Claudette Colvin, a pioneering figure in the U.S. civil rights movement who first refused to give up her bus seat, has died . She was 86.
Colvin’s death was announced Tuesday by the Claudette Colvin Legacy Foundation. She died of natural causes, foundation spokesperson Ashley D. Roseboro said.
In 1955, when she was 15 years old, Colvin was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated city bus. Her act of defiance came nine months before Rosa Parks’ more widely remembered protest and helped ignite growing resistance to Jim Crow laws in the South.
Colvin boarded the bus on March 2, 1955, on her way home from school, and remained seated despite the driver’s order to move to the back of the bus to make room for white riders. When officers arrived, she was forcibly removed and arrested under local segregation laws.
Her refusal and subsequent arrest added to mounting frustration among Black residents over unequal treatment. The following year, the U.S. Supreme Court in Browder v. Gayle struck down bus segregation laws after a federal lawsuit brought by Colvin and other plaintiffs, a landmark decision that helped end legal segregation on public buses.
In an interview years later with WFSA, Colvin reflected on her decision to stay seated, saying, “My mindset was on freedom,” and that was why she chose not to move that day. “I told them that history had me glued to the seat,” she said.
Despite her early and courageous stand, Colvin’s role in the movement was often overshadowed by Parks’ later protest, in part because Colvin was a pregnant teenager. According to Colvin, leaders in the movement were looking for the “right face” to propel the movement further. Her circumstances were not ideal.
Colvin became one of four plaintiffs in the lawsuit that successfully challenged bus segregation policies. In 2021, a judge granted her petition to expunge her juvenile arrest record, a symbolic act that acknowledged her contribution to civil rights history.
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