[Vision2020] The Brave Young Woman Who Went Before Rosa Parks

[Nicholas Gier]

Good Morning Visionaries:

For those who do not get the Daily News here is my MLK column for this
year. Read all my columns on civil rights at

webpages.uidaho.edu/ngier/CivilRights.htm

May we all live out King's Dream,

nfg

*Claudette Colvin went before Rosa Parks*

By Nick Gier, The Palouse Pundit

*Claudette gave all of us moral courage. If she had not done *

*what she did, **I am not sure that we would have been *

*able to mount the support for Mrs. Rosa Parks.*

--Fred Gray, civil rights attorney

            Nine months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a
Montgomery city bus, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin did the same and was
arrested for violating segregation law, disorderly conduct, and assault.

            Colvin found that she was fully prepared for her act of civil
disobedience.  At Booker T. Washington High School that month she and her
classmates had been studying African American history.

Later Colvin would reminisce: "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."

The Montgomery Women’s Political Council was responsible for initiating the
successful 381-day bus boycott. David Garrow, author of *Bearing the Cross,
**reminds us that* civil rights activists were "often young people and
often more than 50 percent women." Rosa Parks complained about sexism in
the movement, and the tendency for the black men in suits to take credit
for all the victories.

A bus boycott had been on the minds of black leaders for some time, but
they decided that Parks, rather than Colvin, was the person who would be
the best symbol of the bus boycott.

There were three reasons why it was Parks rather than Colvin:

·         Colvin was thought to be emotional, unstable, and therefore
unreliable.

·         She wore her hair in cornrows and refused to straighten it as
most black women did.

·         She became pregnant early in 1956 in what she said was a
non-consensual relationship.

With the support of the 26-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr., Colvin and
three other women filed suit against the city of Montgomery.  In May 1956
they gave testimony, and in December 1956 the Supreme Court ruled in *Browder
v. Gayle* that the Montgomery bus system violated African American
constitutional rights.

About not being recognized Colvin said: "I'm not disappointed. Let the
people know Rosa Parks was the right person for the boycott. But also let
them know that attorneys took four other women to the Supreme Court to
challenge the law that led to the end of segregation."

In his book *Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice*, Phillip Hoose claims
that “it would be impossible to tell the story of the civil rights movement
without Claudette. Rosa Parks has to scoot over a little bit."

On the day of her arrest Colvin had just turned in a student paper about
her people not being allowed to try on clothes at Montgomery stores. This
reminded me of the doctrine of untouchability, which is still, despite laws
against it, applied to India’s lowest castes.



In Hoose’s book Colvin remembers an incident in which, as a four-year-old,
she allowed a white boy to touch her.  With the white mother nodding her
approval, Colvin’s mother slapped her in the face and shouted “Don’t you
know you’re not supposed to touch them?”



As a disgraced unwed mother, rejected by blacks and whites, Colvin fled to
New York to find work.  Working as a domestic, she was shocked when the
lady of the house piled her dirty clothes on top of hers and asked her to
wash them together. Colvin remembers her feelings: "That's when I knew I
was out of the South. That could just never have happened there."

Colvin’s comments about the 2008 election are poignant: "Being dragged off
that bus was worth it just to see Barack Obama become president, because so
many others gave their lives and didn't get to see it. Thank God I got to
see it.”

 Nick Gier taught philosophy at the University of Idaho for 31 years.
-- 

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they
shall never sit in.

-Greek proverb

“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.
Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance
from another. This immaturity is self- imposed when its cause lies not in
lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without
guidance from another. Sapere Aude! ‘Have courage to use your own
understand-ing!—that is the motto of enlightenment.

--Immanuel Kant
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20160121/9558fecb/attachment.html>