The Claudette Colvin Foundation announced that a viewing for the civil rights icon will be held on January 23rd at the Bushelon Funeral Home at 1 p.m. APR news reported this week on Colvin's death. Her refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus helped spark the 1956 bus boycott. Her action came before Rosa Parks. Tuskegee attorney Fred Gray represented both women. He told APR news in 2018 how to came back to Montgomery to fight in the courts for civil rights.
“I got my first opportunity, when Claudette Colvin was arrested on March 2, and E.D. Nixon recommended me to her parents and I represented her before Judge hill in the juvenile court of Montgomery County,” Gray recalled to APR in 2018.
E.D. Nixon was a Montgomery civil rights leader in the 1950’s. The Alabama Public Radio news team spent last year going “behind the scenes” on three moments in the state’s civil rights history. That included the included the seventieth anniversary of the Montgomery bus boycott that Claudette Colvin helped to spark.
“We were not only going to be prepared to file a lawsuit, which I was prepared to do for Claudette, and later did in Browder versus Gayle because she was a party in it, but also to try to get the people involved,’ Gray said in 2018.
Browder versus Gayle was the court case that successfully challenged segregation on Montgomery buses. APR’s investigative series is titled “…a death, a bridge, and a seat on the bus.” You can listen again at apr.org.
Claudette Colvin’s funeral service will be held on January 24th at the Greater Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church at 11 a.m.The civil rights icon passed away on Tuesday at the age of 86.
