Before Rosa Parks: Claudette Colvin Was 15, Pregnant, and Erased From History

Nine months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus, a fifteen-year-old girl named Claudette Colvin did the same thing on the same bus system in the same city under the same Jim Crow laws, and she was arrested and dragged off the bus by two police officers while she cried out that her constitutional rights were being violated, and she was booked and fingerprinted and charged with violating the segregation law and with assaulting an officer (she had not assaulted anyone; she had merely refused to move), and the leaders of the Montgomery civil rights community looked at her case and decided, after careful deliberation, that she was not the right person to build a movement around. She was too young. She was too dark-skinned. She was too poor. She came from the wrong side of town. And then, several months later, she became pregnant — unmarried and pregnant, at sixteen — and that, for the respectable leadership of the Montgomery NAACP, was the end of the discussion. They needed a Rosa Parks: composed, dignified, middle-class, light-skinned, employed as a secretary at the NAACP itself, a woman whose image could withstand the scrutiny of white America without confirming any of its stereotypes. Claudette Colvin was not that woman. So they waited for one who was.

This is the story of what we lose when we sanitize history, when we choose our heroes based on their palatability rather than their courage, when we allow respectability politics to determine not only who leads the movement but who gets remembered by it. It is a story about colorism, about class, about the internal hierarchies that the Black community has never fully confronted, and about a girl who had more courage at fifteen than most people accumulate in a lifetime, and who was repaid for that courage with seventy years of invisibility.

March 2, 1955

The date is important because it precedes December 1, 1955 — the date of Rosa Parks’s arrest — by exactly nine months. On March 2, 1955, Claudette Colvin boarded a Capital Heights bus in Montgomery, Alabama, after school. She was a sophomore at Booker T. Washington High School. She sat in a seat in the middle section of the bus — the section that was ostensibly available to Black passengers but could be claimed by white passengers when the white section filled up. When the bus became crowded and the driver ordered the Black passengers in her row to give up their seats for a white woman, the other passengers complied. Colvin did not.

She later said that she felt as if Harriet Tubman’s hands were pushing her down into the seat. She later said that she felt the spirits of Sojourner Truth and the history she had been studying in school — her class had recently been learning about Black history, about the injustices of segregation, about the constitutional amendments that were supposed to protect Black citizens — holding her in place. She was not performing a calculated act of civil disobedience. She was a fifteen-year-old girl who had absorbed enough knowledge of her own history to know, in her bones, that what was being asked of her was wrong, and who had enough fire in her to refuse.

The driver called the police. Two officers boarded the bus, grabbed Colvin by the wrists, and dragged her off. She kicked and screamed and cried. She was handcuffed, taken to an adult jail (not a juvenile facility), and charged with violating the city’s segregation ordinance, disturbing the peace, and assaulting a police officer. Her arrest record would follow her for the rest of her life.

“I felt like Sojourner Truth was on one side pushing me down, and Harriet Tubman was on the other side of me pushing me down. I couldn’t get up.”
— Claudette Colvin

The Calculus of Respectability

The news of Colvin’s arrest electrified Montgomery’s Black community. Here, at last, was the test case that civil rights leaders had been looking for — a clear violation of a Black citizen’s constitutional rights on a public conveyance, exactly the kind of case that could be used to challenge the constitutionality of bus segregation in federal court. The Women’s Political Council, led by Jo Ann Robinson, was already planning a bus boycott and needed a galvanizing incident. E.D. Nixon, the president of the Montgomery NAACP and a powerful figure in the community, initially wanted to use Colvin’s case as the catalyst.

Then the leadership took a closer look at Claudette Colvin, and what they saw made them hesitate. She was fifteen years old — a minor, which presented legal complications but also strategic ones. She was dark-skinned, in a community and a movement that, like the broader American society it was embedded in, had internalized a hierarchy of skin color in which lighter skin was associated with refinement and darker skin with coarseness. She was from King Hill, one of Montgomery’s poorer Black neighborhoods. She was emotional — she had cried and screamed during her arrest, which the leadership worried would be used by segregationists to portray her as unstable or unruly. She was, in every way that the respectability calculus measured such things, imperfect.

And then she became pregnant. Unmarried and pregnant, at sixteen, by a man whose identity she has never publicly disclosed. In the moral framework of the 1950s Black church — which was the institutional backbone of the civil rights movement — an unmarried pregnant teenager was not someone you put on a stage. She was someone you prayed for, quietly, and moved past. The idea of building a national movement around an unwed Black teenage mother was, for the leadership, unthinkable. Not because they doubted her courage. Not because they questioned the injustice of her arrest. But because they understood, with a strategic realism that is difficult to argue with and impossible to admire, that white America would not rally behind a pregnant Black teenager, and that the movement’s enemies would use her circumstances to discredit the cause.

So they waited. They waited nine months, until December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks — forty-two years old, dignified, composed, employed as a secretary at the NAACP, trained in nonviolent resistance at the Highlander Folk School, light-skinned, middle-class, childless — refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus and was arrested. Parks was, by every measure of respectability that the movement’s leadership valued, the perfect plaintiff. She was the woman that white moderates could sympathize with, that the national media could photograph without provoking the reflexive contempt that America reserved for poor, dark-skinned, sexually active Black girls. She was, in the language of the movement, “above reproach.”

Claudette Colvin was not above reproach. She was a human being, flawed and brave and fifteen years old, and she did what Rosa Parks did nine months before Rosa Parks did it, and she has spent the rest of her life watching someone else receive the credit.

The Case That Actually Desegregated the Buses

Here is the historical irony that should be taught in every American history class and is taught in almost none: it was not the Montgomery Bus Boycott that legally desegregated Montgomery’s buses. The boycott was an economic action — it cost the bus company money and applied political pressure, but it did not produce a legal ruling. The legal ruling came from Browder v. Gayle, a federal lawsuit filed in February 1956 that challenged the constitutionality of bus segregation in Montgomery. And one of the four plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle was Claudette Colvin.

The case was argued before a three-judge federal panel. The plaintiffs — Colvin, Aurelia Browder, Mary Louise Smith, and Susie McDonald — testified about their experiences of being humiliated and mistreated on Montgomery’s buses. Colvin, then sixteen, was the star witness. She was clear, she was specific, she was compelling. On June 5, 1956, the panel ruled 2-1 that bus segregation in Montgomery was unconstitutional, citing the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. The city appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which affirmed the ruling on November 13, 1956.

It was Browder v. Gayle, not the bus boycott, that created the legal precedent. It was Claudette Colvin’s testimony, not Rosa Parks’s arrest, that provided the factual foundation for the ruling. And yet, when the history is told — in textbooks, in documentaries, in the popular imagination — it is the boycott that desegregated the buses, it is Rosa Parks who is the hero, and Claudette Colvin is, at best, a footnote.

What Colorism Costs

The decision to pass over Claudette Colvin in favor of Rosa Parks was strategic, and it may have been correct as a matter of strategy. The movement needed white sympathy, needed media coverage, needed the support of moderate Americans who would have recoiled from a pregnant Black teenager but who could see themselves in the composed, dignified figure of Rosa Parks. The leaders who made this calculation were not villains. They were strategists operating under conditions of extreme oppression, making the best choices they could with the tools available to them.

But the calculation itself reveals something that the civil rights movement has never fully reckoned with: the degree to which the internal hierarchies of the Black community — hierarchies of skin color, class, education, respectability — have shaped not only who leads the movement but who is remembered by it. Colorism is not an invention of white supremacy imposed upon Black people from outside. It is a toxin that white supremacy planted within Black communities, where it took root and grew into a set of preferences, biases, and value judgments that operate with devastating efficiency precisely because they are rarely acknowledged.

The preference for lighter skin, which the NAACP’s leadership applied in their evaluation of Colvin, has deep roots in the structure of slavery itself. Lighter-skinned enslaved people — often the children of the slaveholder — were more likely to be assigned to household work rather than field work, more likely to be taught to read, more likely to be manumitted. After emancipation, lighter-skinned Black Americans had greater access to education, professional opportunities, and social capital. The “paper bag test” — in which churches, fraternities, social clubs, and even historically Black colleges admitted only individuals whose skin was lighter than a brown paper bag — was practiced openly into the twentieth century and informally for much longer.

“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”
— Steve Biko

Claudette Colvin was dark-skinned, poor, and pregnant. Rosa Parks was light-skinned, middle-class, and respectable. The movement chose Parks. The movement was effective. And a fifteen-year-old girl who had the courage to resist injustice nine months before the approved hero did so was consigned to obscurity for the better part of a century. Both of these things are true. They are uncomfortable together. That discomfort is the point.

The Life That Followed

After the case, after the legal victory that bore another woman’s name, Claudette Colvin left Montgomery. She moved to New York City, where she worked as a nurse’s aide in a nursing home in the Bronx for thirty-five years. She raised her sons. She lived quietly. She watched as Rosa Parks became the “mother of the civil rights movement,” as Parks received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, as Parks lay in honor in the Capitol Rotunda after her death in 2005 — the first woman and second non-government official to receive that honor.

Colvin did not begrudge Parks the recognition. In interviews, she has been remarkably free of bitterness, speaking of Parks with respect and acknowledging the strategic logic of the NAACP’s decision. But she has also been clear about the cost of erasure — not to herself, though the cost to her was immense, but to history, to the movement, and to the understanding that future generations would have of how change actually happens.

Because the sanitized version of the Montgomery story — the version in which a single, dignified, middle-class woman quietly refuses to move and a movement springs into being — is a lie. Not in its facts, but in its omissions. The reality is messier, more complicated, more human. The reality includes a fifteen-year-old girl who acted on impulse and conviction, who was rejected because she did not fit the image the movement wanted to project, who provided the legal testimony that actually won the case, and who then disappeared from the story entirely. The reality includes the strategic calculations of movement leadership that were simultaneously brilliant and cruel. The reality includes colorism, classism, respectability politics, and the particular cruelty that communities under siege inflict upon their own most vulnerable members in the name of survival.

What We Lose When We Sanitize History

In 2021, at the age of eighty-two, Claudette Colvin petitioned to have her juvenile arrest record expunged. The petition was granted. Sixty-six years after she was dragged off a bus for refusing to accept her own dehumanization, the state of Alabama acknowledged that she should not have been arrested. It was a gesture — belated, insufficient, but real — and Colvin received it with the same quiet grace that had characterized her entire life in the shadows of a movement she helped create.

The question her story poses to us is not whether the NAACP was right to choose Rosa Parks. The question is what we lose when we allow respectability to determine who gets remembered, who gets honored, who gets taught to the next generation as an example of courage. We lose the truth. We lose the complexity. We lose the understanding that courage does not come in a single form — that it can look like a composed, dignified woman in her forties quietly refusing to move, and it can also look like a terrified, screaming, fifteen-year-old girl being dragged off a bus by police officers twice her size. We lose the understanding that the movement was not a single, seamless narrative of dignified resistance but a messy, contested, internally divided struggle in which the people who bore the greatest risks often received the least recognition.

And we lose something else, something that matters deeply to the Black community’s ongoing reckoning with itself: we lose the opportunity to confront, honestly and without flinching, the ways in which colorism, classism, and respectability politics have shaped — and continue to shape — who is valued within our own community. Claudette Colvin was not passed over by white America. She was passed over by Black leadership, by her own community’s institutions, by the people who were supposed to be fighting for her rights. That is a different kind of injustice, and it requires a different kind of reckoning — one that looks inward rather than outward, one that asks not what white supremacy has done to us but what we have done to each other in its shadow.

Claudette Colvin is alive as of this writing. She is in her eighties, living in New York. She has never received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. No building bears her name. No federal holiday honors her. She is the woman who did what Rosa Parks did, nine months earlier, at fifteen years old, and who was told by her own community that she was not good enough to be a hero. Every history class that teaches Rosa Parks without teaching Claudette Colvin is perpetuating the very respectability politics that erased her. Every retelling that begins on December 1, 1955, rather than March 2, 1955, is choosing comfort over truth. And every community that refuses to confront its own internal hierarchies — of color, of class, of propriety — is ensuring that the next Claudette Colvin will be erased, too.