Next time you are having a conversation with an ordinary black person, ask them if they know who Claudette Colvin is. I gaurantee that about 80% of the time, the answer will be “Who?”
Now, for those of you who didn’t just scurry over to Wikipedia and do a search on “cluadett clovin,” here’s the scoop. Ms. Colvin, when she was 15 years old, refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus. No, I’m not confusing her with Rosa Parks; Parks did the same thing, but she did it a full 9 months after Colvin did. So why did Rosa become the poster child for the whole Montgomery Bus Boycott? Why did she become a huge part of American history? Because Colvin was, according to E.G. Nixon, too much of a penniless, pregnant whore to be the hero.
E.G. Nixon was the leader of the Montgomery NAACP chapter and he was eagerly waiting for some poor soul to get arrested for not giving up their seat to the white man so he could rally the black folk and have his little power trip. It finally happened, but Nixon and the NAACP passed their judgement on poor Colvin like the religious zealots they were and decided to wait for a “nice, middle-class, Christian person” to refuse give up their seat. And, lo and behold, along came Rosa Parks. Oh, how fortunate that a woman who was already heavily involved in the Civil Rights Movement even before her bus incident, just happened to be exactly the type of good, moral, Christian person E.G. could use to start his boycott endeavor. If you ask me, Rosa Parks was a fucking puppet and E.G. Nixon was holding the strings. She knew exactly what the fuck she was doing the minute she got on that bus. She wasn’t just some random, unfortunate person that became the victim of oppression, like Claudette was. She was on a mission.
So fuck Rosa Parks, but more importantly, fuck E.D. Nixon for being a manipulative jerk-off, and a White Sentinel salute goes out to Ms. Claudette Colvin for being the real hero.
