Texas resident Claudette Colvin is currently 84 years old and is often asked about her childhood. Specifically, people are interested in what happened to her on this day in 1955 when she was a 15-year-old headed home from school. She was taken off the public bus and arrested. What was her “crime?”
She was black and refused to vacate her seat for a white girl.
Months before Rosa Parks, there was Claudette. Why she isn’t remembered like Rosa Parks is beyond me. Perhaps it was her age and teens are almost expected to be defiant. But her actions highlighted the hypocrisy and bigotry of the times. This is NOT one of America’s shining moments!
In school, Claudette had been learning about Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, two American abolitionists who helped rescue slaves during the 19th c. On the way home, the bus became crowded and when a white woman boarded, the driver told four black girls that they had to move to the back. Three complied but Claudette held her ground. Though there was now plenty of room for the white woman to sit, the law stipulated that a black person and a white person could not sit together. Thinking about a paper she had recently written about Tubman and Truth, Claudette declared that her constitutional rights were being violated, she had paid her fare, and she would not move.
At the next stop, police cars were waiting.
“Whenever people ask me: ‘Why didn’t you get up when the bus driver asked you?’ I say it felt as though Harriet Tubman’s hands were pushing me down on one shoulder and Sojourner Truth’s hands were pushing me down on the other shoulder. I felt inspired by these women because my teacher taught us about them in so much detail,” she says.
“I wasn’t frightened but disappointed and angry because I knew I was sitting in the right seat.”
“The driver kept on going but stopped when he reached a junction where a police squad car was waiting. Two policemen boarded the bus and asked Colvin why she wouldn’t give up her seat.
“I was more defiant and then they knocked my books out of my lap and one of them grabbed my arm. I don’t know how I got off that bus but the other students said they manhandled me off the bus and put me in the squad car. But what I do remember is when they asked me to stick my arms out the window and that’s when they handcuffed me,” Colvin says.
“Instead of being taken to a juvenile detention center, Colvin was taken to an adult jail and put in a small cell with nothing in it but a broken sink and a cot without a mattress.
“I was scared and it was really, really frightening, it was like those Western movies where they put the bandit in the jail cell and you could hear the keys. I can still vividly hear the click of those keys.
“I waited for about three hours until my mother arrived with my pastor to bail me out. My mother knew I was disappointed with the system and all the injustice we were receiving and she said to me: ‘Well, Claudette, you finally did it.'”
“After Colvin was released from prison, there were fears that her home would be attacked. Members of the community acted as lookouts, while Colvin’s father sat up all night with a shotgun, in case the Ku Klux Klan turned up.”1
Try to put yourself in her place and in the place of black people when segregation was happening. They had to use the “colored bathroom,” the “colored drinking fountain,” sit in certain seats, give up their place to a white person, and they were banned from certain restaurants. If they went to a store for a pair of shoes, they weren’t allowed to try them on. They had to draw an outline of their foot on a brown grocery sack and bring that in because their foot was too “black” to be allowed in a shoe that someone else might try.
My heart breaks for the shame placed on certain ethnicities through the years and the degrading ways in which they were treated. This isn’t just something from American culture. Segregation, racism, and bigotry can be found globally. It was even found in Bible days.
There is one solution that works to cure such animosity.
Colossians 3:10-14 says, “And have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him: (11) Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all. (12) Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering; (13) Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel against any: even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye. (14) And above all these things put on charity, which is the bond of perfectness.”
When Jesus enters our heart at salvation, racial diversity ENDS and we become one family of God through Jesus Christ. We are filled with the agape love of God.
You might say, “Some of the worst atrocities perpetrated against those of different ethnicities have been by Christians. How can you say that Jesus makes this go away?”
First, all who say they are Christians aren’t. Matthew 7:21-23 tells us that plainly. To put it another way, all who are professing aren’t possessing. Their actions bear this out.
Second, for those who are genuinely saved but are acting in unchristian way, verses 12-14 of Colossians 3 tell us that we have some decisions to make. We must CHOOSE to act right and do right by the grace of God. We are told that we must “put on”
certain things. Since I am commanded to do this, it intimates that I have a choice – obey or disobey. Unfortunately, NONE of us always choose to do right.
I don’t know who needs this today but please remember something. There is absolutely NO JUSTIFICATION WHATSOEVER (yes, all caps means I’m yelling this!) for being a racist. My skin color makes me no different, better, or worse than anyone else.
Remember something else. There is only one race and it’s called the human race. Be the good, Godly human God wants you to be!
1https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-43171799
