would attract support for the cause. But the struggle to end segregation was often fought by young people, more than half of which were women.