‘I Was Not Going to Stand.’ Rosa Parks Predecessors Recall Their History-Making Acts of Resistance

On March 2, 1955, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was sitting on a totally full bus in Montgomery, Ala., when the driver asked her and three black schoolmates to give up the whole row so that a white woman could sit.

According to her biographer Phillip Hoose’s account of the events, her classmates got up and moved to the back, but Colvin did not — and the white woman remained standing, refusing to sit in the same row as the black teenager. Under the city’s Jim Crow-era segregation laws, black passengers didn’t technically have to get up for white passengers if there were no other free seats, though many did so to avoid the potentially dangerous consequences.

But, though Colvin knew the expectations, she was also thinking of the lessons on constitutional rights she had just learned at school.

“I wanted the young African-American girls also on the bus to know that they had a right to be there because they had paid their fare just like the white passengers,” she tells TIME. “This is not slavery. We shouldn’t be asked to get up for the white people just because they are white. I just wanted them to know the Constitution didn’t say that.”

Two police officers boarded, yanked Colvin out of her seat and dragged her off the bus. Colvin says she didn’t think about how dangerous her decision could have been until after she had already made her stand. Once off the bus, though, the fear set in. “I feared they [the policemen] might hit me with their clubs,” she says. “They were trying to guess my bra size and teasing me about my breasts. I could have been raped.”

During the brief jail stay that followed, she remembers sitting on a cot without a mattress. “I can still vividly hear the keys lock me in,” she says.

In recent decades, when this anniversary comes along, she has usually been in New York City — her home for the last six decades. But she recently moved back to Alabama, to Birmingham, and now marvels at how things have changed — thanks in part to her own actions, as a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit that successfully challenged the bus segregation. In rare interviews with TIME, Colvin and her co-plaintiff Mary Louise Smith-Ware reflected on how their peaceful acts of defiance six decades ago helped bring about a new stage of the civil rights movement.

Read more on Claudette Colvin’s story here:

https://time.com/5786220/claudette-colvin-mary-louise-smith/