Claudette Colvin, RIP

The way we teach the civil rights movement–or any movement–has gotten massively oversimplified, with a focus on just a few people. This may be inevitable, but we lose something by it. One of the ways this has happened is by turning Rosa Parks into some unique hero. She did a great thing of course when she refused to move on that Montgomery bus in 1955, but this was not the first bus boycott in civil rights history, she was not the first person to refuse to give up a seat to a white, and she wasn’t even the first woman to refuse to give up a seat to a white on a Montgomery bus in 1955. That person was Claudette Colvin, who died the other day. But Colvin was a young very dark woman with a hot temper and tendency to swear a lot when she spoke, so the respectability politics of the NAACP and churches in Black Montgomery did not see her case as what they needed to press their agenda. So Colvin was forgotten about for a long, long time. She claimed that she was too dark and too poor for King and Abernathy and the NAACP leadership. That might well have been true.

I’m not going to sit here in 2026 and get too critical about the choices social movements made over 70 years ago. The literature on Black respectability politics is very long if you want to read up on it. It is still a thing today of course and for a long time in my life, was represented by people such as Bill Cosby in the 80s. People made the choices they thought they needed to make at the time. Some people, such as Colvin, were hurt by them. But we all make choices for various reasons and Parks and King and Abernathy and C.D. Nixon and all those people deserve their accolades. But so does Colvin and I’m glad the last quarter century of her life allowed her to experience people looking up to her too, especially since most of her life was defined by poverty.

RIP.