Forgotten figures in '50s bus boycott
Two teenagers refused to give up their seats before Rosa Parks' famous arrest.
DETROIT FREE PRESS
DETROIT -- Before there was a Rosa Parks known to the world, there was Claudette Colvin.
Her name never rose to international prominence even though she, too, refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., bus months earlier.
She was 15 and tired of injustice, just like Parks. In fact, she was one of the young people in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's youth council, of which Parks was the director.
Colvin, now 66, lives in the Bronx in New York.
"We wanted to give honor to her for picking up the torch and carrying the torch for freedom in a soft and quiet way," Colvin said recently. She had traveled to Detroit for Parks' funeral.
Colvin was one of two black women arrested before Parks on charges of violating the laws requiring racial segregation on Montgomery's public buses.
Colvin was arrested and jailed for two hours March 2, 1955.
Mary Louise Smith was 18 years old when she was arrested Oct. 21, 1955 -- a little more than a month before Parks took her stand by remaining seated on a city bus.
Smith, now known as Mary Louise Smith Ware, 68, attended the memorial service for Parks in Montgomery, where she still lives.
"I had to pay my tribute to her," Ware said in a telephone interview. "She was our role model."
Sought perfect person
Before the start of the bus boycott, Montgomery civil rights leaders were looking for the perfect person to rally around.
They chose not to use Colvin or Ware because they wanted to find someone of unquestionable character.
Colvin became pregnant that summer. She said the pregnancy resulted from statutory rape. But being an unwed pregnant teenager, for any reason, carried a shameful stigma in the 1950s.
Ware's father was rumored to have a drinking problem, although she said he did not.
No one could question Parks' character.
Colvin said she has no bitter feelings about Parks' receiving such worldwide acclaim while the general public doesn't know her name.
"It was the organization that pushed her up front," Colvin said. "Many other people suffered similar injustices."
What happened
In her own soft voice, Colvin recalled what happened to her that March afternoon when she was arrested:
She and three other students boarded a city bus after school.
Just like Parks on Dec. 1, 1955, they sat in the colored section.
The law required that once the white section filled, blacks had to move back to accommodate whites needing seats.
As the bus began to fill, the driver asked the four students to move.
Three students complied.
Colvin did not.
"I said, 'It's my constitutional right to sit here,"' Colvin said, recalling one of the lessons at the youth council meetings.
A few blocks later, the bus stopped. Two police officers got on board and told her to get up.
"You don't know the law around here, girl," she recalled one of them saying.
She refused to move. Each cop grabbed her by an arm and removed her from the bus. They forced her to hold her handcuffed hands outside the window of the squad car.
"They said that I'd clawed them," she said. "I may have. I don't remember. I was very emotional. I did have long nails. I only weighed about 110 pounds."
Colvin was sentenced to one-year's probation for charges that included violating the segregation laws.
She's not sure what caused her to take a stand against segregation that day.
"When you've been abused daily and you see people humiliated and harassed, you just get tired of it," Colvin said.
Later life
Colvin left Montgomery for New York in 1968 because she had difficulty finding and keeping work after her arrest, just as Parks had left for Detroit in 1957. Colvin retired last year after 35 years of working as a nurses assistant in a New York City nursing home.
Although Colvin and Ware aren't as widely known as Parks, their names have a permanent place in U.S. history. They were among the four plaintiffs in the court case that ended segregation on the city's buses. The case was fought all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Attorneys decided not to use Parks in the lawsuit because they wanted to build a case that clearly challenged the legality of bus segregation. Parks had been charged with disorderly conduct.
"I'm not disappointed," Colvin said. "Let the people know Rosa Parks was the right person for the boycott. But also let them know that the attorneys took four other women to the Supreme Court to challenge the law that led to the end of segregation."