Claudette Colvin: The Rosa Parks Before Rosa Parks

Rosa Park's name is known worldwide. But few people know the story of Claudette Colvin. When she was 15, she refused to move to the back of the bus and give up her seat to a white person — nine months before Rosa Parks did the very same thing. Most people know the story of Rosa Parks as the first African American to refuse to give up her seat for a white person on a bus. Claudette Colvin, born September 5, 1939, is an African American woman from Alabama. In 1955, at the age of 15, she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white person, in violation of local law. Claudette was arrested and became one of four plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, which ruled that Montgomery's segregated bus system was unconstitutional. Colvin later moved to New York City and lived a quiet life. She worked as a nurse's aide and retired in 2004. The first book published about her was published in 2009 by Phillip Hoose. it's called "Claudette Colvin, Twice Toward Justice." The book describes how the girl stood her ground, yelling, "It's my constitutional right," as the cops pulled her off the bus, threw her into the back of a cop car, and handcuffed her through the window. In Hoose's telling, a teacher named Geraldine Nesbitt had emboldened her students, teaching them about the 14th Amendment. "It just so happens they picked me at the wrong time—it was Negro History Month, and I was filled up like a computer," Colvin tells NEWSWEEK, "I felt like Sojourner Truth was pushing down on one shoulder and Harriet Tubman was pushing down on the other—saying, 'Sit down girl!' I was glued to my seat." Author Phil Hoose couldn't get over that there was this teenager, nine months before Rosa Parks, "in the same city, in the same bus system, with very tough consequences, hauled off the bus, handcuffed, jailed and nobody really knew about it."