US civil rights pioneer Claudette Colvin, arrested at age 15 for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white woman in Montgomery, Alabama, nine months before Rosa Parks’s similar but more famous act of defiance, died on Tuesday at age 86.
Although she remained a largely unsung figure in the civil rights movement for decades, Colvin’s 1955 act of rebellion inspired Parks and others and helped form the basis for the federal lawsuit that outlawed racial segregation in US public transportation.
Her death, under hospice care in Texas, was confirmed by Ashley Roseboro, a spokesperson for her family and the Claudette Colvin Foundation.
In one of the first publicized acts of civil disobedience against Montgomery’s Jim Crow rules governing city bus seating by race, Colvin refused to relinquish her seat for a white woman, as ordered by the driver, and stayed put until she was dragged off the bus by police.
According to accounts of her testimony in court, Colvin recalled she had been studying anti-slavery abolitionist heroes in school, and felt that she had Harriet Tubman on one shoulder, Sojourner Truth on the other, and “history had me glued to the seat.”
But Parks, an older seamstress who was secretary of the local NAACP chapter, was seen as a more dignified, sympathetic figure to rally behind as civil rights leaders organized what became the year-long bus boycott that thrust the Rev Martin Luther King Jr to the national stage.
In the lead-up to the boycott, which started in December 1955, issues of social class and even “colorism” – Colvin came from a poorer background and Parks was lighter-skinned – led civil rights leaders to shy away from the teenager as a standard bearer for the movement, according to Roseboro.
About a year after her arrest, she also became pregnant by a married man from an encounter that she later described as statutory rape.
Nevertheless, Colvin went on to become one of several plaintiffs and a principal witness in the Browder v Gayle lawsuit challenging the city’s Jim Crow bus policies. The case eventually led to the landmark 1956 US supreme court decision banning segregation in public transit as unconstitutional.
Colvin lived in obscurity for decades afterward, working as a caregiver and nurse’s aide and struggling as a single mother, though historians and others have since brought to light the pivotal role she played in the early civil rights movement.
Fred Gray, the attorney behind Browder v Gayle, credited Colvin with helping to ignite the battle against segregation in the deep south.
“I don’t mean to take anything away from Mrs Parks, but Claudette gave all of us the moral courage to do what we did,” the Washington Post quoted Gray as saying.
In recent years, Colvin succeeded in having her juvenile arrest record expunged, Roseboro said.
