Montgomery: Claudette Colvin, who refused to leave her bus seat for a white woman in Montgomery, Alabama, has passed away at the age of 86. The incident took place in 1955 when she was a young girl at 15 years of age.

How Claudette Colvin’s act encouraged other women?

While the act was unpopular at the time, her step encouraged many other women like Rosa Parks, who also showed an act of defiance close to nine months later. Colvin remained involved with civil rights movements.

She also helped others to form basis for basis for the federal lawsuit, which held in the removal of racial segregation in the US public transport, Associated Press reported. Her death has been confirmed by Ashley Roseboro of laudette Colvin Foundation. He is also the spokesperson of the family.

Civil disobedience against Montgomery’s Jim Crow rules

In 1955, in a major act of civil disobedience against Montgomery’s Jim Crow rules, which encouraged sitting in the bus by race, she refused to leave her seat for a white driver, even after the same was ordered by the driver. She was later dragged out of the bus by police.

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As per her testimony in court, Colvin once recounted that she used to study anti-slavery abolitionist heroes when she was in school. She used to feel like having d Harriet Tubman on one shoulder, Sojourner Truth on the other. Colvin observed that history made her continue to remain seated despite order by the bus driver.

Colvin lived in obscurity

About a year after her arrest, she also became pregnant by a married man from an encounter that she later described as statutory rape. She went on to become a principal witness in the Browder v. Gayle lawsuit challenging the city’s Jim Crow bus policies. Afterwards, she lived in obscurity and worked as a nurse’s aide and had to struggle as a single mother.