Nine months before the arrest of Rosa Parks, who refused to surrender her seat to a White passenger, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested on March 2, 1955, for refusing to give up her seat to a white woman on a Montgomery bus.

Colvin later became one of the four plaintiffs in the Browder v. Gayle case that occurred in 1956, where the Supreme Court declared that Alabama’s segregated bus laws were unconstitutional, ending the Montgomery bus boycott. Although Claudette Colvin was one of the first to challenge the bus segregation law, she was deemed unfit to act as a public face for the Civil Rights Movement for multiple reasons.

One, she was considered too young and more unreliable. Two, her feisty temperament made her image less marketable as a sympathetic figure than that of Rosa Parks, who was older and more poised. Three, Colvin was born into a working-class family in a poor neighborhood with darker skin, and she didn’t fit the image the civil rights leaders were looking for. Unlike Rosa Parks, who was a respected and mature member of the NAACP, working as a secretary and having no criminal record. Finally, shortly after her arrest, Colvin became pregnant, and the civil rights leaders feared that the white press would exploit this information.

It wasn’t until 2021 that Claudette Colvin received her long-overdue recognition for the 1955 act of defiance when her juvenile record was expunged. Not only that, but in 2017, the city of Montgomery, Alabama, officially named March 2nd as “Claudette Colvin Day” to commemorate Colvin’s courageous act.

This is in remembrance of Claudette Colvin who died this year, 2026, on January 13 in Texas.