Claudette Colvin is not a name most people know, an under-appreciated pioneer of the civil rights movement. She died two weeks ago. From her New York Times obituary:

Claudette Colvin, whose refusal in 1955 to give up her seat to a white woman on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Ala., came months before it was overshadowed by a similar act of resistance in the same city by Rosa Parks, a historic moment that helped galvanize the civil rights movement, died on Tuesday in Texas. She was 86.

And from AL.com:

She then became a crucial plaintiff in several legal battles that helped to desegregate buses in Montgomery in 1956 and later impacting public transportation across the country.

Because she defied unequal laws she was convicted of assault and deemed a juvenile delinquent for over 66 years.

That conviction was finally expunged in 2021.

Less celebrated than Rosa Parks, it was Colvin’s arrest and subsequent conviction that was the catalyst for the Montgomery Bus Boycott and lawsuit. Colvin could have been the face of the movement—

But local civil rights leaders decided not to make Ms. Colvin their symbol of discrimination. She was, she later said, too dark-skinned and too poor to win the crucial support of Montgomery’s Black middle class.

The Encyclopedia of Alabama expands:

Despite the initial support from the community, the teenager soon found herself shunned by some. […] Colvin and her mother were told that a different “face” would be necessary to ensure the boycott had public support. E. D. Nixon, a longtime civil rights leader in Montgomery, had been looking for a suitable person to voluntarily defy the city’s segregated buses for some time, but Colvin, he felt, was not that person. She was too young, and when she became pregnant later that year, Nixon decided that someone more in line with the more conservative social mores of the time was needed. Nixon and other leaders believed that for a challenge to the system to be successful, anyone who defied the city would have to be of unimpeachable character.

Sadly, even civil rights leaders were not immune from practicing “respectability politics.”

Colvin’s refusal to give up her seat was inspired by what she learned in her segregated school during “Negro history month,” where she studied Black leaders like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, discussed the daily injustices of Jim Crow—like being refused seating at a lunch counter—and wrote an essay on the discrimination Black teenagers faced. Colvin told NPR in 2009:

Can you imagine all of that in my mind? My head was just too full of black history, you know, the oppression that we went through. It felt like Sojourner Truth was on one side pushing me down, and Harriet Tubman was on the other side of me pushing me down. I couldn’t get up.

I didn’t learn about Colvin until 2014, when Apple’s Black employee group (of which I was a co-chair) solicited essays from employees about a person who inspired them. One, an electrical engineer, chose Colvin, writing:

The actions of Ms. Colvin are important to me on a personal level because of my background as a native of Alabama. […] Had it not been for her and any of those that followed in taking a stand for their rights, history could have been written differently […]. Would I have been afforded the opportunities that have led to me working at a company such as Apple?

She concluded her essay:

I hate to think of the what if, but must acknowledge the actions of those who have contributed to the what is. Taking a stand may not always mean a place in history as an icon, but it does mean a contribution to a much greater movement. […] Let’s take a lesson from Ms. Colvin and those others who are unsung, and take a stand when it’s the right thing to do.

Colvin declared to the police who dragged her from the bus, “It’s my constitutional right to sit here as much as that lady,” and proved it in court. As we celebrate Black History Month in the United States—during another time of civil unrest in which our politicians and CEOs kowtow to an autocratic demagogue and law enforcement brutalize Americans—I can’t help but think of all of the unsung modern-day heroes currently taking their stand against an oppressive regime, loudly declaring “it’s my constitutional right!”

Colvin, a quiet pillar of our civil rights movement, would undoubtedly be proud.