Claudette Colvin

by Phillip Hoose

  The verdict radicalized many students at Booker T. Washington High. Reeves was a popular senior, widely admired as a talented drummer. He hadn’t fled from the police—in fact, he had turned himself in. Everyone had always predicted Jeremiah Reeves would go somewhere special. Now he wasn’t going anywhere at all. Unless something could be done, he would languish on death row until he turned twenty-one and became legally old enough to take the short walk from his cell to the electric chair.

  Jeremiah’s plight pulled Claudette’s attention away from her personal difficulties to the injustices blacks faced everywhere. She went to rallies, wrote letters to him in prison, and collected money for his legal defense. The effort to support Jeremiah Reeves became the first time many black teenagers in Montgomery ever acted to address injustices outside their own personal problems. Claudette Colvin was one of those teens.

  THE NAACP

  The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was formed in 1909 in New York City by a group of black and white citizens fighting for social justice. Ever since, the NAACP has organized demonstrations, pickets, and legal actions to expand and defend the rights of people of color. Many cities and communities have local NAACP chapters, including the Montgomery Chapter, which provided support to Jeremiah Reeves.

  CLAUDETTE: Jeremiah Reeves’s arrest was the turning point of my life. That was when I and a lot of other students really started thinking about prejudice and racism. I was furious when I found out what had happened. Jeremiah lived right below us on the Hill. I knew him well, and admired him like everybody else did. We girls thought he was like a rock star because he was so stylish. He always wore a starched clean shirt, and there was never a spot of mud on his shoes. He was a wonderful drummer in the school band and in bands around town.

  Jeremiah Reeves, with poems he wrote in prison

  The NAACP was called in to take his case. That was the first time I had ever heard of them. I think that’s why the jury sentenced him to death—to show that the NAACP couldn’t take over the South. Everyone talked about Jeremiah Reeves at school. There were rumors that the jailers pulled out his finger-nails and tortured him. One girl hid in a delivery truck and got into the jail but didn’t make it to his cell. We showed movies to try to raise money for his lawyers. I would take whatever we raised to his mother.

  The hypocrisy of it made me so angry! Black girls were extremely vulnerable. My mother and my grandmother told me never to go anywhere with a white man no matter what. I grew up hearing horror story after horror story about black girls who were raped by white men, and how they never got justice either. When a white man raped a black girl—something that happened all the time—it was just his word against hers, and no one would ever believe her. The white man always got off. But now they were going to hold Jeremiah for years as a minor just so they could legally execute him when he came of age. That changed me. That put a lot of anger in me. I stayed angry about Jeremiah Reeves for a long time.

  IN 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out Reeves’s conviction and ordered a new trial. (By then, Reeves had retracted his confession, insisting he had been forced by police to make it. For the rest of his life he maintained he was innocent.) But after two days’ testimony, the new jury—again entirely white—took only thirty-four minutes to restore Reeves’s death sentence. Now all hope was gone.

  Many at school wept for their classmate, but Claudette fumed. Why did everyone accept injustice? How could adults complain at home about the insulting way they were treated at work and then put on a happy face for their white employers? Why did her classmates worry about “good hair” when they had no rights? When was anybody ever going to stand up? Claudette was still furious about Jeremiah Reeves’s plight when, on the first day of her sophomore year, she met someone who gave her the confidence to transform her anger into action.

  ONE GIRL’S MEMORY OF JEREMIAH REEVES

  One friend and classmate of Claudette’s was especially active in Jeremiah Reeves’s defense. After an exchange of letters, Reeves invited the girl to visit him on death row, along with his parents. Later she remembered what it was like:

  To reach death row you had to be escorted by a guard through several halls one by one. You’d step in one room and the guard would slam the door loud behind you and turn the key. Then you’d go to the next room. Finally you walked out in the backyard and up a flight of steps. At that point you passed right by the electric chair. I saw it. I’ll never forget the sight of it.

  Jeremiah was eighteen or nineteen when I saw him in prison. He was a fine-looking young man in good health. He hadn’t been tortured. He and three other prisoners had formed a quartet on death row. They couldn’t see each other through the walls but they could hear. Someone would sing a note and they would start in. His voice was rich and beautiful; they sang spirituals.

  Jeremiah was a very spiritual person. Very caring. Again and again he told me he believed he would get out someday.

  CLAUDETTE: Miss Geraldine Nesbitt dressed sharp—more like a saleslady than a schoolteacher. She was slender and petite. She grew up in Montgomery and went to Alabama State College, but she had a master’s degree in education from Columbia University in New York City. She came to school early and stayed late. She was tough, but she was out to make you learn.

  We were supposed to be an English literature class, but Miss Nesbitt used literature to teach life. She said she didn’t have time to teach us like a regular English teacher—we were too far behind. Instead, she taught us the world through literature. She taught the Constitution. She taught the Magna Carta and the Articles of Confederation. We studied Hawthorne and Poe. We discussed Patrick Henry’s speech—“Give me liberty or give me death”—and applied it to our own situation. We’d pick out a passage from the Bible and examine it from a literary standpoint. We wrote poems and essays and themes. We even wrote obituaries.

  She brought in her own books from home, because we had so few books in our library at school. One day we all came into class and Miss Nesbitt had her face buried in an open book. We all said, “Why are you doing that?” Finally she came up with a big smile and said, “Ahhhh . . . there’s no smell as good as the smell of a new book.”

  Right at the end of sophomore year, the Supreme Court ruled that public schools like ours would have to be integrated, though they didn’t say when. Whenever it happened, it was bound to be a big change. Segregation was so total. It wasn’t just that we went to separate schools: we even walked to school on opposite sides of the highway from whites, shouting insults at each other across the street. In class we asked each other, “Would you want to sit next to a white student?” A lot of kids said things like “If they don’t want to sit next to me on a bus, why would I want to sit next to one in class?”

  Geraldine Nesbitt, Claudette’s favorite teacher

  I felt differently. I wanted to go to college. I wanted to grow up and greet the world, and so did my best friends. I thought if whites came into our schools, maybe our textbooks would improve. Sometimes when I babysat I’d sneak looks at the textbooks of white students who lived in those families. There were essays on the Lincoln-Douglas debate, which I had never heard of. They made me think for the first time about the economic basis for slavery. While we were taking routine math, whites my age were studying algebra. Our school’s entire set of encyclopedias only had two articles about blacks—Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver. In fact, we had very few books of any kind in our school library, and the library downtown—the “colored” library—didn’t have many more. I didn’t care who I sat next to. I wanted a good education.

  The children involved in the landmark civil rights lawsuit Brown v. Board of Education, which challenged segregation in public schools, in Topeka, Kansas, 1953: (left to right) Vicki Henderson, Donald Henderson, Linda Brown (the Brown of the case’s name), James Emanuel, Nancy Todd, and Katherine Carper

  Miss Nesbitt made us see that we had a history, too—that our story didn’t begin by
being captured and chained and thrown onto a boat. There had been life and culture before that. She related literature back to our lives. She would ask, “Why do we celebrate the Fourth of July—Independence Day—when we are still in slavery?” “Why are there no black people except Sammy Davis, Jr., and Pearl Bailey on TV?”

  I had Miss Nesbitt in both tenth and eleventh grades, and during those years I grew in confidence. In those two years she challenged many assumptions I had taken for granted. She said, “There’s no such thing as ‘good hair’—hair is just hair. Everyone is born with the hair they have and you just do the best you can with it.” Same with skin color. She wanted us to love whatever color we were. Our history teacher, Miss Josie Lawrence, was the blackest teacher in the whole school, but she had the same attitude. She’d say, “I’m a real African. I’m a pure-blooded African.” She was proud of it. She taught us all the different nations of Africa and the periods of African history. It all made sense to me. I wasn’t ashamed of my thick lips and broad nose and coarse hair. I had always thought God made our features so we could be comfortable in the hot African sun.

  BROWN v. BOARD OF EDUCATION

  OF TOPEKA

  Linda Brown was a third-grade student who lived in Topeka, Kansas. She had to walk five long blocks to her school every day, even though she lived much closer to a school for whites only. Linda’s father sued the city government to let her go to the all-white school. The case was combined with several similar cases around the country, and it was argued all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, under the title Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

  Lawyers from the NAACP represented Linda and the other black students. On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court ruled 9–0 that segregated schools did not give black students an equal chance for a good education. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote on behalf of the nine justices: “We conclude, unanimously, that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Some school systems integrated smoothly, but other communities took as long as twenty years to open the school doors to all students.

  Little by little, I began to form a mission for myself. I was going be like Harriet Tubman and go North to liberate my people. I admired Harriet Tubman more than anyone else I read about—her courage, the pistol she wore, the fact that she never lost a passenger on the Underground Railroad. I wasn’t going to go to Alabama State College, where they taught you how to teach school but didn’t teach you how to get your freedom. We had nothing but preachers and teachers in the South. I was going to do something different. I was going to be a lawyer. My mom always said I could outtalk any forty lawyers—I agreed it would be a good fit.

  In 1955, my junior year, Miss Nesbitt and Miss Lawrence team-taught Negro History Week. We really got into it. We spent that whole February talking about the injustices we black people suffered every day in Montgomery—it was total immersion. My parents had only gone to sixth grade—they’d never had a chance for a class discussion like that. So I was grateful for it, and totally receptive. I was done talking about “good hair” and “good skin” but not addressing our grievances. I was tired of adults complaining about how badly they were treated and not doing anything about it. I’d had enough of just feeling angry about Jeremiah Reeves. I was tired of hoping for justice.

  When my moment came, I was ready.

  A Birmingham, Alabama, city bus. Two separate worlds within one vehicle

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “IT’S MY CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT!”

  Early in life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise. —Malcolm X

  March 2, 1955

  CLAUDETTE AND HER CLASSMATES got out of school early that Wednesday because of a faculty meeting. When she stepped outside, the afternoon air was warm and muggy, already like summer. Claudette spotted some friends and ran to catch up with them. The group walked together for a few blocks, then got on the Highland Gardens bus at Dexter Avenue and Bainbridge Street. She handed the driver her pink coupon, which allowed a student to ride for five cents—half fare. Since there were no whites in the front of the bus, she and her classmates walked straight down the aisle without getting off.

  Claudette slid into a window seat on the left side, near the exit door and about halfway back. A schoolmate plopped down beside her, and two other Booker T. Washington students took the seats across the aisle in the same row. Balancing her textbooks on her lap, Claudette settled back and gazed absently out the window as the bus pulled away from the curb.

  As the bus moved east along Dexter Avenue, the seats filled up block by block with white passengers getting off work from the downtown stores and offices. The ten front seats went quickly, and soon riders were standing in the aisle, keeping their balance by clutching poles as the bus stopped and started. Just before they reached Court Square, Claudette realized that a white woman was standing in the aisle between the four seats in her row. Clearly the woman expected Claudette and her three schoolmates to vacate the entire row so she could sit down in one of the seats.

  CLAUDETTE: The motorman looked up in his mirror and said, “I need those seats.” I might have considered getting up if the woman had been elderly, but she wasn’t. She looked about forty. The other three girls in my row got up and moved back, but I didn’t. I just couldn’t.

  Rebellion was on my mind that day. All during February we’d been talking about people who had taken stands. We had been studying the Constitution in Miss Nesbitt’s class. I knew I had rights. I had paid my fare the same as white passengers. I knew the rule—that you didn’t have to get up for a white person if there were no empty seats left on the bus—and there weren’t. But it wasn’t about that. I was thinking, Why should I have to get up just because a driver tells me to, or just because I’m black? Right then, I decided I wasn’t gonna take it anymore. I hadn’t planned it out, but my decision was built on a lifetime of nasty experiences.

  After the other students got up, there were three empty seats in my row, but that white woman still wouldn’t sit down—not even across the aisle from me. That was the whole point of the segregation rules—it was all symbolic—blacks had to be behind whites. If she sat down in the same row as me, it meant I was as good as her. So she had to keep standing until I moved back. The motorman yelled again, louder: “Why are you still sittin’ there?” I didn’t get up, and I didn’t answer him. It got real quiet on the bus. A white rider yelled from the front, “You got to get up!” A girl named Margaret Johnson answered from the back, “She ain’t got to do nothin’ but stay black and die.”

  The white woman kept standing over my seat. The driver shouted, “Gimme that seat!” then “Get up, gal!” I stayed in my seat, and I didn’t say a word.

  EXASPERATED BY CLAUDETTE’S NONRESPONSE, the driver pushed on to Court Square, Montgomery’s major downtown transfer station for city buses. In the late afternoon rush hour, scores of weary passengers were lined up behind signs reading “Colored” and “White.”

  At Court Square, the driver snapped open the doors and hollered for a transit policeman to come inside and make an arrest. Seconds later, a uniformed officer clambered aboard and the driver pointed down the aisle at Claudette. “It’s her,” he said.

  During these moments as the bus idled, several passengers boarded through the rear door. One, a pregnant woman whom Claudette recognized as her neighbor Mrs. Hamilton, sat down heavily in the empty seat next to Claudette. Of course, Mrs. Hamilton was totally unaware of the standoff between Claudette and the driver. All she knew was that for some reason a policeman was coming her way. When he arrived, the officer saw that now there were two blacks seated in the disputed row. He ordered both women to rise. Mrs. Hamilton replied that she didn’t feel like getting up. Claudette also refused.

  COURT SQUARE

  If the historical importance of places could be detected by an instrument like a Geiger counter, Court Square would send the needle dancing.
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  At Court Square, six downtown Montgomery streets converge around a fountain topped by a statue of Hebe, goddess of youth and cupbearer to the gods. In the early 1800s, Court Square was the site of a major auction block, where livestock, furniture, and Negro slaves of all ages were exhibited and sold. Looking down Dexter Avenue from the fountain, one has a straight sight line to the Alabama State Capitol, where, in 1861, Jefferson Davis was sworn in as the first president of the Confederate States of America. To the viewer’s right is the Winter Building, where, on April 10, 1861, a local boy delivered a telegram from Jefferson Davis instructing Confederate troops to start shelling Fort Sumter, South Carolina. The message touched off the Civil War.

  Court Square is also within sight of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, pastored by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., from 1954 to 1960. And Court Square, as the major transfer point for City Lines buses, figured centrally in the Montgomery bus protests.

  All eyes turned to the policeman. As much as he might have wanted to evict Claudette, he hesitated to bully a pregnant woman. Cocking a thumb toward Mrs. Hamilton, he addressed a group of black men seated in the rear. “If any of you are not gentleman enough to give this lady a seat,” he said, “you should be put in jail yourselves.” Two men rose and scrambled off the trouble-filled bus. Mrs. Hamilton slowly walked back and took one of their seats. Now Claudette was again alone in her row.