Claudette Colvin (8 page)

Jo Ann Robinson, professor of English at Alabama State College and leader of Montgomery's influential Women's Political Council

Though Robinson owned her own car and rarely rode the city bus, the memory of the driver's bullying behavior and how humiliated she had felt wouldn't go away. She started interviewing black residents who had been mistreated on the city buses and writing down their stories. She soon possessed a thick file of nightmare accounts.

Robinson longed to do something about the buses, but she didn't know quite what. In March 1954, she organized a face-to-face meeting of black leaders, city officials, and bus company representatives to complain about the way blacks were treated on the buses and to propose reforms. The meeting was pleasant enough but unproductive.

She kept at it. Two months later she wrote a letter to Montgomery's mayor, W. A. “Tacky” Gayle, on behalf of the Women's Political Council. Robinson pressed for three changes to the bus rules:

1. A new seating plan that would let blacks sit from back to front and whites from front to back until the bus filled up, as was the practice in several other Southern cities.

2. An end to making blacks pay their fares at the front of the bus but then get off and reenter through the rear door to find a seat at the back.

3. A requirement that drivers stop at every corner in black neighborhoods just as they did in white neighborhoods.

Robinson's diplomatic letter contained one fragment of steel. In the third to last paragraph she wrote that, if things did not get better, “there has been talk from twenty-five or more local organizations of planning a city-wide boycott of busses.”

The idea of a bus boycott had been gaining momentum throughout the black community for months. Its power was obvious: three-quarters of Montgomery's bus passengers were black. If everyone quit riding, they could
starve
the City Lines bus company into reason. Still, the letter stopped short of calling for an end to segregated seating. As Robinson later wrote, “In Montgomery in 1955 no one was brazen enough to announce publicly that black people might boycott City buses for the specific purpose of integrating those buses. Just to say that minorities wanted ‘better seating arrangements' was bad enough.”

Robinson's letter led only to more polite meetings. The whites offered coffee, nodded, and smiled, but refused to budge an inch when it came to Jim Crow. Still, Claudette Colvin's arrest had stripped the veneer of politeness from the talks. She had been wrenched from her seat and dragged off a bus by police in front of shocked witnesses. People were angry.

Claudette's arrest made her the center of attention wherever she went. On the following Sunday, Reverend Johnson led the congregation in prayer for the girl among them who had been arrested for
bravely standing up to the bus driver and the police and challenging the whole ugly system. The next day classmates swarmed around her when she pulled up to Booker T. Washington High School in her cousin's car. They followed her into homeroom and asked to hear her story. Students pointed at her in the halls, whispering, “There's the girl who got arrested.”

Opinion at Booker T. Washington was sharply divided between those who admired Claudette's courage and those who thought she got what she deserved for making things harder for everyone. Some said it was about time someone stood up. Others told her that if she didn't like the way things were in the South, she should go up North. Still others couldn't make up their minds: no one they knew had ever done anything like this before.

“A few of the teachers like Miss Nesbitt embraced me,” Claudette recalls. “They kept saying, ‘You were so brave.' But other teachers seemed uncomfortable. Some parents seemed uncomfortable, too. I think they knew they should have done what I did long before. They were embarrassed that it took a teenager to do it.”

Facing serious criminal charges, and with her court hearing only two weeks away, Claudette feared she might be sent to a reform school as a juvenile delinquent. She had a lot to lose: she was a good student with dreams of college and a career. She was not about to plead guilty to anything, but she didn't know what to do or whom to turn to. Somehow, she had to find a lawyer, and figure out how to pay for one. She had no time to lose.

C
LAUDETTE:
Everybody got busy. We started working family connections, trying to find someone to help me. My great-aunt's husband, C. J. McNear, told my parents to get in touch with Mr. E. D. Nixon. C.J. thought my case might be a good civil rights case. Mr. Nixon called the shots in the black community of Montgomery. He knew everybody. So Mom called him. And he agreed to help us.

N
IXON MOVED SWIFTLY
on two fronts. He called Fred Gray, one of Montgomery's two black lawyers, and convinced him to represent Claudette in court. Then he organized a committee of black leaders to meet downtown with the police commissioner. Among those selected was the new pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church,
twenty-six-year-old Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The attempt to obtain justice for Claudette Colvin marked Dr. King's political debut.

A conference of black leaders, the bus company's manager, and the police commissioner seemed to break the tension. “Both men were quite pleasant, and expressed deep concern over what had happened [to Claudette],” Dr. King later wrote. The bus company conceded that, according to the driver, Claudette had been sitting behind the ten white seats in front and there had been no seats available when the driver ordered her to move. That seemed to be an admission that she hadn't broken the law. The police commissioner agreed the seating rules were confusing and promised that the city's attorney would soon clarify them in writing. The one thing they didn't do was drop the charges against Claudette. The trial would go on.

Still, Dr. King walked out of the meeting feeling “hopeful,” and Jo Ann Robinson also felt her spirits lifting as she stepped outside. “[We] were given to understand . . . that . . . Claudette would be given every chance to clear her name,” she later wrote. “It was not [to be] a trial to determine guilt or innocence, but an effort to find out the truth, and if the girl were found innocent, her record would be clear . . . Those present left the conference feeling . . . that everything would work out fairly for everyone.”

Plainspoken E. D. Nixon, longtime leader of the Montgomery NAACP

In the days before Claudette's trial, E. D. Nixon also called Rosa Parks, a soft-spoken, forty-two-year-old professional seamstress who had for many years been secretary of the Montgomery NAACP. Mrs. Parks was also the head of the NAACP's youth group in Montgomery. Nixon and Mrs. Parks had long tried to get more young blacks involved in the struggle for civil rights, but the Sunday afternoon NAACP youth meetings were, for the most part, poorly attended. However, both saw promise in the dramatic arrest, jailing, and trial of a fifteen-year-old bus protester. It might spark interest if the girl was willing to tell her story. Nixon urged Mrs. Parks to get Claudette Colvin involved with the NAACP.

C
LAUDETTE:
The first time I ever met Rosa Parks was one Sunday afternoon when she walked into a church before an NAACP youth meeting. There were only a few students around. This small, fair-skinned woman with long, straight hair came up to me, and looked me up and down. She said, “You're Claudette Colvin? Oh my God, I was lookin' for some big old burly overgrown teenager who sassed white people out . . . But no, they pulled a little girl off the bus.” I said, “They pulled me off because I refused to walk off.”

Rosa had already asked the teachers at my school about me and found out I was a good student. She got even more interested when she realized she knew my mother—my biological mom—from Pine Level. Rosa had lived there, too, when she was younger. Mom was close friends with Rosa's brother, Sylvester, before she left Pine Level for Birmingham.