Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice

Content Warning: Part 1, Chapter 7 Summary references the sexual assault and sexual exploitation of a minor.

The NAACP and other Black advocacy groups would finally have their ideal bus boycott icon in December 1955, when Rosa Parks was arrested for disturbing the peace after, like Claudette, refusing to give up her seat to a white woman. At the time of her arrest, Parks was 41, married, and well-known in both activist communities and the Montgomery population as a whole, since she worked as a seamstress at a popular downtown department store.

By the time Parks made her stand, the NAACP was primed for immediate action and the bus boycott began almost immediately. By the day after her arrest, a network of activists had distributed leaflets to almost every Black person in Montgomery, calling for them to avoid the buses that Monday. Almost everyone was on board with this plan; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. drove around town on boycott day looking into bus windows, and only reported seeing eight Black people riding them, when usually there would have been hundreds. Although Claudette was happy that Parks’s arrest had finally sparked a boycott, she was disappointed that she was not asked to be part of the movement.