How Old Is Claudette Colvin? Claudette Colvin Birthday
Claudette Colvin was born on September 5, 1939 and is 84 years old now.
Birthday: September 5, 1939
How Old - Age: 84
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Claudette Colvin - Biography
Claudette Colvin (born September 5, 1939) is a pioneer of the African American Civil Rights Movement. On March 2, 1955, she was the first person arrested for resisting bus segregation in Montgomery, Alabama, preceding the more publicized Rosa Parks incident by nine months.
Colvin gave birth to a son, Raymond in March 1956. He was light-skinned (like his father) and people frequently assumed his father was Elliot Klein who was a very prominent white male in the Montgomery community who was known for sympathizing with blacks. Elliot likely had European ancestry, among more distant ancestors. Elliot later admitted to being the father of the child, but nobody believed him. Colvin left Montgomery for New York City in 1958, because she had difficulty finding and keeping work following her participation in the federal court case that overturned bus segregation. Similarly, Rosa Parks left Montgomery for Detroit in 1957. Colvin said that after her actions on the bus, she was branded a troublemaker by many in her community. She had to drop out of college and struggled in the local environment.
Colvin was a predecessor to the Montgomery bus boycott movement of 1955, which gained national attention. But she rarely told her story after moving to New York City. The discussions in the black community began to focus on black enterprise rather than integration, although national civil rights legislation did not pass until 1964 and 1965. NPR's Margot Adler has said that black organizations believed that Rosa Parks would be a better figure for a test case for integration because she was an adult, had a job, and had a middle-class appearance. They felt she had the maturity to handle being at the center of potential controversy.
Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove memorialized Colvin in her poem "Claudette Colvin Goes To Work", published in her 1999 book On the Bus with Rosa Parks; folk singer John McCutcheon turned this poem into a song, which was first publicly performed in Charlottesville, Virginia's Paramount Theater in 2006.
