On 2 March 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Claudette Colvin, a 15-year-old Black schoolgirl and activist, refused to give up her seat on a bus that she had been ordered to vacate for a white passenger and was arrested.
Colvin had been a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) Youth Council, and had recently written a school paper on segregation. After her arrest, some civil rights activists like Rosa Parks, began organising to support her.
Colvin was charged with three crimes, including breaking the segregation law, disturbing the peace and assaulting police. The judge dropped the first two charges, and so Colvin was only convicted of assault. While Colvin said that she did not fight back against police, some Black eyewitnesses reported that she "fought like a little tigress".
Local leaders of the civil rights movement considered attempting to make her case a cause célèbre and a test case for the movement, but eventually decided against it for several reasons. Rosa Parks' biographer, Jeanne Theoharis, cites the main reasons as being the legal situation, in that in the end Colvin was not convicted of breaching segregation laws, and the fact that "Colvin was young and seen as 'feisty' and 'uncontrollable' by many adults and lived on the wrong side of town".
Some local activists believe that Colvin's dark skin and working class background was a factor. One, Gwen Patton, told Guardian journalist Gary Younge, "It was partly because of her colour and because she was from the working poor… It was a case of 'bourgey' Blacks looking down on the working class Blacks."
There is a popular myth that Colvin being pregnant was a factor in the decision, however, Colvin did not become pregnant until later.
When Parks was arrested later that year, civil rights leaders had their standard-bearer, and launched a mass campaign which became the Montgomery bus boycott.
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