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Black Women Radicals

5 Sep, 10 tweets, 2 min read

Happy 82nd Birthday, Claudette Colvin (Sept. 5, 1939)!🎈Colvin is a pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement & a retired nurse aide.

On March 2, 1955, she was arrested at the age of 15 in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her seat to a white woman on a segregated bus.

This occurred nine months before the more widely known incident in which Rosa Parks, secretary of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), helped spark the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott.

“On March 2, 1955, after taking the bus home from high school, the bus driver ordered Colvin to get up & she refused, saying she'd paid her fare & it was her constitutional right. Two police officers put her in handcuffs & arrested her. Her school books went flying off her lap.”

“All I remember is that I was not going to walk off the bus voluntarily," Colvin says.

“It was Negro history month, & at Colvin’s segregated school they had been studying Black leaders like Harriet Tubman, the formerly enslaved Africa s who led more than 70 enslaved Africans to freedom through the network of safe houses known as the Underground Railroad…”

“…They were also studying about Sojourner Truth, a former enslaved African who became an abolitionist and women's rights activist.”

“The class had also been talking about the injustices they were experiencing daily under the Jim Crow segregation laws, like not being able to eat at a lunch counter.”

"We couldn't try on clothes. You had to take a brown paper bag and draw a diagram of your foot ... and take it to the store. Can you imagine all of that in my mind?”
— Claudette Colvin

“ My head was just too full of black history, you know, the oppression that we went through. It 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

Source: npr.org/2009/03/15/101…

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