The author feels that the activists of that time didn't feel like a teenager would be a good icon for a movement. So, Claudette Colvin's action still remain little known today.
On March 2, 1955, Colvin was riding home on a city bus after school when a bus driver told her to give up her seat to a white passenger. She refused, saying, "It's my constitutional right to sit here as much as that lady. I paid my fare, it's my constitutional right." Colvin felt compelled to stand her ground.
After her refusal to give up her seat, Colvin was arrested on several charges, including violating the city's segregation laws.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People briefly considered using Colvin's case to challenge the segregation laws, but they decided against it because of her age. She also had become pregnant and they thought an unwed mother would attract too much negative attention in a public legal battle.
Colvin opposed the segregation law by declaring herself not guilty. The court, however, ruled against her and put her on probation. Despite the light sentence, Colvin could not escape the court of public opinion. The once-quiet student was branded a troublemaker by some, and she had to drop out of college. Her reputation also made it impossible for her to find a job.
Plaintiff in 'Browder v. Gayle'
Despite her personal challenges, Colvin became one of the four plaintiffs in the Browder v. Gayle case, along with Aurelia S. Browder, Susie McDonald and Mary Louise Smith (Jeanatta Reese, who was initially named a plaintiff in the case, withdrew early on due to outside pressure). The decision in the 1956 case, which had been filed by Fred Gray and Charles D. Langford on behalf of the aforementioned African American women, ruled that Montgomery's segregated bus system was unconstitutional.
Two years later, Colvin moved to New York City, where she had her second son, Randy, and worked as a nurse's aide at a Manhattan nursing home. She retired in 2004.
While her role in the fight to end segregation in Montgomery may not be widely recognized, Colvin helped advance civil rights efforts in the city. "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. Parks," her former attorney, Fred Gray, told Newsweek.
Hope this helps you to understand why her action remains little unknown
This dissertation studies the first Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to Urban areas in the northern United States. While most existing research has focused on the experiences of the migrants themselves, I am focused on how this influx of rural black migrants impacted outcomes for African Americans who were already living in the north and had already attained a modicum of economic success. Common themes throughout this dissertation involve the use of the complete-count U.S. population census to link records across years. In the first chapter, I linked northern-born blacks from 1910 to 1930 to study how the arrival of new black residents affected the employment outcomes of existing northern-born black residents. I find that southern black migrants served as both competitors and consumers to northern-born blacks in the labor market. In the second chapter, my co-authors and I study the role of segregated housing markets in eroding black wealth during the Great Migration. Building a new sample of matched census addresses from 1930 to 1940, we find that racial transition on a block was associated with both soaring rental prices and declines in the sales value of homes. In other words, black families paid more to rent housing and faced falling values of homes they were able to purchase. Finally, the third chapter compares the rates of intergenerational occupational mobility by both race and region. I find that racial mobility difference in the North was more substantial than it was in the South. However, regional mobility difference for blacks is greater than any gap in intergenerational mobility by race in prewar American. Therefore, the first Great Migration helped blacks successfully translate their geographic mobility into economic mobility.
RASPP is an algorithm that given a 4-D contact map, parental protein alignment and a few other parameters will generate libraries with the lowest average SCHEMA disruption.
