US civil rights pioneer Claudette Colvin dies aged 86
She refused to give up her bus seat months before Rosa Parks and helped dismantle segregation in US public transport.
US civil rights pioneer Claudette Colvin has died at the age of 86, after decades in which her pivotal role in ending racial segregation in public transport remained largely unrecognised.
Colvin was arrested in 1955 at the age of 15 for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white woman in Montgomery, Alabama, nine months before Rosa Parks carried out her more widely known act of defiance.
Her death under hospice care in Texas was confirmed by Ashley Roseboro, a spokesperson for her family and the Claudette Colvin Foundation.
Colvin’s arrest was among the earliest publicised acts of civil disobedience against Montgomery’s Jim Crow laws.
She was forcibly removed from the bus by police after refusing to comply with the driver’s order.
According to accounts of her later court testimony, Colvin said she had been studying anti-slavery figures at school and felt inspired by Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth.
She recalled that "history had me glued to the seat."
Although her actions helped inspire the Montgomery bus boycott, civil rights leaders at the time chose not to centre the movement around her.
Parks, an older and more established activist, was viewed as a more suitable public figure to rally behind.