Claudette Colvin (10 page)

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.

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.

C
LAUDETTE:
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.”

“F
ROM THE TIME
C
LAUDETTE GOT ARRESTED
she was the center of attention,” remembers Alean 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.

At least there was still church. On Sundays after services at Hutchinson Street Baptist, she would go across town to Rosa Parks's NAACP youth meetings. Mrs.
Parks had appointed Claudette youth secretary, which meant keeping attendance and membership records and putting out notices. The meetings were held at the redbrick Trinity Lutheran Church, pastored by the Reverend Robert S. Graetz. He was the only white minister in Montgomery with an all-black congregation.

C
LAUDETTE:
I only went if I could get a ride, because I didn't want to ride the bus anymore. If I couldn't get a ride back, I'd stay overnight at Rosa's—she lived in the projects across the street. Rosa was hard to get to know, but her mom was just the opposite—warm and talkative and funny. We would stay up all night gabbing, sometimes while Rosa pinned wedding dresses on me that she was altering for work. Rosa's mother knew all sorts of horror stories about black girls getting mistreated. There was nothing we couldn't talk about.

Rosa Parks was like two different people inside and out of the meetings. She was very kind and thoughtful; she knew exactly how I liked my coffee and fixed me peanut butter and Ritz crackers, but she didn't say much at all. Then, when the meetings started, I'd think, Is that the same lady? She would come across very strong about rights. She would pass out leaflets saying things like “We are going to break down the walls of segregation.”

I might have had more fun if the meetings had been in my neighborhood. The children in the NAACP youth group weren't like the students I went to school with. Their parents were professionals; these children went to private schools. Whenever they said they planned to go North for an education after they graduated, Rosa would scold them. “Why should your families have to send you North? Our colleges right here could offer a good education, too—but they're segregated.” Rosa kept inviting me to tell my bus arrest story to the kids there, but after a while they had all heard it a million times. They seemed bored with it.