Claudette Colvin (5 page)

T
RAGEDY STRUCK ONCE AGAIN
in November, when Claudette's schoolmate and neighbor, sixteen-year-old Jeremiah Reeves, was arrested and charged with raping a white housewife. Reeves confessed to the crime. Police quickly expanded the charges, claiming that he was responsible for raping six white women after breaking into their homes. Blacks in Montgomery were furious. Most were convinced that the police had forced him to confess. “One of the authorities had led him to the death chamber, threatening that if he did not confess at once he would burn there later,” Martin Luther King, Jr., then the new pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, wrote.

After a brief trial, an all-white jury sentenced Reeves to death in the electric chair. This brought blacks throughout Alabama to a boiling point. Even if Reeves was guilty of the charges—something few blacks believed—he hadn't killed anyone. Why should he pay with his life? Blacks knew that no white man accused of a similar crime against a black woman would have been convicted at all, let alone sentenced to die.

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.

C
LAUDETTE
: 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.

I
N
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.

C
LAUDETTE
: 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.