Claudette Colvin (7 page)

C
LAUDETTE:
One of them said to the driver in a very angry tone, “Who is it?” The motorman pointed at me. I heard him say, “That's nothing new . . . I've had trouble with that ‘thing' before.” He called me a “thing.” They came to me and stood over me and one said, “Aren't you going to get up?” I said, “No, sir.” He shouted “Get up” again. I started crying, but I felt even more defiant. I kept saying over and over, in my high-pitched voice, “It's my constitutional right to sit here as much as that lady. I paid my fare, it's my constitutional right!” I knew I was talking back to a white policeman, but I had had enough.

The X on this diagram indicates where Claudette was sitting on the Highland Gardens bus when she was arrested

One cop grabbed one of my hands and his partner grabbed the other and they pulled me straight up out of my seat. My books went flying everywhere. I went limp as a baby—I was too smart to fight back. They started dragging me backwards off the bus. One of them kicked me. I might have scratched one of them because I had long nails, but I sure didn't fight back. I kept screaming over and over, “It's my constitutional right!” I wasn't shouting anything profane—I never swore, not then, not ever. I was shouting out my rights.

It just killed me to leave the bus. I hated to give that white woman my seat when so many black people were standing. I was crying hard. The cops put me in the back of a police car and shut the door. They stood outside and talked to each other for a minute, and then one came back and told me to stick my hands out the open window. He handcuffed me and then pulled the door open and jumped in the backseat with me. I put my knees together and crossed my hands over my lap and started praying.

All ride long they swore at me and ridiculed me. They took turns trying to guess my bra size. They called me “nigger bitch” and cracked jokes about parts of my body. I recited the Lord's Prayer and the Twenty-third Psalm over and over in my head, trying to push back the fear. I assumed they were taking me to juvenile court because I was only fifteen. I was thinking, Now I'm gonna be picking cotton, since that's how they punished juveniles—they put you in a school out in the country where they made you do field work during the day.

But we were going in the wrong direction. They kept telling me I was going to Atmore, the women's penitentiary. Instead, we pulled up to the police station and they led me inside. More cops looked up when we came in and started calling me “Thing” and “Whore.” They booked me and took my fingerprints.

Then they put me back in the car and drove me to the city jail—the adult jail. Someone led me straight to a cell without giving me any chance to make a phone call. He opened the door and told me to get inside. He shut it hard behind me and turned the key. The lock fell into place with a heavy sound. It was the worst sound I ever heard. It sounded final. It said I was trapped.

The police report that was filed when Claudette was arrested on March 2, 1955, and her fingerprint record

When he went away, I looked around me: three bare walls, a toilet, and a cot. Then I fell down on my knees in the middle of the cell and started crying again. I didn't know if anyone knew where I was or what had happened to me. I had no idea how long I would be there. I cried and I put my hands together and prayed like I had never prayed before.

M
EANWHILE
, schoolmates who had been on the bus had run home and telephoned Claudette's mother at the house where she worked as a maid. Girls went over and took care of the lady's three small children so that Claudette's mother could leave. Mary Ann Colvin called Claudette's pastor, the Reverend H. H. Johnson. He had a car, and together they sped to the police station.

C
LAUDETTE:
When they led Mom back, there I was in a cell. I was cryin' hard, and then Mom got upset, too. When she saw me, she didn't bawl me out, she just asked, “Are you all right, Claudette?”

Reverend Johnson bailed me out and we drove home. By the time we got to King Hill, word had spread everywhere. All our neighbors came around, and they were just squeezing me to death. I felt happy and proud. I had been talking about getting our rights ever since Jeremiah Reeves was arrested, and now they knew I was serious. Velma, Q.P. and Mary Ann's daughter, who was living with us at the time, kept saying it was my little squeaky voice that had saved me from getting beat up or raped by the cops.

But I was afraid that night, too. I had stood up to a white bus driver and two white cops. I had challenged the bus law. There had been lynchings and cross burnings for that kind of thing. Wetumpka Highway that led out of Montgomery ran right past our house. It would have been easy for the Klan to come up the hill in the night. Dad sat up all night long with his shotgun. We all stayed up. The neighbors facing the highway kept watch. Probably nobody on King Hill slept that night.

But worried or not, I felt proud. I had stood up for our rights. I had done something
a lot of adults hadn't done. On the ride home from jail, coming over the viaduct, Reverend Johnson said something to me I'll never forget. He was an adult who everyone respected and his opinion meant a lot to me. “Claudette,” he said, “I'm so proud of you. Everyone prays for freedom. We've all been praying and praying. But you're different—you want your answer the next morning. And I think you just brought the revolution to Montgomery.”

This school photo of Claudette was probably taken in 1953, when she was thirteen

The world is a severe schoolmaster
.

—Phillis Wheatley, the first published African-American poet (1753?–1784)

T
HE NEWS
that a schoolgirl had been arrested for refusing to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger flashed through Montgomery's black community and traveled far beyond. One man from Sacramento, California, wrote to Claudette:

The wonderful thing which you have just done makes me feel like a craven coward. How encouraging it would be if more adults had your courage, self-respect and integrity.

In Montgomery, students stopped one another at bus corners and by their lockers, saying things like “Have you ever heard of Claudette Colvin?” “Well, do you
know
anyone who knows her?” “Where's she go to school?”

Jo Ann Robinson, a professor of English at Alabama State College at the time, later wrote, “[With]in a few hours, every Negro youngster on the streets discussed Colvin's arrest. Telephones rang. Clubs called special meetings and discussed the event with some degree of alarm. Mothers expressed concern about permitting their children on the buses.”

Jo Ann Robinson had a personal reason to admire anyone who took on the bus system. In 1949, just after she had moved to Montgomery, Robinson had boarded a bus for the airport. It was Christmas break, and she was flying off to Cleveland to visit relatives. After dropping a dime in the fare box, she absentmindedly sat down in one of the ten front seats reserved for whites. Still new to town, she hadn't thought to walk to the back. Besides, there were only two other passengers on the entire bus. Lost in holiday thoughts, she was startled by the realization that someone's face was inches from hers. It was the bus driver, shouting, “Get up from there! Get up from there!” His hand was drawn back as if to strike her. She snatched up her packages and stumbled out the front door, nearly sprawling in the mud as the bus pulled away. “I felt like a dog,” she later wrote.

He had picked the wrong person to bully. Smart, energetic, and extremely well-connected, Jo Ann Robinson was an active member of the Women's Political Council, a large and influential civic group of professional black women in Montgomery. Some WPC members were Alabama State College professors; others, including Claudette's teacher, Geraldine Nesbitt, were ASC graduates who had become teachers. Shortly after Robinson took over as president of the WPC in 1950, she led a successful campaign to make white merchants include the titles “Mr.,” “Mrs.,” and “Miss” on bills and announcements sent to black customers. It was an important measure of respect.