Claudette Colvin, aged 13, in 1953.
•On September 5, 1939, Claudette Colvin, civil rights pioneer, was born in Montgomery, Alabama.
•On March 2, 1955, while returning from high school on the bus, Colvin refused to give up her seat to a white person in violation of local law.
•As a result, she was removed from the bus by two police officers and taken to jail.
•At the time, black leaders were looking for a case to litigate to overturn the law, but because of Colvin’s poor background, they waited until they had a plaintiff who was more upstanding.
•For many years, Montgomery's black leaders did not publicize Colvin's pioneering effort.
•At 15 years old, she was an unmarried teenager and was reportedly impregnated by a married man soon after the incident.
•Nine months later, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white person resulting in the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
•"The bus was getting crowded, and I remember the bus driver looking through the rearview mirror asking her [Colvin] to get up for the white woman, which she didn't," said Annie Larkins Price, a classmate of Colvin.
•"She had been yelling, 'It's my constitutional right!' She decided on that day that she would not move."
•Colvin recalled, "History kept me stuck to my seat. I felt the hand of Harriet Tubman pushing down on one shoulder and Sojourner Truth pushing down on the other."
•Colvin was handcuffed, arrested, and forcibly removed from the bus. She shouted that her constitutional rights were being violated.
•Claudette Colvin said, "But I made a personal statement, too, one that [Parks] didn't make and probably couldn't have made. Mine was the first cry for justice, and a loud one."
•Colvin was sentenced to probation and in 1958 moved to New York City.
•She retired in 2004 after 35 years as a nurse’s aide at a Manhattan nursing home.
•Colvin’s story was told in the biography “Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice,” which won the 2009 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature.