Claudette Colvin

by Phillip Hoose

  The officer ordered her to get up. Again Claudette refused. He returned to the driver and explained that as a transit policeman he lacked the authority to make an arrest. The doors closed behind him as he stepped down into the street and the bus pulled away again. One block north, at the intersection of Bibb and Commerce streets, a squad car was waiting. This time, when the Highland Gardens bus door opened, two Montgomery city policemen climbed aboard. Passengers held their breath.

  CLAUDETTE: One of them said to the driver in a very angry tone, “Who is it?” The motorman pointed at me. I heard him say, “That’s nothing new . . . I’ve had trouble with that ‘thing’ before.” He called me a “thing.” They came to me and stood over me and one said, “Aren’t you going to get up?” I said, “No, sir.” He shouted “Get up” again. I started crying, but I felt even more defiant. I kept saying over and over, in my high-pitched voice, “It’s my constitutional right to sit here as much as that lady. I paid my fare, it’s my constitutional right!” I knew I was talking back to a white policeman, but I had had enough.

  The X on this diagram indicates where Claudette was sitting on the Highland Gardens bus when she was arrested

  One cop grabbed one of my hands and his partner grabbed the other and they pulled me straight up out of my seat. My books went flying everywhere. I went limp as a baby—I was too smart to fight back. They started dragging me backwards off the bus. One of them kicked me. I might have scratched one of them because I had long nails, but I sure didn’t fight back. I kept screaming over and over, “It’s my constitutional right!” I wasn’t shouting anything profane—I never swore, not then, not ever. I was shouting out my rights.

  It just killed me to leave the bus. I hated to give that white woman my seat when so many black people were standing. I was crying hard. The cops put me in the back of a police car and shut the door. They stood outside and talked to each other for a minute, and then one came back and told me to stick my hands out the open window. He handcuffed me and then pulled the door open and jumped in the backseat with me. I put my knees together and crossed my hands over my lap and started praying.

  All ride long they swore at me and ridiculed me. They took turns trying to guess my bra size. They called me “nigger bitch” and cracked jokes about parts of my body. I recited the Lord’s Prayer and the Twenty-third Psalm over and over in my head, trying to push back the fear. I assumed they were taking me to juvenile court because I was only fifteen. I was thinking, Now I’m gonna be picking cotton, since that’s how they punished juveniles—they put you in a school out in the country where they made you do field work during the day.

  But we were going in the wrong direction. They kept telling me I was going to Atmore, the women’s penitentiary. Instead, we pulled up to the police station and they led me inside. More cops looked up when we came in and started calling me “Thing” and “Whore.” They booked me and took my fingerprints.

  Then they put me back in the car and drove me to the city jail—the adult jail. Someone led me straight to a cell without giving me any chance to make a phone call. He opened the door and told me to get inside. He shut it hard behind me and turned the key. The lock fell into place with a heavy sound. It was the worst sound I ever heard. It sounded final. It said I was trapped.

  The police report that was filed when Claudette was arrested on March 2, 1955, and her fingerprint record

  When he went away, I looked around me: three bare walls, a toilet, and a cot. Then I fell down on my knees in the middle of the cell and started crying again. I didn’t know if anyone knew where I was or what had happened to me. I had no idea how long I would be there. I cried and I put my hands together and prayed like I had never prayed before.

  MEANWHILE, schoolmates who had been on the bus had run home and telephoned Claudette’s mother at the house where she worked as a maid. Girls went over and took care of the lady’s three small children so that Claudette’s mother could leave. Mary Ann Colvin called Claudette’s pastor, the Reverend H. H. Johnson. He had a car, and together they sped to the police station.

  CLAUDETTE: When they led Mom back, there I was in a cell. I was cryin’ hard, and then Mom got upset, too. When she saw me, she didn’t bawl me out, she just asked, “Are you all right, Claudette?”

  Reverend Johnson bailed me out and we drove home. By the time we got to King Hill, word had spread everywhere. All our neighbors came around, and they were just squeezing me to death. I felt happy and proud. I had been talking about getting our rights ever since Jeremiah Reeves was arrested, and now they knew I was serious. Velma, Q.P. and Mary Ann’s daughter, who was living with us at the time, kept saying it was my little squeaky voice that had saved me from getting beat up or raped by the cops.

  But I was afraid that night, too. I had stood up to a white bus driver and two white cops. I had challenged the bus law. There had been lynchings and cross burnings for that kind of thing. Wetumpka Highway that led out of Montgomery ran right past our house. It would have been easy for the Klan to come up the hill in the night. Dad sat up all night long with his shotgun. We all stayed up. The neighbors facing the highway kept watch. Probably nobody on King Hill slept that night.

  But worried or not, I felt proud. I had stood up for our rights. I had done something a lot of adults hadn’t done. On the ride home from jail, coming over the viaduct, Reverend Johnson said something to me I’ll never forget. He was an adult who everyone respected and his opinion meant a lot to me. “Claudette,” he said, “I’m so proud of you. Everyone prays for freedom. We’ve all been praying and praying. But you’re different—you want your answer the next morning. And I think you just brought the revolution to Montgomery.”

  This school photo of Claudette was probably taken in 1953, when she was thirteen

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “THERE’S THE GIRL WHO GOT ARRESTED”

  The world is a severe schoolmaster.

  —Phillis Wheatley, the first published African-American poet (1753?–1784)

  THE NEWS that a schoolgirl had been arrested for refusing to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger flashed through Montgomery’s black community and traveled far beyond. One man from Sacramento, California, wrote to Claudette:

  The wonderful thing which you have just done makes me feel like a craven coward. How encouraging it would be if more adults had your courage, self-respect and integrity.

  In Montgomery, students stopped one another at bus corners and by their lockers, saying things like “Have you ever heard of Claudette Colvin?” “Well, do you know anyone who knows her?” “Where’s she go to school?”

  Jo Ann Robinson, a professor of English at Alabama State College at the time, later wrote, “[With]in a few hours, every Negro youngster on the streets discussed Colvin’s arrest. Telephones rang. Clubs called special meetings and discussed the event with some degree of alarm. Mothers expressed concern about permitting their children on the buses.”

  Jo Ann Robinson had a personal reason to admire anyone who took on the bus system. In 1949, just after she had moved to Montgomery, Robinson had boarded a bus for the airport. It was Christmas break, and she was flying off to Cleveland to visit relatives. After dropping a dime in the fare box, she absentmindedly sat down in one of the ten front seats reserved for whites. Still new to town, she hadn’t thought to walk to the back. Besides, there were only two other passengers on the entire bus. Lost in holiday thoughts, she was startled by the realization that someone’s face was inches from hers. It was the bus driver, shouting, “Get up from there! Get up from there!” His hand was drawn back as if to strike her. She snatched up her packages and stumbled out the front door, nearly sprawling in the mud as the bus pulled away. “I felt like a dog,” she later wrote.

  He had picked the wrong person to bully. Smart, energetic, and extremely well-connected, Jo Ann Robinson was an active member of the Women’s Political Council, a large and influential civic group of professional black women in Montgomery. Some WPC members were Alabama Stat
e College professors; others, including Claudette’s teacher, Geraldine Nesbitt, were ASC graduates who had become teachers. Shortly after Robinson took over as president of the WPC in 1950, she led a successful campaign to make white merchants include the titles “Mr.,” “Mrs.,” and “Miss” on bills and announcements sent to black customers. It was an important measure of respect.

  Jo Ann Robinson, professor of English at Alabama State College and leader of Montgomery’s influential Women’s Political Council

  Though Robinson owned her own car and rarely rode the city bus, the memory of the driver’s bullying behavior and how humiliated she had felt wouldn’t go away. She started interviewing black residents who had been mistreated on the city buses and writing down their stories. She soon possessed a thick file of nightmare accounts.

  Robinson longed to do something about the buses, but she didn’t know quite what. In March 1954, she organized a face-to-face meeting of black leaders, city officials, and bus company representatives to complain about the way blacks were treated on the buses and to propose reforms. The meeting was pleasant enough but unproductive.

  She kept at it. Two months later she wrote a letter to Montgomery’s mayor, W. A. “Tacky” Gayle, on behalf of the Women’s Political Council. Robinson pressed for three changes to the bus rules:

  1. A new seating plan that would let blacks sit from back to front and whites from front to back until the bus filled up, as was the practice in several other Southern cities.

  2. An end to making blacks pay their fares at the front of the bus but then get off and reenter through the rear door to find a seat at the back.

  3. A requirement that drivers stop at every corner in black neighborhoods just as they did in white neighborhoods.

  Robinson’s diplomatic letter contained one fragment of steel. In the third to last paragraph she wrote that, if things did not get better, “there has been talk from twenty-five or more local organizations of planning a city-wide boycott of busses.”

  The idea of a bus boycott had been gaining momentum throughout the black community for months. Its power was obvious: three-quarters of Montgomery’s bus passengers were black. If everyone quit riding, they could starve the City Lines bus company into reason. Still, the letter stopped short of calling for an end to segregated seating. As Robinson later wrote, “In Montgomery in 1955 no one was brazen enough to announce publicly that black people might boycott City buses for the specific purpose of integrating those buses. Just to say that minorities wanted ‘better seating arrangements’ was bad enough.”

  BUS BOYCOTTS

  The idea of boycotting—or staying off—public vehicles until reforms were made was nothing new, but it had never succeeded for long on a large scale. Between 1900 and 1906, Montgomery was one of twenty-five Southern cities to protest segregated streetcars through boycotts. More recently, in June 1953, the black community of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, had boycotted the city’s buses for several days to protest segregated seating. Though they weren’t able to evict Jim Crow, the Baton Rouge protesters developed a free-ride transportation system and left a detailed blueprint for other bus protesters to follow.

  Robinson’s letter led only to more polite meetings. The whites offered coffee, nodded, and smiled, but refused to budge an inch when it came to Jim Crow. Still, Claudette Colvin’s arrest had stripped the veneer of politeness from the talks. She had been wrenched from her seat and dragged off a bus by police in front of shocked witnesses. People were angry.

  Claudette’s arrest made her the center of attention wherever she went. On the following Sunday, Reverend Johnson led the congregation in prayer for the girl among them who had been arrested for bravely standing up to the bus driver and the police and challenging the whole ugly system. The next day classmates swarmed around her when she pulled up to Booker T. Washington High School in her cousin’s car. They followed her into homeroom and asked to hear her story. Students pointed at her in the halls, whispering, “There’s the girl who got arrested.”

  Opinion at Booker T. Washington was sharply divided between those who admired Claudette’s courage and those who thought she got what she deserved for making things harder for everyone. Some said it was about time someone stood up. Others told her that if she didn’t like the way things were in the South, she should go up North. Still others couldn’t make up their minds: no one they knew had ever done anything like this before.

  “A few of the teachers like Miss Nesbitt embraced me,” Claudette recalls. “They kept saying, ‘You were so brave.’ But other teachers seemed uncomfortable. Some parents seemed uncomfortable, too. I think they knew they should have done what I did long before. They were embarrassed that it took a teenager to do it.”

  Facing serious criminal charges, and with her court hearing only two weeks away, Claudette feared she might be sent to a reform school as a juvenile delinquent. She had a lot to lose: she was a good student with dreams of college and a career. She was not about to plead guilty to anything, but she didn’t know what to do or whom to turn to. Somehow, she had to find a lawyer, and figure out how to pay for one. She had no time to lose.

  CLAUDETTE: Everybody got busy. We started working family connections, trying to find someone to help me. My great-aunt’s husband, C. J. McNear, told my parents to get in touch with Mr. E. D. Nixon. C.J. thought my case might be a good civil rights case. Mr. Nixon called the shots in the black community of Montgomery. He knew everybody. So Mom called him. And he agreed to help us.

  NIXON MOVED SWIFTLY on two fronts. He called Fred Gray, one of Montgomery’s two black lawyers, and convinced him to represent Claudette in court. Then he organized a committee of black leaders to meet downtown with the police commissioner. Among those selected was the new pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, twenty-six-year-old Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The attempt to obtain justice for Claudette Colvin marked Dr. King’s political debut.

  E. D. NIXON

  When black people had serious problems in Montgomery, they went to E. D. Nixon. Employed as a railroad sleeping car porter, Nixon worked tirelessly throughout his life to advance the rights of black people. A tall, rugged man with a commanding voice and an earthy sense of humor, Nixon seemed to know everyone: jailers, white policemen, judges, newspaper reporters, lawyers, and government officials. An early president of the Montgomery Chapter of the NAACP, Nixon was often able to fix common people’s problems through plain talk and informal dealing before they hardened into legal cases.

  A conference of black leaders, the bus company’s manager, and the police commissioner seemed to break the tension. “Both men were quite pleasant, and expressed deep concern over what had happened [to Claudette],” Dr. King later wrote. The bus company conceded that, according to the driver, Claudette had been sitting behind the ten white seats in front and there had been no seats available when the driver ordered her to move. That seemed to be an admission that she hadn’t broken the law. The police commissioner agreed the seating rules were confusing and promised that the city’s attorney would soon clarify them in writing. The one thing they didn’t do was drop the charges against Claudette. The trial would go on.

  Still, Dr. King walked out of the meeting feeling “hopeful,” and Jo Ann Robinson also felt her spirits lifting as she stepped outside. “[We] were given to understand . . . that . . . Claudette would be given every chance to clear her name,” she later wrote. “It was not [to be] a trial to determine guilt or innocence, but an effort to find out the truth, and if the girl were found innocent, her record would be clear . . . Those present left the conference feeling . . . that everything would work out fairly for everyone.”

  Plainspoken E. D. Nixon, longtime leader of the Montgomery NAACP

  In the days before Claudette’s trial, E. D. Nixon also called Rosa Parks, a soft-spoken, forty-two-year-old professional seamstress who had for many years been secretary of the Montgomery NAACP. Mrs. Parks was also the head of the NAACP’s youth group in Montgomery. Nixon and Mrs. Parks had lo
ng tried to get more young blacks involved in the struggle for civil rights, but the Sunday afternoon NAACP youth meetings were, for the most part, poorly attended. However, both saw promise in the dramatic arrest, jailing, and trial of a fifteen-year-old bus protester. It might spark interest if the girl was willing to tell her story. Nixon urged Mrs. Parks to get Claudette Colvin involved with the NAACP.

  CLAUDETTE: The first time I ever met Rosa Parks was one Sunday afternoon when she walked into a church before an NAACP youth meeting. There were only a few students around. This small, fair-skinned woman with long, straight hair came up to me, and looked me up and down. She said, “You’re Claudette Colvin? Oh my God, I was lookin’ for some big old burly overgrown teenager who sassed white people out . . . But no, they pulled a little girl off the bus.” I said, “They pulled me off because I refused to walk off.”

  Rosa had already asked the teachers at my school about me and found out I was a good student. She got even more interested when she realized she knew my mother—my biological mom—from Pine Level. Rosa had lived there, too, when she was younger. Mom was close friends with Rosa’s brother, Sylvester, before she left Pine Level for Birmingham.

  Rosa Parks worked as a department store seamstress and served for many years as the secretary of Montgomery’s branch of the NAACP. Pleasant and soft-spoken, she was a steely foe of racial segregation

  We did all sorts of things to raise money for my lawyer. Rosa’s mother baked and sold cookies. I was always eating them, and Rosa would come up and say, “Claudette, don’t eat all the cookies or we won’t have any to sell.” Rosa put me up for Miss NAACP, Montgomery Chapter. I finished second, but it didn’t matter; all the money from the contest went to pay my lawyer anyway.