Claudette Colvin

by Phillip Hoose

  CLAUDETTE’S LAWYER wasn’t much older than she was. Bespectacled, serious, sporting a pencil-thin mustache, and usually seen in a neatly pressed suit, twenty-four-year-old Fred Gray was just six months out of law school in March 1955. The youngest of five children, he had grown up riding the Montgomery city buses in a triangle between school and home and his job with a newspaper. He had never himself been beaten or threatened on a bus, but he had heard more than enough insults and witnessed more than enough abuse of black passengers to last a lifetime. Like Claudette, he had vowed to study law in the North and then return home to “destroy everything segregated I could find.”

  After high school, Gray worked his way rapidly through Alabama State College and then went off to law school in Ohio. True to his pledge, he returned to Montgomery soon after graduation, passed the Alabama bar exam, and opened his practice in a tiny downtown office, finding his first clients though black churches and NAACP meetings. He had lunch almost every day with Rosa Parks, who worked across the street at the Montgomery Fair department store. When E. D. Nixon suggested he take the Claudette Colvin case, Gray leaped at the chance. Since Claudette had been charged with breaking the city and state segregation laws, Gray hoped he could use the case to show they were unconstitutional. There had never been a chance before, since no one except Claudette Colvin had ever pleaded not guilty to breaking the segregation laws in a bus arrest.

  Claudette’s lawyer, Fred Gray—young, smart, and “determined to destroy everything segregated I could find”

  One March evening, Gray and his secretary, Bernice Hill, drove out to King Hill to meet Claudette and her parents. They sat around the Colvins’ small kitchen table sipping coffee and talking, while Hill took notes. Since Claudette was still a legal minor, one of her parents would have to file the lawsuit on her behalf. Given its importance, both parents would have to strongly support it. Gray took an instant liking to the entire family, sizing them up as brave and self-reliant. For her part, Claudette admired Fred Gray as the first person she had ever met who was doing what she herself wanted to do someday.

  Gray urged all three to consider the hazards of contesting the charges in court. By pleading not guilty, Claudette would be doing more than just talking back to whites: she would be challenging Jim Crow dead-on. Her name would almost certainly be in the paper. Homes had been bombed, jobs lost, and people lynched for less. All three Colvins simply looked back at him, unshaken. Gray turned to Claudette and asked if she was sure.

  “Yes, I am,” she replied.

  Her quick response and the family’s unity of purpose sent Fred Gray off King Hill with a sense of hope. Whatever was to come, at least the Colvins were not people who would back down.

  There had been thirteen black students on the Highland Gardens bus the day Claudette was arrested, most of them her classmates at Booker T. Washington. Gray arranged for the high school principal to issue passes for students willing to testify at Claudette’s hearing. Just before the trial, he spoke to them as a group, coaching them about what they might be asked and how best to answer.

  In the days before Claudette’s hearing, black leaders rallied around her. The Citizens Coordinating Committee, a group of prominent black men and women, mimeographed a leaflet and passed it around Montgomery. Entitled “To Friends of Justice and Human Rights,” it described Claudette’s arrest and demanded that she be acquitted of charges. It also called for punishment of the bus driver and insisted on clarification of the long-standing city bus rule—constantly ignored by drivers—that said no rider had to give up a seat unless another was available.

  Claudette’s hearing was held on March 18, 1955, late in the morning. A cousin drove Claudette, Q.P., and their neighbor Annie Larkin off the Hill and down to Montgomery County’s juvenile court. Claudette felt certain her troubles would be over by nightfall. “I thought Fred Gray was a very good lawyer,” she remembers. “He seemed to have prepared very well. I was confident.”

  Because Claudette’s plea of not guilty to breaking the segregation law was important to every black bus rider in Montgomery, several leaders attended the hearing, including Jo Ann Robinson and the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, pastor of the First Baptist Church. It was nearly noon when Claudette and Fred Gray were summoned into the small courtroom to appear before Juvenile Court Judge Wiley Hill, Jr. Students remained in the hall, straining to hear what was going on behind the door and waiting for their names to be called.

  Claudette faced three separate charges: violating the segregation law, disturbing the peace, and “assaulting” the policemen who had pulled her off the bus. Judge Hill heard testimony from Patrolmen Paul Headley and T. J. Ward, the arresting officers. Ward testified that when he’d placed Claudette under arrest, she had “fought” the officers, kicking and scratching them. “She insisted she was colored and just as good as white,” Ward informed the judge. The two officers were able to show a letter written by a white passenger on the bus that day, praising them as “gentlemen almost to the point of turning the other cheek” who spoke to Claudette in “tones so soft that I doubt if any of the other passengers aboard the bus even heard them.” When called, Fred Gray’s student witnesses offered a very different story, of two police officers confronting a teenage girl with frightening force on a packed bus. Gray challenged the laws themselves, contending that the provisions of Alabama’s laws and Montgomery’s city ordinances requiring racial segregation were unconstitutional.

  Just before lunchtime, Judge Hill delivered his blunt ruling: guilty of all charges. Claudette would be placed on probation, was declared a ward of the state, and was released to the custody of her parents. He cracked his gavel, dismissing the case. As the words washed over Claudette, she felt a wave of anguish, and then everything she had been holding inside for the past two weeks came pouring out. “Claudette’s agonized sobs penetrated the atmosphere of the courthouse,” wrote Jo Ann Robinson. “Many people brushed away their own tears.”

  CLAUDETTE: Now I was a criminal. Now I would have a police record whenever I went to get a job, or when I tried to go to college. Yes, I was free on probation, but I would have to watch my step everywhere I went for at least a year. Anyone who didn’t like me could get me in trouble. On top of that I hadn’t done anything wrong. Not everyone knew the bus rule that said they couldn’t make you get up and stand if there was no seat available for you to go to—but I did. When the driver told me to go back, there was no other seat. I hadn’t broken the law. And assaulting a police officer? I probably wouldn’t have lived for very long if I had assaulted those officers.

  When I got back to school, more and more students seemed to turn against me. Everywhere I went people pointed at me and whispered. Some kids would snicker when they saw me coming down the hall. “It’s my constitutional right! It’s my constitutional right!” I had taken a stand for my people. I had stood up for our rights. I hadn’t expected to become a hero, but I sure didn’t expect this.

  I cried a lot, and people saw me cry. They kept saying I was “emotional.” Well, who wouldn’t be emotional after something like that? Tell me, who wouldn’t cry?

  The newspaper article on the facing page appeared in the Alabama Journal on March 19, 1955

  CHAPTER SIX

  “CRAZY” TIMES

  I had crossed the line. I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land.

  —Harriet Tubman

  Spring and Summer 1955

  THE MORNING AFTER HER HEARING, an article about Claudette’s conviction appeared in the Montgomery Advertiser. Headlined “Negro Guilty of Violation of City Bus Segregation Law,” the story reminded readers that, according to the city code, “a bus driver has police power while in charge of a bus and must see that white and Negro passengers are segregated.”

  As word spread, an atmosphere of tension settled over Montgomery. “The verdict was a bombshell,” Jo Ann Robinson later wrote. “Blacks were as near a breaking point as they had ever
been. Resentment, rebellion and unrest were evident in all Negro circles. For a few days, large numbers refused to use the buses . . . Complaints streamed in from everywhere.

  “The question of boycotting came up again and loomed in the minds of thousands of black people,” Robinson continued. “On paper, the Women’s Political Council had already planned for fifty thousand notices calling people to boycott the buses; only the specifics of time and place had to be added . . . But some members were doubtful; some wanted to wait. The women wanted to be certain the entire city was behind them, and opinions differed where Claudette was concerned. Some felt she was too young to be the trigger that precipitated the movement.”

  Was she too young? Could a rebellious teen be controlled? Who was this girl anyway? Robinson’s WPC lieutenants probed into Claudette’s background, since few adult leaders in Montgomery had ever heard of her. They already knew that her mother and father were not part of the elite social set that revolved around Alabama State College and the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Investigation showed that Claudette Colvin was being raised by her great-uncle and great-aunt, respectively a “yard boy” and a “day lady,” as maids were called. The Colvins lived in King Hill, a neighborhood that meant “poor” or “inferior” to most who didn’t live there. And the Hutchinson Street Baptist Church, which Claudette faithfully attended, was a church for the working poor.

  This list, probably written by NAACP secretary Rosa Parks, shows contributions made by churches to “the Colvin case”

  Doubts crept in. A swarm of adjectives began to buzz around Claudette Colvin, words like “emotional” and “uncontrollable” and “profane” and “feisty.” The bottom line was, as Jo Ann Robinson tactfully put it, that “opinions differed where Claudette was concerned.” E. D. Nixon later explained, “I had to be sure that I had somebody I could win with.” So the leaders of the burgeoning Montgomery bus revolt turned away from Claudette Colvin.

  About the only person not involved in these discussions was Claudette. “Nobody ever came to interview me about being a boycott spokesperson,” she later said. “I had no idea adults were talking about me and looking into my life. The only one of those people I talked to was my lawyer, Fred Gray.”

  The NAACP and other Montgomery groups decided not to protest Claudette’s conviction with a bus boycott, but they did raise money to appeal the ruling, partly to clear her name and partly so they could keep using her case to attack the segregation law. Leaders were eager to appeal it all the way up to federal court. Throughout March, Montgomery’s black churchgoers were asked to drop a little extra into the collection plate for Claudette Colvin’s case. By the end of the month, fourteen churches and four civic groups had chipped in to raise almost all of what the lawyers were charging.

  Virginia Durr, a wealthy and influential white Montgomerian who supported the NAACP, launched her own support drive for Claudette. She wrote Curtiss McDougall, a college professor she knew, and asked him to persuade his students to collect money for the appeal and write Claudette messages of support. “I just can’t explain how this little girl was so brave,” Mrs. Durr wrote. “It was a miracle . . . Even after being deserted [on the bus] by her other companions she still would not move. In this setting and in this town and with four big burly white men threatening her—isn’t that amazing?” More than one hundred letters soon arrived addressed to Claudette in care of Mrs. Rosa Parks, Secretary of the Montgomery NAACP.

  APPEALING A LEGAL DECISION

  The U.S. legal system begins with city and county courts, goes on to state courts, then to federal courts, and finally to the U.S. Supreme Court. If a person does not agree with a court decision, she or he can usually appeal the case to a higher court.

  It is tempting to appeal, to take a second chance. But lawyers are expensive, and winning cases on appeal is not always easy, as judges are sometimes reluctant to reverse the decisions of their colleagues on lower courts.

  In Claudette’s case, black leaders decided to appeal a decision made in Montgomery’s juvenile court to the next level, Montgomery Circuit Court, which was still within the state of Alabama’s court system.

  On May 6, 1955, Gray went back to Montgomery Circuit Court to appeal Claudette’s conviction. After hearing testimony, Judge Eugene Carter dropped two of the three charges against Claudette—disturbing the peace and breaking the segregation law. But he kept the third, her conviction for “assaulting” the officers who had lifted her out of her seat and dragged her off the bus. He sentenced Claudette to pay a small fine and kept her on probation in the custody of her parents.

  It was a dispiriting outcome on two scores. First, Montgomery’s black leaders had hoped to keep using Claudette’s case in higher courts to challenge the constitutionality of segregated bus seating. But now that Judge Carter had shrewdly dropped that charge, there was nothing left to appeal that was specifically about segregation. All the leaders but Gray lost interest in appealing Claudette’s case any further.

  Second, Claudette still had a criminal record. She had been convicted of assaulting police officers, information that would forever blemish her job applications, credit record, and school transcripts. By keeping the assault charge, Judge Carter deprived Claudette of peace of mind. Now she feared that people would see her as a juvenile delinquent, a criminal, someone with a mark against her name. Had she thrown away her dreams by taking a stand?

  As cold, rainy weather set in, blacks returned to the buses. Claudette went back to school to finish out the last few weeks of her junior year. She soon found that attitudes at Booker T. Washington had hardened against her. It was easier to see the “bus girl” as a troublemaker than as a pioneer. More and more students mocked her now. Shaken, but defiant to the core, Claudette battled back—in her own way.

  CLAUDETTE: One Saturday I was home by myself waiting around for an appointment with the beautician to have my hair straightened. And then it hit me: Why am I wasting my time and two good dollars straightening my hair so I can look more white? I went straight into the kitchen and washed it. Then I pulled it out into little braids while it was still damp. When I was done I looked like I was about six years old.

  My mother came in the door to ask me why I didn’t show up at the beauty shop. Then she took one look at my hair and said, “What?”

  Making those pigtails was the strongest statement I could make in that school. If I had cut all my hair off, they probably would have locked me in an institution. Miss Nesbitt was right: My hair was “good hair,” no matter what. By wearing it natural I was saying, “I think I’m as pretty as you are.” All of a sudden it seemed such a waste of time to heat up a comb and straighten your hair before you went to school. So I just quit doing it. I felt very emotional about segregation, about the way we were treated, and about the way we treated each other. I told everybody, “I won’t straighten my hair until they straighten out this mess.” And that meant until we got some justice.

  When I went to school the next Monday, people were cold shocked. Teachers asked me, “Why would you do such a thing?” They wouldn’t let me be in the school play because of how I wore my hair. Classmates said I was still grieving Delphine. I tried to put it out of my mind, but no one else would.

  At that time I had a boyfriend named Fred Harvey. He was in my homeroom and I used to help him with his homework. He was really sweet. He’d take me to the movies and save enough money so he could send me home in a taxi rather than put me on the bus. But he was just stunned. He kept asking me, “Why, why? Why won’t you straighten your hair?” I told him I thought my hair looked “African,” and I was proud of it. That really got him. Back then we never used the word “African.” Africa was the jungle, Africa was Tarzan. We were supposed to be ashamed of our African past. But Africa made me proud. That whole spring, until school was out, just about all I heard from anybody was “You’re crazy. You’re crazy. You’re crazy.”

  “FROM THE TIME CLAUDETTE GOT ARRESTED she was the center of attention,” remembers Alea
n Bowser, one of Claudette’s classmates. “But the attention was directed in the wrong way. Kids were saying she should have known what would happen, that she should have got up from her seat. Everything was reversed, everyone blamed her rather than the people who did those things to her. They would whisper as she went down the hall. It was mean.

  “What she did with her hair just made it worse. She had always kept her hair neatly styled. And then she just came to school one day with cornrows . . . It was shocking. Kids had already pulled back from her. They were already whispering she was crazy and things like that. I was shocked, too, but I wasn’t embarrassed by what she did with her hair. I was on her side. Claudette was a wonderful person, with a mind that was mature beyond her years. One day our teacher told us to write down on a piece of paper what we wanted to be when we grew up and pass it up front. Claudette wrote, ‘President of the U.S.’ I think she meant it. We should have been rallying around her and being proud of what she had done, but instead we ridiculed her.”

  School recessed for the year and the sun set about baking central Alabama. As the long, buggy summer days drifted by, Claudette spent much of her time at King Hill Park, sitting outside on the veranda, crocheting and talking to her cousin, dragging her chair around to follow the shade. Often she helped her mother take care of her white family’s three young children. Every now and then she scraped up a babysitting job. Nights seemed even slower. Dances and parties were out—what if something went wrong? One false move, or one malicious report, and she was a parole violator. Claudette lost touch with her friends, stayed home, and turned inward.