Nine months before Rosa’s fateful encounter in December 1955, fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin boarded a bus with her friends. There was only a half day of school that day, and Colvin sat near several of her classmates. Their excitement at being let out early was palpable. She sat in the section reserved for Black passengers, but before she knew it, the white spaces on the bus were filled. The bus repeated its familiar pattern, pulling away from the curb, accelerating, pulling toward the curb, stopping, doors opening.
At this stop, a white woman walked up the steps, scanning the front section, reserved for people like her. Seeing that it was full, she walked toward Claudette. “Move back,” the woman insisted, not just to Claudette but to every Black passenger in the row. To the white woman looking for a seat, occupying a space with other Black passengers meant that she viewed herself as equal to them. Which she most certainly did not.
Watching from the large mirrors near his seat, the white bus driver barked at the teenagers to give up their seats, and all of Claudette’s classmates obeyed. But she could not. Don’t do it, Claudette, she told herself. You’re not doing anything wrong by sitting in the seat you paid for. The woman huffed. “MOVE BACK,” she insisted. Claudette could feel the animosity radiating off the woman who loomed above her. Don’t you get up, she heard in her mind. The other Black passengers who moved back had made three empty seats for the white woman, but she still refused to sit down until Claudette was gone.
“I might have considered it if the woman were elderly,” Claudette said later. But she wasn’t.
“Get up!” the driver barked at her. I’m done doing that, she thought. But instead of arguing, Claudette sat silently, resolutely. Had she known the work of Lin-Manuel Miranda, she might have thought of the lyric, “History has its eyes on you,” but instead what she felt were the guiding forces of her community of ancestors, those women who came before her, who showed her what to do now.
“History kept me stuck to my seat,” she recalled. “I felt the hand of Harriet Tubman pushing down on one shoulder, and Sojourner Truth pushing down on the other.”[1] In this moment, getting up felt like giving up. And Claudette? She was done with that.
Claudette was a bright, inquisitive child who wore glasses and peppered the adults around her with questions. “Where did their dog go after it died?” “Why don’t stars fall out of the sky?” And, as Claudette recalled it, one of the most pressing questions of her childhood was, “How did white people come to dominate the South?”[2] Adults often told her that Black people were cursed.
Claudette was like, “Immediately no.” She just knew that it couldn’t be true. She told the minister of her church that she didn’t want to serve a God who cursed people.
Mary Anne and Q. P. Colvin had adopted Claudette and her sister, Delphine, from a relative. They moved the girls to a working-class neighborhood of Montgomery, and Claudette found herself hemmed in on all sides by the realities of segregation and racism. At clothing stores, she and her sister were never allowed to try on shoes, being forced instead to use paper outlines of their feet to approximate their size. White shop clerks refused to sell them the Easter bonnets that the girls wanted, instead trying to force them into styles that were less “uppity.” Why can’t I wear what I want? Claudette’s bright mind wondered. There just didn’t seem to be a reason that made sense.
As a girl, Claudette needed to have her vision examined, and when they arrived at the scheduled time, the receptionist took one look at the color of their skin and canceled the appointment. White people wouldn’t want to sit as equals in the singular waiting room. And in order to keep the system of white supremacy humming like a well-oiled machine, it was important that everyone participate in it. “You can come back at the end of the day,” the receptionist told them. “After the last white patient has left.”
Claudette was on the cusp of adolescence when her little sister died of polio. Delphine had been the one constant in her life, and Claudette didn’t know how she was supposed to continue just…going to school? Getting dressed every day? How? Claudette was gutted. The smallest provocation set her off. She wondered how she was supposed to start high school two weeks after her sister’s funeral, how she was supposed to look right and act right when nothing in her world was right.
But school did start, and it became Claudette’s refuge. Her English teacher, Geraldine Nesbitt, seemed to understand how important it was that her curriculum connect her students to the broader world. Rather than being forced to read dusty, musty novels of which there were too few anyway, Nesbitt used things like the Constitution and Magna Carta as texts. They read the Bible as literature. She brought in great speeches from history, like Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death!” written two hundred years prior in Virginia Randolph’s native Richmond, and asked students to analyze how it might apply to their lives.
The grief from her sister’s death didn’t grow lighter over time. But Claudette grew stronger, and each day, it became a little easier to carry it. Then the world changed again. One of her classmates pulled her aside in the hallway. “Did you hear about Jeremiah?” they asked. Jeremiah Reeves, a senior at her school, had been arrested. Reeves was a drummer—a popular, good-looking boy who had a job delivering groceries. He had been caught in a romantic embrace with a white woman on his route, part of an ongoing affair the two had been having. When they were found together, the white woman immediately declared that he had raped her.
Rage spilled out of the officers that day as they hauled Reeves to jail and strapped him into the electric chair. “We know what you did. Confess,” they spat, as they stood poised, ready to switch on the chair.[3]
Reeves was distraught, terrified that the police would turn the electric chair on unless he told them what they wanted to hear. Even though he knew the relationship was consensual, after a night of torture spent strapped into the electric chair, he admitted to the rape. The police then forced him to admit to every other rape that had been reported that entire summer before they unhooked him from the confines of the instrument of death. Reeves felt his choices in that moment were to confess and try to sort it out later, or to be immediately electrocuted. Reeves chose the former. He was only sixteen.
Jeremiah Reeves quickly recanted his confession. Students at Booker T. Washington High were shocked and horrified. Whispers of the brutality of his torture at the hands of the police spread like wildfire. At his trial, an all-white jury sentenced him to death within thirty minutes, despite death not typically being a sentence for rape. The United States Supreme Court granted him a new trial, because they found it was wrong that the jury had not been allowed to hear evidence of his torture in jail.
Another all-white jury was convened for a new trial. Reeves was convicted again in under an hour, and the state of Alabama imprisoned him until he was old enough to kill. Reeves walked to the electric chair, the same one that had been used to extract his confession under duress, when he was twenty-two years old.[4]
Rage bubbled in Claudette’s chest. Nothing about this was okay, and she was being asked to pretend that it was.
A few days after Reeves’s execution, on Easter Sunday in 1958, Martin Luther King led a group of mourners in prayer on the grounds of the Alabama state capitol. “Truth may be crucified and justice buried,” he thundered. “But one day they will rise again. We must live and face death if necessary with that hope.”[5]
Claudette recalled, “My mother and grandmother told me never to go anywhere with a white man no matter what. I grew up hearing horror story after horror story about Black girls who were raped by white men, and how they never got justice either. When a white man raped a Black girl—something that happened all the time—it was just his word against hers, and no one would ever believe her. The white man always got off…. That changed me. That put a lot of anger in me. I stayed angry about Jeremiah Reeves for a long time.”[6]
Overwhelmed by the injustice of the Jim Crow South, Claudette began to imagine a life’s mission for herself, one modeled after her personal hero, Harriet Tubman. To Claudette, Tubman was the epitome of courage—a pistol-wearing woman who never lost a passenger on the Underground Railroad. Claudette wasn’t going to become like other members of the Black middle-class in the South, who were overwhelmingly teachers and preachers. She was going to become a lawyer. She was going to do something.
“I was tired of adults complaining about how badly they were treated and not doing anything about it. I’d had enough of just feeling angry about Jeremiah Reeves. I was tired of hoping for justice. When my moment came, I was ready,” she said years later.[7]
On that early spring day, streets crowded with oblivious children freed from the confines of school, the bus driver yelled at Claudette. “Why are you still sitting here? You’ve got to get up!” I’m done playing this game, Claudette thought. I’m not going to pretend it’s okay anymore. When she sat, unmoving, the bus driver flagged down an officer, who boarded the bus.
“You have to get up now,” the officer insisted. No, Claudette thought. No, I do not.
The students at the back of the bus buzzed with energy as this scene unfolded, while the white passengers in the front craned their necks to see the person who was refusing to participate in the carefully crafted caste system. “Get her off the bus,” one person in the front might have called. “I have an appointment to get to.”
“Get up and move,” the officer repeated. “You have to get up.”
One of Claudette’s classmates, a girl named Margaret, yelled from the back of the bus, “She ain’t got to do nothing but stay Black and die!”
Over and over, the whites in authority repeated their demands that Claudette relinquish what she had paid for. But she would not budge. She sat calmly, tears now rolling down her cheeks, repeating, “I have constitutional rights. It’s my constitutional right to sit here as much as that lady. I paid my fare; it’s my constitutional right.”[8] She was doing it for Harriet and Sojourner, for Delphine and Jeremiah. She was doing it for herself.
When the transportation officer realized she wasn’t going anywhere, he informed the bus driver that he’d done all he could, but he didn’t have arrest power. So the bus driver moved the bus a few blocks up the street and flagged down some Montgomery police officers.
One officer looked at Claudette and said, “I’ve had trouble with that thing before.”[9]
Thing? Claudette thought. THING?
“Are you going to get up?” one of them barked at Claudette.
“No, sir. It’s my constitutional right to sit here,” Claudette said. The officers grabbed her arms and yanked, and Claudette’s books went flying. She went limp as a baby, because she knew what would happen if she tried to fight back. One of the officers kicked her repeatedly as they dragged her up the aisle and out of the bus.
Claudette swallowed her fury. She wanted to kick and scream at those officers; she wanted them to listen, just listen for one second, to understand what they were doing to her. To everyone. To Montgomery. To America. Instead, she bore their assault, knowing that anything she did would be blown out of proportion and used against her. “It just killed me to leave that bus. I hated to give that white woman my seat when so many Black people were standing. I was crying hard,” she remembered.[10]
Claudette was handcuffed and put in the back of a police car. She pressed her knees tightly together. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, she thought. I will fear no evil. One of the officers wedged himself in the back seat next to her, speaking about her to the driver as though she weren’t sitting right there. Psalm 23, which she had memorized in Sunday school, now filled her mind. Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
“N****r b***h!” The officer’s voice dripped with contempt. “What do you think her bra size is?”[11]
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies, Claudette hoped.
They drove her, not to the juvenile facility where they would normally take a fifteen-year-old, but to the adult jail, where more officers called her names no one should ever call a child. She was thrown into a cell, and the lock clanged shut with a sickening thud.
In the middle of the cell, Claudette dropped to her knees and sobbed, praying the prayer of the terrified and desperate.
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