Unsung civil rights pioneer aims to wipe ’55 arrest record
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Months before Rosa Parks became the mother of the modern civil rights movement by refusing to move to the back of a segregated Alabama bus, Black teenager Claudette Colvin did the same.
Convicted of assaulting a police officer while being arrested, she was placed on probation yet never received notice that she’d finished the term and was on safe ground legally.
Now 82, Colvin wants a court in Montgomery to wipe away a record that her lawyer says has cast a shadow over the life of a largely unsung hero of the civil rights era.
“I am an old woman now. Having my records expunged will mean something to my grandchildren and great-grandchildren. And it will mean something for other Black children,” Colvin said in a sworn statement.
Supporters sang civil rights anthems and clapped as Colvin entered the clerk’s office and filed the expungement request last week. Her attorney, Phillip Ensler, said he was seeking all legal documents to be sealed and all records of the case erased.
Montgomery County District Attorney Daryl Bailey later said he agreed with the request to clear Colvin’s record, removing any doubt it would be approved.
Colvin left Alabama at 20 and spent decades in New York, but relatives always worried what might happen when she returned for visits since no court official ever said she had finished probation, according to Ensler.
Montgomery’s city bus system, like the rest of public life across the Deep South, was divided along racial lines in the 1950s; the front of a bus was for white people while Blacks had to take the back by law.
Parks, a 42-year-old seamstress and activist with the NAACP, gained worldwide fame after refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man Dec. 1, 1955. Her treatment led to the yearlong Montgomery Bus Boycott, which propelled the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. into the national limelight and often is considered the start of the modern civil rights movement.
A 15-year-old high school student at the time, Colvin got fed up and refused to move even before Parks.
A bus driver called police March 2, 1955, to complain that two Black girls were sitting near two white girls and refused to move to the back of the bus. One of the Black girls moved when asked, a police report said, but Colvin refused.
The police report said Colvin put up a struggle as officers removed her from the bus, kicking and scratching an officer. She was initially convicted of violating the city’s segregation law, disorderly conduct and assaulting an officer, but she appealed and only the assault charge stuck.
The case was sent to juvenile court because of Colvin’s age, and records show a judge found her delinquent and placed her on probation.
And that’s where it ended, Ensler said, with Colvin never getting official word that she’d completed probation and her relatives assuming the worst — that police would arrest her for any reason they could.