Another Historical Glitch

I am beginning to wonder how many of the things I learned in school are actually facts,as time goes on the accuracy rate drops lower and lower.

Everyone knows that Rosa Parks is famous for not giving up her seat on a bus in Montgomery,Alabama on December 1,1955,but she was not the first black woman to do so. Nine months prior to Rosa,on March 2,1955 a 15 year old Claudette Colvin refused to surrender her seat. Montgomery's black leaders did not publicize Colvin's effort because she was a teenager and became pregnant while unmarried. The NAACP worried about using her to represent the movement due to social norms of the time.



A young Claudette



Colvin admires Rosa Parks and concedes that as a 42 year old adult she made a better symbol for the bus boycott than a youth of 15 would have. Parks was a Colvin family friend,and Claudette's mother always felt that Rosa was the mother of the civil rights movement,and nothing should be said to contradict that.

Claudette today