Claudette Colvin, US civil rights pioneer, dead at 86: foundation

Claudette Colvin, who refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Alabama in 1955 and became a US civil rights pioneer, has died aged 86, her foundation said Tuesday.

Colvin, then aged 15, made her protest several months before Rosa Parks' similar act of defiance became a key moment in the birth of the modern civil rights movement in the United States.

Colvin "leaves behind a legacy of courage that helped change the course of American history," her foundation said.

Colvin had been studying Black history in school on March 2, 1955, when she was detained after she refused to give up her seat to a white woman on a bus in Montgomery -- the same southern US city where Parks' protest made headlines.

"I remained seated because the lady could have sat in the seat opposite me," Colvin told reporters in Paris in April 2023.

"She refused because...a white person wasn't supposed to sit close to a negro." 

"People ask me why I refused to move, and I say history had me glued to the seat," Colvin said.

Colvin was briefly imprisoned for disturbing public order. The following year, she became one of four Black female plaintiffs who filed a lawsuit challenging segregated bus seating in Montgomery. 

The case was successful, impacting public transportation throughout the United States, including trains, airplanes and taxis.

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Colvin's role in the US civil rights movement was less celebrated than that of Parks, who was already a key figure in the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) at the time of her arrest.

Parks' arrest triggered a year-long bus boycott in Montgomery that thrust civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to national prominence.

The civil rights movement led to significant advances for Black people in the mid-1960s -- ending legal segregation and securing their voting rights.

Colvin, who was born in Alabama in 1939 as the eldest of eight sisters, would be ostracized from the civil rights movement when she became pregnant out of wedlock. 

She spent decades in obscurity, working for 30 years at a Catholic nursing home, caring for elderly patients as a nursing assistant.

But she won recognition later in life. 

A 2009 biography by Phillip Hoose, "Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice," won the US National Book Award for young people's literature.

However, it was only in 2021 that the record of her 1955 arrest and adjudication of delinquency was expunged by a US court.

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