Free Claudette Colvin by Phillip Hoose Page A

who didn’t know about the one-day bus boycott read about it in the next morning’s
Montgomery Advertiser
, in a story leaked by E. D. Nixon to a trusted reporter.
    The “other Negro woman” arrested was Rosa Parks. Just the afternoon before, Mrs. Parks had refused a driver’s command to give up her seat to a white passenger on a crowded bus. Then, as had been the case with Claudette, the driver called the police, officers boarded, and one asked her, “Why don’t you stand up?” She replied, “Why do you push us around?” He answered, “I don’t know, but the law is the law and you are under arrest.”
    There the similarity to Claudette’s arrest ended. Rather than being grabbed by the wrists and jerked up from her seat with belongings flying everywhere, Rosa Parks stood up. One officer took her shopping bag, the other picked up her purse, and they escorted her off the bus and into a patrol car. She sat in the backseat alone, her hands uncuffed, as they drove to police headquarters and then to city hall. After her fingerprints were taken and the paperwork completed, she was allowed to telephone her family.
    She was charged only with disorderly conduct, not with breaking the segregation law. She was not jailed. Soon E. D. Nixon and two white activists, Clifford and Virginia Durr, hurried downtown, paid her bond, and took her home, where Fred Gray later met her and agreed to be her lawyer. The next Monday morning, Mrs. Parks was found guilty in a brief court hearing. She paid a ten-dollar fine and was released. Gray told the judge to expect an appeal. When Mrs. Parks walked out of the dim courthouseand into the cool, bright morning, she was surprised to find several hundred cheering supporters waiting for her.
    Claudette had lit the fuse to a powder keg of protest, but her rebellion had caught black Montgomery by surprise. Now, nine months later, Rosa Parks was embraced by a community ready for action. Claudette had given them the time to prepare. As Fred Gray later said, “I don’t mean to take anything away from Mrs. Parks, but Claudette gave all of us the moral courage to do what we did.”
    Married and in her early forties, Rosa Parks was widely known as an activist through her work with the Montgomery NAACP. As a seamstress at a downtown department store, she repaired, altered, and steam-pressed clothing—work known and respected by both the black professional class and ordinary workers. She was light-skinned but not white. She may not have gone to the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church—she was a Methodist—but she would have been accepted in any congregation. She bridged classes.
    What she wasn’t may have been just as important to Montgomery’s black leadership, the preachers and teachers and ASC women and E. D. Nixon. She wasn’t a teenager. Hardly “feisty” or “emotional,” as Claudette was rumored to be, Rosa Parks struck almost everyone she met as a contained, pleasant, committed, and levelheaded individual. She was safe.
    And she wasn’t pregnant. Neither was Claudette when she had been arrested and people started talking about her, but now she
was
, and she would have to deal with it.

    C LAUDETTE: The first few months I hoped and prayed and pretended it wasn’t true, but it was. I had so little information about sex. I wasn’t sexually active at all. I had never gone very far with my boyfriend, and my parents had never talked to me about sex. I would hear other girls say, “Well, I didn’t get pregnant my first time, or the second.” It had only happened once with this man, and I was so uninformed that I wasn’t even sure that what we had done could get me pregnant.
    But it had, and I thought my mom was going to have a heart attack when I told her. We thought about an abortion, but it was illegal, and the only woman we had heard of who did abortions was supposedly connected with the