Claudette Colvin

[Anonymous]

Interesting story about how Rosa Parks was chosen to be the face of the bus desegregation lawsuit.

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On that supercharged day in 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Ala., she rode her way into history books, credited with helping to ignite the civil rights movement.

But there was another woman, named Claudette Colvin, who refused to be treated like a substandard citizen on one of those Montgomery buses — and she did it nine months before Mrs. Parks. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made his political debut fighting her arrest. Moreover, she was the star witness in the legal case that eventually forced bus desegregation.

Yet instead of being celebrated, Ms. Colvin has lived unheralded in the Bronx for decades, initially cast off by black leaders who feared she was not the right face for their battle, according to a new book that has plucked her from obscurity.

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“My mother told me to be quiet about what I did,” Ms. Colvin recalled. “She told me: ‘Let Rosa be the one. White people aren’t going to bother Rosa — her skin is lighter than yours and they like her.’ ”

Ms. Colvin said she came to terms with her “raw feelings” a long time ago. “I know in my heart that she was the right person,” she said of Mrs. Parks.

Unlike Mrs. Parks, whose protest was carefully planned, Ms. Colvin was just a 15-year-old who couldn’t stomach the Jim Crow segregation laws one second longer.

Ms. Colvin was riding the bus home from school when the driver demanded that she give up her seat for a middle-age white woman, even though three other seats in the row were empty, one beside Ms. Colvin and two across the aisle.

“If she sat down in the same row as me, it meant I was as good as her,” Ms. Colvin said.

Two police officers, one of them kicking her, dragged her backward off the bus and handcuffed her, according to the book. On the way to the police station, they took turns trying to guess her bra size.

At the time, the arrest was big news. Black leaders, among them Dr. King, jumped at the opportunity to use her case to fight segregation laws in court. “Negro Girl Found Guilty of Segregation Violation” was the headline in The Alabama Journal. The article said that Ms. Colvin, “a bespectacled, studious looking high school student,” accepted the ruling “with the same cool aloofness she had maintained” during the hearing.

As chronicled by Mr. Hoose, more than 100 letters of support arrived for Ms. Colvin — sent in care of Mrs. Rosa Parks, secretary of the Montgomery branch of the N.A.A.C.P.

But Ms. Colvin was ultimately passed over.

“They worried they couldn’t win with her,” Mr. Hoose said in an interview from his home in Portland, Me. “Words like ‘mouthy,’ ‘emotional’ and ‘feisty’ were used to describe her.”

Mrs. Parks, on the other hand, was considered “stolid, calm, unflappable,” he said. The final straw: Ms. Colvin became pregnant by a married man.

A second Montgomery teenager, Mary Louise Smith, was also arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat — after Ms. Colvin’s arrest but before Ms. Parks’s — and she was also deemed an unsuitable symbol for the movement partly because of rumors that her father had an alcohol problem.


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/26/books/26colvin.html?_r=1&hp

[Anonymous]

Yes. For every famous name in the civil rights movement, there were always a dozen others who died in obscurity. What made Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney famous whlle so many others met the same fate in obscurity? Why is Medgar Evers famous for university desegregation and Vivian Malone and James Hood are historical footnotes? Why did King get picked to be the symbol of the movement, and not Reverands Shuttlesworth, Lowery, or Abernathy?

The answer IMO is twofold: circumstance plays a major role, as does strategy. In the case of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, they are famous because their bodies were found. Medgar Evers is probably more famous than Vivian Malone because he was assassinated. And King was not the better minister but the best public face for the movement. And the fact that the leaders of the movement could acknowledge that and fall behind MLK was completely reasonable, as was picking Rosa Parks - who exemplified the temperament that the movement wanted to project- that they were respectable, calm and yet insistent on their rights. She was a better symbol than a temperamental 15 year old girl.

[Anonymous]

The WaPo did a nice piece a few years back on all the people (I believe all women) who had gotten arrested on the bus before Rosa Parks did.

And MLK was chosen as a leader in the early days of the Montgomery struggle because he was new in town and it avoided a power struggle between two other local leaders.

In the United States, we love the "great man" theory of change -- as if without Rosa Parks or MLK, nothing would have happened -- when stories like these show how lots of people contribute to a social movement. Everybody can help.