Do You Have to Be Read Your Rights Before Being Handcuffed

Every American child learns nearly Rosa Parks in school. On December 1, 1955, she, a black adult female, was arrested for refusing to give her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus to a white man. Her abort led to a boycott of the city'due south public transportation that lasted 381 days and ignited the Civil Rights Motility of the 1950s and 1960s. Nine months earlier, Claudette Colvin was arrested for the exact same affair. She was just 15 years former.

Claudette Colvin at age 13, April 20, 1953.

Growing Up in Jim Crow Montgomery

Colvin grew up in a poor black neighb orhood in Montgomery, Alabama. She was well accustomed with the Jim Crow laws of the South. She says the first fourth dimension she realized things were different for her was when she was a little girl and her mother took her to a department store. A white boy started staring at her and laughing because she looked different than him. She put her hands up to his to show him they both were really the aforementioned. Her mother slapped her for acting out and touching a white person. She picked upwards quickly that blackness people "had to be on their best beliefs" while out in public considering of Jim Crow. In school, she learned about inequalities blackness people in the South faced on a regular ground. She attended an all-black school, equally Alabama did not actually desegregate its schools until years subsequently the 1954 Brown v. Board Supreme Court decision. Her instructors took the time to teach their students about Jim Crow and most Blackness History, peculiarly during February. February was the month during which Negro History Week (every bit it was then known) was historic around the country, just Colvin's school celebrated Blackness History for the entire month, equally we practise now, because her teachers felt black people were absent-minded from history books. Her personal heroes were Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth.

Boarding the Motorbus and Making a Decision

After schoolhouse on March 2, 1955, Claudette Colvin walked to downtown Montgomery with 3 of her classmates. She and her friends were going to have the metropolis coach home from schoolhouse that day. When they boarded the motorcoach, they sat behind the first 5 rows, which were reserved for white passengers. A immature white woman boarded the bus after Colvin and her friends and found nowhere to sit down considering the white section was full. Bus drivers had the authorization to brand blackness passengers move for white passengers, fifty-fifty if they were sitting in the black department. The bus driver asked Colvin and her friends to get upward, which her friends immediately did. She refused to movement. On her heed were the lessons she had learned throughout her life, specially during Negro History Month at her school just days before. Though her friends' seats (1 next to Colvin and two across the aisle) were now vacant, the white woman refused to sit in them because, according to Jim Crow laws, black people could not sit down next to side by side to white people. They had to sit behind white people to show their inferiority. When asked again, Colvin refused to get up. The jitney commuter alerted the traffic police, and iii stops later, a traffic officeholder came onto the double-decker and asked her why she was sitting at that place and why she would not become upwardly. She replied, "considering it'due south my ramble right," and told him she was not breaking the segregation constabulary by sitting there. The traffic officer told the bus driver that the police needed to become involved. A terminate or 2 later, 2 police officers came onto the coach and instructed Colvin to become up. She refused. She later said, "I could non move because history had me glued to the seat…Sojourner Truth's easily were pushing me down on 1 shoulder and Harriet Tubman'south easily were pushing me down on another shoulder." The police officers each grabbed i of her arms, kicked her, threw her books from her lap, and "manhandled" her off the passenger vehicle. They shoved her in their police machine, handcuffed her through the windows, and took her off to jail. She was the first person to be arrested for challenging Montgomery's bus segregation laws.

Arrested, Afraid, and Pending Consequences

On the mode to jail, the police officers called her racist and sexist names, "took turns trying to guess [her] bra size…and croaky jokes about parts of [her] body." When they got to the jail, other constabulary officers joined in on the proper noun calling. She was charged with breaking the segregation law, resisting arrest, and assaulting a police officer (one of them got scratched in the scuffle off the bus). They booked her every bit an adult and locked her in a cell without permitting her to make a call. She had no thought if anyone who could help her would find out where she was. The classmates that were on the motorcoach with her chosen her mother and her minister, yet, and told them what happened. Her government minister paid her bond and she was released. This fourth dimension her mother did not scold her, instead she simply asked if she was okay. Colvin, her family, and her neighbors were all afraid of retaliation from the KKK. They stayed up all night keeping watch, her begetter with gun in manus in case they came. Luckily, they never did. When she went back to school later her arrest, she constitute that many parents told her classmates to stay away from her because she was crazy. As a result of the stand up she took, she was made fun of by other teenagers. She was eventually found guilty on all three charges, just subsequently had two of them dropped by a judge. The judge upheld the assaulting a police officer charge, knowing it meant she would have "a serious police force record that could damage her future, but she could no longer appeal to claiming the Jim Crow regulations." She remembers the words her revered said to her on the mode home from jail – "I'm so proud of y'all. Anybody prays for freedom…But you're unlike – y'all want your answer the adjacent morning. And I think you but brought the revolution to Montgomery." But the revolution would not actually occur until nine months later.

Colvin's Opinion Paved the Fashion

Colvin feels her contributions to the Civil Rights Motion have been largely forgotten. When asked why her arrest did non have the impact Parks' did, she often sites five reasons. Showtime, Colvin was a minor and Parks was an adult—Parks seemed more trustworthy as the face of a move than a kid would have been. Second, Parks had lighter peel than Colvin—a feature more socially acceptable at the time. Tertiary, Colvin was poor and Parks was more middle class—also more socially acceptable. Quaternary, Parks was already well-known and respected in blackness political circles. Fifth, Colvin became significant (by a human ten years her senior) a few months afterwards her arrest—black leaders did not believe it would be good for their move if the face of it was an unwed teenage mother. Additionally, Colvin moved to New York shortly after her abort and rarely mentioned it to others because people at that place, she says, were more interested in the growing Black Power Motion and Malcolm 10 than they were in the bus boycott and Martin Luther Rex, Jr.

Though her arrest has been completely overshadowed by the arrest of Rosa Parks, Parks' arrest might not have been such a powerful activeness if it weren't for Colvin. Prior to December, 1955, black leaders in Montgomery had been in talks with the motorcoach company about a boycott if they did non desegregate. The bus company depended on black passengers to stay in business, and so they knew a cold-shoulder would really striking them hard and have a large bear upon. Equally secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, Parks was well enlightened of those talks, as well every bit other strategies they hoped to use to end the unequal treatment of blacks in Alabama and around the country. When Colvin refused to go off the autobus in March 1955, they got to work developing a plan and preparing for the moment to thrust their cause into the national spotlight. If they did non take that grooming time, Parks' abort might not have gained much more than local attention. Dr. Male monarch might not have go the face of the boycott if he had not had that preparation time between the 2 arrests.

Though she does not get the notoriety Parks gets, Colvin's contributions to the cause are still most definitely felt. A year after she was arrested, Colvin became one of four plaintiffs in a segregation case that reached the Supreme Court. Colvin testified in federal court in the Browder v. Gayle (Gayle was the Montgomery mayor) example and was the then-called star witness. Her testimony helped the court attain its verdict – that segregation on Montgomery buses was illegal.

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Source: https://www.womenshistory.org/articles/girl-who-acted-rosa-parks

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