On March 2nd, 1955 Claudette Colvin walked downtown with her friends to board a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. On the bus, Colvin and her companions decided to sit in the first five rows of the bus which were reserved for whites. (Diaries) When a white woman boarded the bus with her friends, they could not find seats. Because the bus driver had the power to force blacks to change seats, he ordered Colvin and her friends to move. Although her friends moved immediately, (Michaelmechanic) Colvin refused. She later said that she did not move because “history had me glued to my seat.” (Diaries) She was thinking about the lessons that were taught at her segregated school during Negro History month (now Black History month). The police were alerted. …show more content…
They thought that she didn’t fit the image that they were trying to present. After further investigation into Colvin, the NAACP found out that she was impregnated by a married man. (Blattman) Her family was poor and she lived in King Hill, the poorest section of Montgomery, AL. Her father mowed lawns and her mother was a maid. (“The First ‘Rosa Parks.’” ) Furthermore, she was deemed to have “darker skin” which was not as socially accepted at the time as “lighter skin”. She also didn’t wasn’t that well known, so people didn’t know what they were expecting from her. (Blattman) From all this Black leader and the NAACP decided that they should turn to Rosa Parks to be an …show more content…
Her qualities as the secretary of the NAACP (“On This Day) pulled the trust of black leaders and the NAACP towards her. Unlike Claudette Colvin, she was a free standing middle-class citizen with “lighter skin”. She was also an adult while Claudette was still a minor. (Blattman) She was very well known and highly respected in her community (Dobson). Additionally, Rosa Parks stayed in Montgomery after she was arrested, but Colvin moved away to New York, New York because she was “more interested in the growing Black Power Movement and Malcolm X than they were in the bus boycott and Martin Luther King, Jr.”