6813: Taking Her Rightful Seat In History.

From The New York Daily News…

Claudette Colvin: A civil rights pioneer gets due recognition

By Patrice O’Shaughnessy

She was a civil rights hero — a 15-year-old girl in the segregated South who refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger, almost a year before Rosa Parks.

Yet for decades, Claudette Colvin has lived in anonymity in the Bronx, where co-workers, neighbors and even friends had no clue about her pivotal role in history.

That’s changing a bit with the publication of “Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice,” a lauded new book for young adults.

A self-described loner, Colvin has even spoken at a few schools about her jailing, trial and participation in a landmark court fight against segregation of Alabama’s buses.

“I say to the kids, ‘How would you like it if you went to a mall and you couldn’t try on shoes, because what white person would put their foot in the shoe after you tried it?’ You couldn’t try on dresses or Easter hats,” Colvin said.

A retiree with a thick Heart of Dixie drawl and deep dimples when she smiles, Colvin’s eyes grow wide when she speaks about those days.

She didn’t shout her story from the rooftops because she didn’t think anyone in the city wanted to hear it.

“People up here were not interested,” she said.

“They had the same skin color as me, but they speak a different language. They are from the Caribbean, or Africa. They have no idea what it was like for a black person in the South.”

For author Phillip Hoose, Colvin’s story “was the book I wanted to do the most.”

“It’s the best example of a young person making a difference that I’ve ever heard,” he said.

“And then having the guts in a Klan-soaked atmosphere to put her name on a lawsuit against the city and state. I was determined to find her to get her story for teens.”

Colvin’s moment of infamy happened March 2, 1955, when she was sitting in the Negro section of a bus in Montgomery.

Because there were no seats left in the white section, the bus driver ordered her to get out of her row so a white woman could sit there.

Colvin refused, and cops dragged her off the bus as she yelled, “It’s my constitutional right!”

She was tried for violating the segregation laws and sentenced to probation. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. told her he was “proud” of her; most people referred to her as “the girl in the bus thing.”

“She was not considered a good spokeswoman for the cause. She was a teenager. She was outspoken,” Hoose said.

“The NAACP was looking for an icon, and they thought I’d be militant,” Colvin laughed. “Then they got Angela Davis.”

Colvin’s notoriety in the South drove her to New York, where she’s lived since 1967.

“I couldn’t get a job down there. People recognized me,” she said. “My sister was up here, and people were getting jobs.”

She found the North to be “as segregated as the South, but people were courteous.”

Colvin recalled that when she first arrived, she was at a drugstore and a white man held the door open for her. She stood frozen in disbelief.

“I didn’t realize he was holding it for me, and he was looking at me and I was looking at him,” she laughed.

When she came north, Harlem was not the storied place she had heard about; it was ravaged by poverty and riots.

“Harlem was not appreciative of Dr. King. People were more interested in Malcolm X,” she said.

“I was at a bar with co-workers at 125th St. and Seventh Ave. and a guy was on the corner saying, ‘Burn those buildings down!’ and next thing I know a block of buildings was burned down.”

She said the man’s disparaging remarks about King upset her.

“I was crying and someone asked me what was the matter … How was I going to explain? They didn’t understand how King was trying to clear the way. He wanted to show we weren’t lazy Negroes and all those labels they put on us.”

Colvin had shaken King’s hand at a meeting, and then after her arrest she met with him.

“He was a little, average guy, someone you would pass right by on the street,” she said. “But once he opened his mouth to speak he was like Moses, when Charlton Heston played him.”

After moving to New York, Colvin worked at the Mary Manning Walsh nursing home on the East Side as a nurse’s aide from 1968 until she retired in 2004.

She is the mother of two sons; one is deceased and the other is a CPA in Atlanta. She has five grandchildren, including one in medical school, one in the Air Force, one at the Pentagon.

Compelling as her story is, it was all but forgotten after she left Alabama. “By the 1970s, Rosa Parks had a mythological place in history,” Hoose explained.

Colvin joked that she’s “too old to be excited” about Hoose’s book, but she’s clearly pleased.

“I’m so glad that someone is setting the record straight for the youth to know and appreciate what we’ve done and the sacrifices we made,” she said.