| One of the goals Deesha and I had for this 32 Days of Black History project was to go beyond the "oft-told tales," to go--as we decided to call this theme--"Beyond Martin and Rosa." I echo Deesha, who says that her post Beyond Martin and Rosa: Clyde Kennardthat the post "is not intended to minimize the great contributions of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks [but]... to remind us that the struggle for civil rights was (and is) a struggle fought by countless people whose names will likely never be recited by schoolchildren, during February or any other month." Deesha at Mamalicious! and I are joined by Tami; Inkognegro; Christina; and Chris. Visit, comment, bookmark! |
Rosa Parks and the Montgomery, AL bus boycott. It is a Black History Month story as familiar as King's I Have a Dream, Tubman's Railroad journeys, and George Washington Carver's peanuts. It is--rightly--an oft-told tale every February. But there was another Montgomery bus ride, by a young woman who didn't spark the boycott, even though her protest predated Mrs. Park's by several months. This was a ride by one of those names that school children (and most of us) do not know: Claudette Colvin.
Happily, Colvin's story is starting to gain more traction in the retelling of this episode in the 20th century Black Civil Rights Movement. The Montgomery Advertiser's History of the Boycott site, for example, has a page dedicated to her:
On March 2, 1955, she, just as Parks had, openly refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery segregated bus to a white passenger. Her arrest preceded the arrest of Parks by nine months.She was only 15 years old at the time. At the time, she was a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Youth Council.
Her act of civil defiance did not spark a bus boycott as Parks’ arrest did. Some controversy surrounded the use of Colvin as a test case to challenge seating practices in the Capital City. Some leaders were reluctant to use Colvin, who later became pregnant, and gave birth about a year after her arrest.
Other more recent stories have gone deeper. This one, for example, names the things that we African Americans still have trouble openly discussing: intra-racial class, color, and gender bias:
[U]nlike Parks, Colvin never made it into the civil rights hall of fame. Just as her case was beginning to catch the nation's imagination, she became pregnant. To the exclusively male and predominantly middle-class, church-dominated, local black leadership in Montgomery, she was a fallen woman. She fell out of history altogether....Colvin was also very dark-skinned, which put her at the bottom of the social pile within the black community - in the pigmentocracy of the South at the time, and even today, while whites discriminated against blacks on grounds of skin colour, the black community discriminated against each other in terms of skin shade. The lighter you were, it was generally thought, the better; the closer your skin tone was to caramel, the closer you were perceived to be to whatever power structure prevailed, and the more likely you were to attract suspicion from those of a darker hue.
Is it ever too late to elaborate in the text what had previously just been a footnote? Is it ever too late to sing the songs of those who had been unsung? Hopefully it is not too late for us to learn about and remember Claudette Colvin.
*Awele Makeba's one-woman play Rage is Not a 1-Day Thing!: The Untaught History of the Montgomery Bus Boycott that is told from the perspective of a 15-year old Colvin. (2005 Stanford Daily review here.)
*Wikipedia page
*Claudette Colvin as part of a project at the Booker T. Washington Magnet High School, "Taking the Time: Young Writers and Old Stories"
*One of several recent efforts to analyze how we relate to children Rosa Parks' and others' roles in the bus boycott is She Would Not Be Moved: How We Tell the Story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott by Herbert Kohl