The Bus Incident Case Study

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The bus incident On the second day of March in the year 1955, a young, black girl named Claudette Colvin waited for the bus. She was 15 years old and lived in Montgomery. Colvin had just finished school for the day and was heading home. The city bus came, and she sat down in the area reserved for “black” passengers. As the bus filled up, left standing was a young, white woman. The seats in the white area were full, but there was an available seat in the opposite row of Colvin. Because of Jim Crows law- a law that said that a white person could not sit opposite of a colored person, the white woman refused to sit there. The bus driver ordered Colvin to move to the back of the bus so that the white female could sit down. Colvin refused to move. The bus driver called the police, and they asked Colvin to get up. Once again, she refused, and they asked her why she was still sitting there when they had asked her to leave. Colvin told them that history had glued her to the seat, that it felt like Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman’s hand was pushing her down. Colvin continued by saying that it was her constitutional right to sit there and that she was not breaking any state law. One of the police officers knocked her books out of her hands, and the other …show more content…

Raymond was so light-skinned that many people believed that his father was a white man. In 1958, Colin and her son moved to New York. This was because of the federal court who had given her a hard time getting and keeping a job after the bus incident. As with Colvin, this also happened to Rosa Parks and she chose to leave Montgomery in 1957. Claudette Colvin had to drop out of college because some of the people in the community thought of her as a troublemaker. She lost most of her friends because of their parents who told them that they had to stay away from her. Some people called her an extremist, while others looked up to her and her

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