Claudette Colvin, a key but long-overlooked figure in the early fight against racial segregation and for civil rights equality, has died at the age of 86.
Her death was confirmed on Tuesday, January 14, by the Claudette Colvin Legacy Foundation. According to NPR, Colvin died of natural causes while under hospice care in Texas.
Colvin’s place in history was sealed on March 2, 1955, when she was just 15 years old. Riding a Montgomery city bus home from school, she refused to surrender her seat after the driver demanded that Black passengers move to accommodate white riders.
The front of the bus was reserved for white passengers under Jim Crow laws, and when those seats filled up, Black riders were expected to stand. Colvin stayed seated.
“My mindset was on freedom,” Colvin recalled years later. “So I was not going to move that day. I told them that history had me glued to the seat.”
Police were called, and Colvin was arrested—nine months before Rosa Parks’ similar act of defiance would draw national attention and spark the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
At the time, tensions around segregation on the city’s buses were already rising. Another Black teenager, Mary Louise Smith, would also be arrested later that year for refusing to give up her seat.
While Parks’ arrest on December 1, 1955, became the public rallying point for the boycott and helped propel the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. into the spotlight, Colvin’s earlier stand played a crucial legal role.
She later became one of four plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, the federal lawsuit that ultimately ended bus segregation in Montgomery. The case led to a 1956 Supreme Court decision declaring segregated public transportation unconstitutional.
Despite her role in shaping that outcome, Colvin spent much of her life outside the public eye, working as a nurse’s aide and raising her family. Only in recent years did broader recognition begin to catch up with her contribution. In 2021, she successfully petitioned to have her juvenile arrest record expunged.
“When I think about why I’m seeking to have my name cleared by the state, it is because I believe if that happened, it would show the generation growing up now that progress is possible,” Colvin said at the time. “It will inspire them to make the world better.”
Montgomery Mayor Steven Reed acknowledged that her bravery went unrecognized for far too long, saying her actions “helped lay the legal and moral foundation for the movement that would change America.”