For the past few years for Black
History month I have done posts like Famous Black Firsts as well as
Cool Shit Black People Invented. This year I decided to look into
some people and moments in civil rights history. Not sure of a title
yet but by the time I finish this I'll have come up with something.
Hopefully. This post is going to be about Claudette Colvin. I didn't
know that this girl existed until watching an episode of Drunk
History. Sows how well they were teaching this stuff in school.
Claudette was 15 years old on March 2nd, 1955 when while riding the
bus in Montgomery, Alabama she refused to leave her seat. Again.
1955. Doing something like that back then was extremely dangerous
especially if you were some 15 year old Black girl in Alabama. In
school she was learning about Black leaders and felt all kinds of
inspired. Today kids learn about Drake and get inspired to...I don't
know. Go to Canada?
Claudette was arrested and put in jail.
She and a few other women had done this at the time but all we know
about is Rosa Parks and her refusal to leave her seat when asked.
Why? Politics, man! The NAACP, whom Parks was a secretary for at the
time, thought that Parks would be a better representative for the
fight against these laws. So there you have this 15 year old girl
doing something because she felt she was fighting the good fight and
getting hardly any recognition and then you have a 42 year old woman
who is married to a member and working for this huge organization
that planned out the whole thing. Didn't help she was pregnant by a
married man at the time. She once said “Young people think Rosa
Parks just sat down on a bus and ended segregation, but that wasn't
the case at all.”
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