R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Today we celebrate Ms Claudette Colvin, an 80 year old retired American nurse aide who was a pioneer of the 1950s Civil Rights Movement. 65 years ago today on March 2nd 1955 Ms Colvin aged 15, was arrested in Montgomery Alabama for refusing to give up her seat to a white woman on a crowded segregated bus.
In 1955 Colvin was a student at a segregated High School and she relied on the city’s buses to get to and from school, because her parents didn’t own a car. The majority of passengers on the busses those days were African-American, but they were discriminated against by its custom of segregated seating. On March 2, 1955, Ms Colvin was returning home from school. She sat in the colored section in the back, knowing that If the bus became so crowded that all the “white seats” in the front of the bus were filled until white people were standing, any African Americans were supposed to get up from nearby seats to make room for whites, move further to the back, and stand in the aisle if there were no free seats in that section.
When a white woman who got on the bus was left standing in the front, the bus driver commanded Ms Colvin to move to the back. When she refused, the police were called who handcuffed, forcibly removed this 15 year old girl and arrested her. While Ms Colvin was refusing to get up, she was thinking about a school paper she had written that day about the local custom that prohibited blacks from using the dressing rooms in order to try on clothes in department stores. “We couldn’t try on clothes. You had to take a brown paper bag and draw a diagram of your foot and take it to the store” she later said. Referring to the segregation on the bus and the white woman she said: “She couldn’t sit in the same row as us because that would mean we were as good as her”.
This incident happened 9 months before the well known similar incident with Rosa Parks but Ms Colvin was advised to keep quiet as she did not have ‘good hair’, she was not fair skinned, she was a teenager and she got pregnant. The leaders in the Civil Rights Movement tried to keep up appearances and make the ‘most appealing’ protesters the most seen.
Colvin’s moment of activism was not solitary or random. In high school, she had high ambitions of political activity. She dreamed of becoming the president of the United States. Her political inclination was fueled in part by an incident with her schoolmate, Jeremiah Reeves. Reeves was found having sex with a white woman who claimed she was raped though Reeves claims their relations were consensual. He was executed for his alleged crimes.
As we celebrate this remarkable human, I can’t help wondering what she would think of Linda Bellos. This veteran black British lesbian activist recently travelled to America to speak outside the US Supreme Court, along with right wing Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom, backing the Trump administration’s efforts to make it legal to fire LGBTQ+ people.
Emma Rylands
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