Rosa Parks's defiance of Montgomery, Alabama's segregated city buses on December 1, 1955 is a legendary moment in the history of African-American civil rights, but in fact she was beaten to it nine months earlier by 16 year old Claudette Colvin, who unlike Parks didn't get much media attention and was little known for decades afterward. Colvin, who was born in 1939 to a poor black family in Montgomery, was abandoned by her father at an early age. She attended classes at the all-black Booker T. Washington High School and relied on public transportation as the city's school buses did not service black children and the Colvin family was too poor to own a car. The bus system was heavily used by blacks for the very reason that they had a low rate of car ownership and needed it to get around town, but like everything else in the South at this time was racially segregated. Colvin was also a member of the local NAACP chapter's Youth League. One of her classmates at Booker T. Washington High, Jeremiah Reeves, was convicted in 1953 on sketchy charges of raping white women and sentenced to death, as rape was then a capital offense in Alabama (Reeves, unfortunately, did not find justice and ended up in the state's electric chair in 1958).
If a city bus got too crowded, black passengers were expected to stand up in the aisles to make room for whites to sit in seats. And so March 2, 1955, Colvin got on the bus and along with three other black females, was ordered by the driver to move to the back and stand to make room for a white passenger. One of the black women, Ruth Hamilton, was pregnant and declared she was not going to get up and stand for anyone. Colvin chimed in that she would also refuse to stand. The driver told them fine, but he was going to get the police to force them to sit if necessary. Two Montgomery PD officers, Thomas Ward and Paul Headley, arrived and told a black male passenger to move to the back. He obeyed but Colvin wouldn't budge. The officers promptly arrested Colvin. She yelled "My constitutional rights are being violated!" As Colvin remembered it, "I could feel the hand of Harriet Tubman pressing on one shoulder and the hand of Sojourner Truth on the other. I made a statement that Rosa didn't make and probably couldn't have made."The incident didn't make the news or anything outside a brief notice in the police blotter of the local newspapers. After Rosa Parks sat in on the Montgomery bus in December, Colvin's mother told her to let Parks take the credit for defying segregation instead. She told Claudette that it was better optics, Parks was a respectable-looking middle aged woman and more sellable to the media than a raggedy-looking and poorly dressed teenager--in addition, Colvin had become pregnant a few months after the incident on the bus.
Colvin would recall some of the convoluted racial laws in Montgomery at that time. One of them was that blacks weren't allowed to use the dressing rooms of department stores to try on clothes--they had to take a paper bag or a sheet of paper, draw a diagram of their foot on it, and take it to the store. She added "So many of the older folks would complain about segregation but none of them ever tried to do anything about it. I felt it was time to take a stand."The cops took her downtown to be booked and along the way made crude remarks about her body and guessed what her bra size was. Colvin was afraid they would sexually molest her as it was not uncommon for police to do that to black females at the time. She was charged with creating a public disturbance, violating segregation laws, and assaulting a police officer, which she said never happened and was nonsense. The minister at her family's church paid her bail and told her she brought the revolution to Montgomery. She was tried in juvenile court and found guilty on all three counts, but on appeal the first two charges were dropped, however the appeals court upheld the conviction for assaulting a cop.
The Browder v. Gayle court case the following year challenged Montgomery's bus segregation and the Supreme Court upheld a lower court's ruling that it was unconstitutional. Segregated busing in the city would be abolished as a result of this. Colvin's son Raymond was born in early 1956 and she left Alabama for New York City two years later, less because of segregation than because she had become unpopular with the black community in Montgomery who believed her actions were going to cause problems for them. Colvin had relatives in the Big Apple and there gave birth to her second son, Randy, in 1960. She eventually found work as a nurse's assistant and served in that capacity for more than 30 years before retiring in 2004. Her older son Raymond died in 1993 at only 37 while Randy Colvin became an accountant in Atlanta and father of four.
>>17995840>The cops took her downtown to be booked and along the way made crude remarks about her body and guessed what her bra size was. Colvin was afraid they would sexually molest her as it was not uncommon for police to do that to black females at the time.Cops and prison staff used to routinely get away with torture and rape if the prisoner was black, Hispanic, or Native American. The system is better policed (to make a bad pun) now so they can't get away with that so much anymore but in those days...
>>17995840>Colvin would recall some of the convoluted racial laws in Montgomery at that time. One of them was that blacks weren't allowed to use the dressing rooms of department stores to try on clothes--they had to take a paper bag or a sheet of paper, draw a diagram of their foot on it, and take it to the store. She added "So many of the older folks would complain about segregation but none of them ever tried to do anything about it. I felt it was time to take a stand."wtf man
>>17995863The South was shit then, it's shit now, and it will be shit 100 years from now. Don't lose any sleep over it.
nice /pol/ b8, m8
>>17995980>>17995835I would rather get stabbed to death for no reason by a lunchtime rowdie than hear about the horrors of segregation. I feel awful. Just awful.
>>17995875Some day Missouri will get the right to have sick leave.
>>17995994If you don't have PTO and sick days get a better fucking job.
>>17995863Yeah, it turns out that Jim Crow was bad and wasn't just making blacks drink from a different water fountain like /pol/ would have you believe.
>>17995863blacks smell funky, you want them to smell up your dressing room so it smells like stale cheese?
>>17995835No, it was a staged Commie publicity stunt. SAD.
>>17996663Blacks are infamous for being over the top in cleaning and grooming. That's why heavy scents and over washing is a stereotype.
>>17996034>get a better fucking job.Super easy to say that lmao. That shit shouldn't have to be an "extra". Many companies that "give" PTO and sick days LOVE Guilt tripping employees or try to call them in early.
>>17995875they invented most of our popular music canon, so there's that
>>17995835>Rosa Parks's defiance of Montgomery, Alabama's segregated city buses on December 1, 1955 is a legendary moment in the history of African-American civil rights, butthe 70th anniversary is coming up in 3 months, fortunately SJWs are dead/powerless now so we won't be subjected to a month long media blitz about tht
>>17995841>She eventually found work as a nurse's assistant and served in that capacity for more than 30 years before retiring in 2004wiping elderly guidos' butts in a NYC hospital, eh...it's a living.
>>17995838>>17995835i have to applaud her for not changing her fashion sense a bit in the almost 60 years between these two photos
my grandmother took a bus down to Georgia during WW2 to visit my grandfather when he was undergoing Army training there and she was like "wtf man" at the segregated everything down there because we didn't have nothing like that in Pennsylvania
