December 1, 1955. Seventy years ago today. Montgomery, Alabama. Rosa Parks dared to help America find its conscience. And for some, it’s heart.
On a Thursday evening in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus to head home from her job at a department store. She sat in the first row of the “colored” section.
As the bus filled up, the “white” section became full. The driver, James F. Blake, demanded that Parks and three other Black passengers stand up to create a new row for a single white male passenger.
The other three passengers moved. Rosa Parks refused.
“I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”
March 2, 1955, nine months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, Claudette Colvin did the same. She was a 15-year-old student at Booker T. Washington High School.
On her way home from school, the bus driver ordered her and three other Black students to move to the back to accommodate a white woman. The other students moved; Colvin refused. She later recalled feeling like “Sojourner Truth was pushing down on one shoulder and Harriet Tubman was pushing down on the other.”
Witnesses described young Colvin as fighting “like a little tigress.” She was forcibly removed from the bus by officers, handcuffed, and arrested. She was charged with violating segregation laws, disturbing the peace, and assaulting a police officer.
