Full Name
Claudette Colvin (born Claudette Austin)
Date of Birth
September 5, 1939
Place of Birth
Birmingham, Alabama, United States
Education
Known Affiliates Names
- Rosa Parks (fellow civil rights activist)
- National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
Affiliated Organizations’ Names
Major Events
- Montgomery Bus Boycott
- Browder v. Gayle (1956 Supreme Court case)
Brief Biography
Claudette Colvin, born on September 5, 1939, in Birmingham, Alabama, was an American pioneer of the 1950s civil rights movement. In 1955, at the age of 15, she was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white person, nine months before Rosa Parks’s similar action. Colvin’s act of defiance led to her becoming one of the four plaintiffs in the Browder v. Gayle case, which ruled that Montgomery’s segregated bus system was unconstitutional. She later moved to New York City and worked as a nurse’s aide for 35 years before retiring. Her story was largely forgotten until the early 2000s, when the book “Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice” by Phillip Hoose was published, winning the National Book Award for young people’s literature in 2009[1][2][3][4][5].
Citations: [1] https://kids.britannica.com/kids/article/Claudette-Colvin/544733 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudette_Colvin [3] https://www.biography.com/activists/claudette-colvin [4] https://americanswhotellthetruth.org/portraits/claudette-colvin-2/ [5] https://rosaparksbiography.org/bio/claudette-colvin/