I've noticed that a lot of people on Facebook are, quite properly, acknowledging that today is the 60th anniversary of Rosa Parks sitting down on the bus as a stand against segregation. Some folks are also reminding people (again, as they should) that the story most Americans are told, where Rosa Parks is an old lady who sits down on the bus because she's tired, is in fact a myth. Rosa Parks was an activist, and she sat down on the bus because she had planned to do so as an act of protest. To say anything else about her is to downplay her political agency and the real injustice of segregation. (I've found a disturbing amount of misinformation about this just by Googling her-thank you, about.com, she was not "a bit distracted" when she sat down, and she did not stay seated because the bus-driver did not use his gun to "convince" her, as he was legally allowed to do). To indicate that a black woman, of any age, in Montgomery, AL at that time could or would stay seated when the bus driver demanded her seat, simply because she was tired, really downplays the violence of segregation, and the intelligence of the people who were imprisoned by it. Bus drivers were allowed to use guns on buses to enforce segregated seating. And they did in fact use them. Think about that. If you know you can get shot for standing up, and someone tells you to stand up, you stand up even when you're tired.

So there's that--and it's important. But it feels wrong to challenge all those myths without saying that Rosa Parks was actually far from the first black woman to protest segregation on a Montgomery bus. A decent number of women had done it before her--the segregation of buses in Montgomery was unusually contested in comparison to other Southern cities, because it was worse. In most other Southern cities, there was a black section of the bus and a white section of the bus-black people couldn't sit in the white section, but white people couldn't sit in the black section either, no matter how full the bus was. In Montgomery, the law was that if the white section was full and a white passenger boarded, the bus-driver had the right (and this is what Rosa Parks was refusing to comply with) to demand that black people vacate seats such that the white passenger could sit down. Not only sit down, but sit down without having to sit next to a black person (segregation, remember?) so that sometimes numerous black people would have to vacate their seats for one white person. It was really unusually bad, and women (usually women because they took the bus more) did sometimes refuse to comply because of how resented it all was and how roughly they were treated by the bus-drivers "requesting" seats (who could also force people to vacate seats that weren't strictly "necessary" even under this system-that firearm gave them a lot of leeway).

But in addition to never hearing about those earlier women, we never hear much about Claudette Colvin, and it seems really wrong to let this anniversary go by without mentioning her. Claudette Colvin was actually, in a way, the real Rosa Parks. She was a black high school kid who had refused to vacate her seat on the bus 9 months before Rosa Parks did, partly inspired by a teacher who had been talking to her class about African-American history and the rights of US citizens under the Constitution. Her case was picked up by the NAACP, and she ended up being one of the five plaintiffs in the case that actually led the Supreme Court to uphold the lower court ruling that declared the bus segregation laws in Alabama unconstitutional (Browder v Gayle). She was very young (I think the youngest person ever to have protested in this way), she performed a consciously political act, and she was really very brave. Claudette Colvin was essentially the person who, by her actions, set off the NAACP's battle against segregation of the buses in Montgomery. So why do we never hear about her? Well, she was from the wrong side of the tracks, she was young and perceived as "wild," and she got pregnant as an unmarried teenager (after she had refused to give up her seat on the bus). That's really what happened. Rosa Parks lived in the tier of the segregated African-American community where people had skilled jobs (she had one herself, as a seamstress), while most adults in Claudette Colvin's neighborhood worked as cleaners or doing menial labor. The NAACP felt Rosa Parks would make a better face for this battle in the movement for civil rights--and you can see why they would have thought so. The kind of words people use now about black kids from poor neighborhoods are probably nothing to the kind of words they used to describe those kids then. Not to mention single mothers and pregnant teens. So Claudette Colvin was pushed into the background and the story about Montgomery buses became a story about Rosa Parks. (Ironically, Rosa Parks' case was not successful in the courts, whereas Claudette Colvin's, now mostly forgotten, was). It's not exactly a triumphal version of this story. But it's a true one. It reminds you about how injustice sometimes compounds injustice in ways that later get lost, when people write history. It reminds you that every part of the world, including the parts you don't like, has a history that contributed to the way things are. And it pays tribute to someone whose role has been unjustly forgotten.

When I was teaching in a GED program, my (primarily African-American) students and I read this book: Claudette Colvin: Twice Towards Justice.  My students loved it, and I did too. I spent a lot of time while teaching really wanting my students to get that history gets constructed, that the disempowering version of American history they'd learned in regular school was a far watered down version of real history, which they could investigate and which is about how things get the way they are. Claudette Colvin's story, and this book, made that argument better than I ever managed to. She had a lot in common with my students, and they found it exciting that she participated in this familiar event in such a big way, but they also understood and related to how and why she was sidelined, as had often happened to them. I saw them get how history is made and how it could tell the truth about the world they experienced, and it was exciting to see.

So I am thinking today about Claudette Colvin. She's often gone unmentioned, but it seems wrong to let today go by without someone mentioning her.
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