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On a personal note: Please excuse grammatical errors, typos, repetition, and any general nonsense, and such in this post. I am getting a bit older now, and I have about 20,000 pages of information that must get published before I leave the mortal coil. I simply write and publish more than my humble editors are able to correct. If you find enough errors you are welcome to contact me about being an editor of my work.
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Q. Lewis,It is Black History Month and I wanted to learn more about some of the “unsung” heroes of the Civil Rights movement. Where do I begin?
A. A good place to begin is with Claudette Colvin who refused to give up her bus seat 9 months before Rosa Parks.
To understand why you have never heard of Ms. Colvin, we need to explore a bit about how history get’s written.
History is the study and the documentation of past events as well as the memory, discovery, collection, organization, presentation, and interpretation of these events. The best historians seek knowledge of the past using historical sources such as written documents, oral accounts, art and material artifacts, and ecological markers.
As an academic discipline history investigates their patterns of cause and effect.
Being that this is Black History Month it is a good time to explore flaws in this area of exploration. Historians often debate which narrative best explains an event, as well as the significance of different causes and effects. Historians also debate the nature of history as an end in itself, as well as its usefulness to give perspective on the problems of the present.
There are certain names of heroes of the American Civil Rights movement that grab our attention through familiarity. …Dr. King, Malcolm X, John Lewis, Thurgood Marshall, and Rosa Parks to name just a few…But what about Claudette Colvin?
Claudette Colvin, who is still alive today, is an American pioneer of the 1950s civil rights movement and retired nurse aide. On March 2, 1955, Colvin was arrested at the age of 15 in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her seat to a white woman on a crowded, segregated bus. This occurred nine months before the more widely known incident in which Rosa Parks, secretary of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), helped spark the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott.
Colvin was one of five plaintiffs in the first federal court case filed by civil rights attorney Fred Gray on February 1, 1956, as Browder v. Gayle, to challenge bus segregation in the city. In a United States district court, she testified before the three-judge panel that heard the case. On June 13, 1956, the judges determined that the state and local laws requiring bus segregation in Alabama were unconstitutional. The case went to the United States Supreme Court on appeal by the state, and it upheld the district court's ruling on November 13, 1956. One month later, the Supreme Court affirmed the order to Montgomery and the state of Alabama to end bus segregation. The Montgomery bus boycott was then called off after a few months.
For many years, Montgomery's black leaders did not publicize Colvin's pioneering effort. Colvin has said, "Young people think Rosa Parks just sat down on a bus and ended segregation, but that wasn't the case at all."
Why is Colvin unknown to most people? Her case was dropped by civil rights campaigners because she was unmarried and pregnant during the proceedings. It is now widely accepted that Colvin was not accredited by civil rights campaigners at the time due to her circumstances. Rosa Parks stated: "If the white press got ahold of that information, they would have [had] a field day. They'd call her a bad girl, and her case wouldn't have a chance."
The record of her arrest and adjudication of delinquency was expunged by the district court in 2021, with the support of the district attorney for the county in which the charges were brought more than 66 years before.
The Takeaway
There are many heroes in Black History that you may not be familiar with. Many did not live “squeaky clean” lives, but they need to be remembered nonetheless for what they accomplished in very difficult times.
Take a few minutes to Google them.
· W.E.B. Du Bois
· Paul Robeson
· Percy Lavon Julian
· Stephanie St. Clair
· David Harold Blackwell
· A. Philip Randolph
· Aurelia Browder
· Susie McDonald
· Mary Louise Smith
· Fannie Lou Hammer
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Author: Lewis is a writer, teacher, and master results-oriented life coach. He is the author of over twenty books, numerous self-improvement, and personal development courses. A history buff he is the former host of a talk show on NPR Affiliated WIOX91.3 FM. He can be contacted at LewisCoaches@gmail.com
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