Claudette Colvin Children: Meet Raymond Colvin And Randy Colvin

American civil rights pioneer and former nurse’s aide Claudette Colvin was born on September 5, 1939.

She was detained on March 2, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, at the age of 15, after refusing to give up her seat to a white woman on a crowded, segregated bus. This episode took place nine months before the more well-known one, when Rosa Parks, the secretary of the neighborhood NAACP branch, had a role in inspiring the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. Colvin was one of four plaintiffs in the first federal court lawsuit, Browder v. Gayle, brought by civil rights lawyer Fred Gray on February 1, 1956, to fight the city’s bus segregation.

Claudette Colvin Children: Meet Raymond Colvin And Randy Colvin

In March 1956, Colvin gave birth to Raymond, a son. In 1958, Colvin moved from Montgomery to New York City because she was having trouble obtaining and keeping a job after taking part in the federal court lawsuit that ended bus segregation. Rosa Parks also left Montgomery in 1957 and moved to Detroit. Colvin initially resided in New York with her son Raymond and her older sister Velma Colvin. She gave birth to Randy, her second son, in 1960. In 1969, Claudette started working as a nurse’s assistant in a Manhattan nursing home.