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Before Rosa Parks, Claudette Colvin refused to give way to white people on a bus in the segregationist South of the United States. For that, she had been arrested. This Tuesday, Claudette Colvin, now aged 82, made an official request that her criminal record be purged of any mention of this case.
In March 1955, the police forcibly dismounted Claudette Colvin, fifteen, from a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in the segregationist south while she was coming home from school: they had just arrested the young African-American for refusing to give up his place to a white woman.
They take him to jail. ” When I heard the sound of the key in the lock, I started to cry, and I began to recite the 23rd Psalm “the Lord is my shepherd” “, will tell much later Claudette Colvin, condemned at the time for violating the policy of segregation of the city, and for having attacked a police officer.
An assault which the old lady says she has no memory of. Only that she resisted by shouting “ it’s my constitutional right Because she had just had a class on the Constitution at school.
Rosa Parks’ image more “acceptable” to white America
Nine months later Rosa Parks will also refuse to give up its place. Claudette Colvin believes that if she was put forward more in the civil rights movement, it is because she was more “acceptable” to the white community because she is older, married, and lighter in skin.
At the time, Claudette Colvin was released on parole. She was sentenced in a juvenile court, then jailed, before a sum was raised by figures of the local black community, including Rosa Parks, to pay her bail.
Today, she explains that she wants to have her name washed for her grandchildren, her great-grandchildren and for black children, to show them that things can improve, and that progress is possible.
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