Who is Claudette Colvin?

With the killing of George Floyd in the USA the Civil Rights Movement is back in focus. It seems unbelievable that the act for voting rights for African Americans was passed only in 1965, and that even in the 1950s they were strictly segregated in schools, buses and elsewhere. In buses, they had to sit at the back. Many who have a basic knowledge of the movement have heard about Rosa Parks, the young woman who refused to give up her seat to a white person in a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on 1 December 1955, and who sparked a movement to end segregation. Rosa Parks became a symbol of the movement, but there were many others who remained unknown. Claudette Colvin was perhaps the first of these to be arrested and imprisoned and this happened  in the same city,  nine months before the Rosa Parks incident when Claudette was only 15. On her refusal to give her seat to a white person, she was arrested in the bus, her schoolbooks went flying, she was handcuffed and imprisoned. She was locked in a cell in an adult jail, and not allowed to make a phone call. Fellow students in the bus told her mother, who reached the jail along with her pastor, Reverend H. H. Johnson. Johnson managed to get her released on bail. But Rosa Parks, middle-class and in her forties, seemed a more acceptable symbol of the movement, and she remains famous in history. The bus boycott, and the move to end segregation, started because of her. To know more about Claudette, the true founder of the movement, read Claudette Colvin: Twice Towards Justice  by Phil Hoose.