Glasgow Celebrates Women’s History Month by Spotlighting Claudette Colvin
On September 5, 1939, Claudette Austin was born in Montgomery, Alabama to Mary Jane Gadson and C. P. Austin. Claudette’s mother was unable to support her children when her dad left the family. They were taken in by their great aunt and uncle. Colvin and her sister, Delphine, took their last names from their parents. Pine Level is a small country town in Montgomery County where Rosa Parks grew up. When she was eight years old, the Colvins moved to King Hill, a poor black neighborhood in Montgomery, where she spent the rest of her life. Delphine died of polio two days before Claudette’s birthday.
In September 1952, Claudette started attending Booker T. Washington High School. Despite being a good student, Claudette had trouble connecting with her peers due to grief. She formed a close relationship with her mentor, Rosa Parks, while she was a member of the NAACP Youth Council.
On March 2, 1955, Claudette was arrested at the age of 15 in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her seat to a white woman on a crowded bus. Nine months before the Montgomery bus boycott, the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had an incident in which Rosa Parks helped spark the boycott. A group of black civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr. She was helped out by her minister, who told her that she had brought the revolution to Montgomery. She was convicted in juvenile court. On May 6, 1955, the charges of disturbing the peace and violating the segregation laws were dropped when the case was appealed to the Montgomery Circuit in court.
Claudette Colvin is important to our community because she was around our age when all the incident happened but she demonstrated courage and strong will and kept looking forward which inspires many Glasgow students.
Want to learn more? Check these out:
https://www.biography.com/activist/claudette-colvin
https://www.npr.org/2009/03/15/101719889/before-rosa-parks-there-was-claudette-colvin
Lina Mohamed (any pronouns) is an 8th grader in Glasgow Middle School. He was born and from Saudi Arabia, but their parents are from Ethiopia. They love gaming, drawing, baking, and listening to music. She also obsessed with horror + psychological books, shows etc. and true crime documentaries
