Claudette Colvin

(noun)

(Born September 5, 1939) A pioneer of the African-American civil rights movement, and the first person to resist bus segregation in Montgomery, Alabama, preceding the better known Rosa Parks incident by nine months.

Related Terms

Examples of Claudette Colvin in the following topics:

  • Montgomery and Protests

    • Black activists had begun to build a case to challenge state bus segregation laws around the arrest of a 15-year-old girl, Claudette Colvin, a student at Booker T.
    • At the time, Colvin was an active member in the NAACP Youth Council, a group to which Rosa Parks served as adviser.
    • The decision to choose Parks and not Colvin as the symbol of the boycott was political.
    • It is the second time since the Claudette Colvin case that a Negro woman has been arrested for the same thing.
    • Browder, Susie McDonald, Mary Louise Smith and Jeanette Reese, Colvin was one of the five plaintiffs in the case.