If it has to be explained to you that being black in America has been fairly shitty for pretty much all of our history, then buddy, you’re a bit of a fricking moron. In the constant struggle of two steps forward and one step back, one courageous woman from Montgomery, Alabama was brave enough in the mid-1950's to say she wasn't going to take anymore bullshit. That woman's name was Claudette Colvin. What? You thought I was going to say Rosa Parks? You don't know who Claudette is? Well buddy, better sit down, because history is always shittier than most books would have you believe.
Claudette was born and raised in Montgomery right in the heart of the segregated south. Now, segregation was at the time a legally protected system theoretically based on the idea of “separate, but equal”, though in every case “equal” meant that blacks got everything whites did, just in a much shittier, both figuratively and literally, form. When it came to the city bus system, everyone rode the same bus, because even racists prefer profits over ideology. However, blacks had to sit in the back, and if a white person needed their seat they had to stand. This was the world that Claudette grew up in, and this was the world that, at the age of sixteen, she decided she wouldn't put up with anymore. In March of 1955, a full nine months before Rosa Parks, Claudette, on her way home from school, refused to give up her seat to a white woman. Screaming that it was her constitutional right not to get up for anyone, Claudette was forced from the bus and arrested.
Now comes the part where things begin to get rather fucked up. The NAACP had been looking for someone just like Claudette for several years. You see, while most people like to imagine political activism as massive world changing protests, the real change tends to come from groups of well funded lawyers finding court cases to push up through the judicial system. If this sounds tedious as hell, you’re right, it is, and one of the most important things in the process is that the right symbol is found. Unfortunately for Claudette she did not fit this bill. Claudette was from a poor family and was best described as mouthy, emotional, and feisty, as most teenagers are. Unlike most teenagers, she was also pregnant with the bastard child of a married man. However, these weren't the biggest knocks against her. The biggest knock was that she was considered too black. That's right, the NAACP wanted a black woman who would create more national sympathy, which is a real nice way of saying she had to look whiter. Over the next nine months four more women were arrested for not giving up their seats, and all four were rejected by the NAACP for a myriad of reasons, which were largely cover for the fact that they were all too black.
By December of 1955, the NAACP was tired of waiting for a champion, so they made their own in the form of the secretary of the NAACP's Montgomery chapter, Rosa Parks. Rosa was 42, from a middle class family, calm, well mannered, and most importantly, had relatively straighter hair and a lighter skin tone. Rosa got on the bus, refused to give up her seat, the Montgomery Bus Boycott began, and as they say, the rest is history. Except no, things continued to be just as fucked up. The NAACP had its perfect public face, which they preserved by never letting Rosa speak in public. It should probably be mentioned that most of the Civil Rights leaders of the time were rather sexist, this being the 1950's and all. Unfortunately, Rosa's court case quickly got mired down in the local court system. The bus boycott couldn't last forever, since after all, even in the pursuit of freedom people still needed to make money to feed their families, and Rosa's case looked like it wouldn't go anywhere for years. So what did the NAACP do? I'll tell you what. They went back to all the women they had rejected, including Claudette, and started a civil case that skipped right to the federal level. This case quickly worked its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in December of 1956 that all buses had to be desegregated. It was one of the first great victories of the Civil Rights Movement.
So that's it, right? Happy ending? Not really. During and after the court case, Claudette and the other five women found themselves targeted for retribution via harassment, an inability to find work, and even death threats. The NAACP, having gotten what it wanted, did little to help them. Claudette was forced to move to New York in 1958 where she worked in a nursing home and had a second bastard child. Claudette, as well as the other women who were all considered too black, disappeared into anonymity, their contribution almost entirely forgotten.
Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Claudette_Colvin.jpg