Claudette+Colvin

by Kaiya Grade 5

Did you know that Rosa Parks wasn’t the first person to refuse to give up her seat to a white passenger? In 1955 a teenager named Claudette Colvin did not give up her seat on a bus to a Caucasian woman in Montgomery Alabama, 9 months before Rosa Parks got arrested. She didn’t want to give up her seat because she was sitting in her section of the bus, and just because a white woman didn’t have a seat she had to give up hers. She was saying in her head she had Harriet Tubman holding her down on one shoulder, and Sojourner Truth holding her down on the other. She was only 15 when she got dragged off the bus. She started shouting and saying “It’s my constitutional right” as she was dragged off. Because she didn’t give up her seat she was arrested and went to jail, but luckily she was bailed out. She went home and told everybody what happened. Her mother was very upset, but didn’t want to lose her job. So Claudette had to act as if nothing had happened or if she did she and her mother would lose their house and become poor.

If Claudette had to go through all this chaos she would need a lawyer, like everybody else. Fred Gray was Claudette’s lawyer. Fred wasn’t much older than her. He really didn’t like segregation, and to see what Claudette was going through he hopped on her case as soon as possible. Fred Gray was the man everybody came running after when they needed a lawyer. People like Claudette Colvin, Martin Luther King, Jr. and even Rosa Parks. Fred was a very intelligent man. He finished school and decided to go to law school in Ohio. He went back to Montgomery, Alabama after passing the bar exam.

Fred and Claudette pleaded not guilty when they went to court. Fred had gotten the idea to work with Claudette Colvin because of E.D. Nixon. When E.D. had told him about Claudette’s case he was so excited. So he worked with Claudette and they won a case that had to do with challenging the Jim Crow laws.

Claudette Colvin is a very important woman, but she didn’t want to be heard or known because her family could have lost their house, their jobs and everything else that they needed. But in 2009, Claudette Colvin revealed her secret. She told the whole world that when she was a teenager she refused to give up her seat to a white woman. media type="youtube" key="hGNiACFN1AE" height="349" width="425" align="center"

Image sources: [] http://www.1199seiu.org/media/news.cfm?bSuppressLayout=true &nid=1998