Claudette Colvin, Civil Rights Pioneer, Seeks to Have Her Record Cleared

Minutes before the white bus driver told Claudette Colvin in 1955 to give her seat to a white woman, she had been looking out the window, thinking of a Black boy from her neighborhood in Montgomery, Ala., who had been sentenced to death. She remembers thinking of her English teacher’s lesson about understanding and taking pride in her history.

Get off, several white passengers told her. Ms. Colvin, who was 15, stayed put, and was promptly arrested.

“History had me glued to the seat,” she recalled six decades later.

Ms. Colvin, who refused to give up her seat on a segregated Montgomery bus on March 2, 1955, nine months before Rosa Parks, filed a petition on Tuesday to have her juvenile arrest record expunged, saying in an affidavit that justice from the court system was overdue.

“I’m not doing it for me, I’m 82 years old,” Ms. Colvin said in an interview on Tuesday. “But I wanted my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren to understand that their grandmother stood up for something very important, and that it changed our lives a lot, changed attitudes.”

While Mrs. Parks’s story is well known, Ms. Colvin’s role in the Montgomery bus boycott and the broader civil rights movement has been overlooked. And yet the significance of her defiance that day was widely recognized among the emerging leaders of the movement, including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who met with city and bus company officials after her arrest. Ms. Colvin would later serve as the star witness in the landmark case that effectively ended bus segregation.

Ms. Colvin filed her petition in family court in Montgomery County, where her case was processed in 1955. The petition says that clearing Ms. Colvin’s record “serves in the interest of justice and further, acknowledges her integral role in the civil rights movement.”

She was initially convicted of violating the city’s segregation law and of disorderly conduct and assaulting an officer. But she appealed and was sentenced to probation only on the assault charge, which may have been for “something as small as accidentally stepping on an officer’s toes,” said her lawyer, Phillip Ensler.

One police officer kicked her while another dragged her backward off the bus and handcuffed her, according to “Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice” by Phillip Hoose, which won a National Book Award in 2009. On the way to the police station, the officers took turns guessing her bra size, Mr. Hoose wrote.

“We were treated like second-class citizens,” she said on Tuesday.

Ms. Colvin moved to the Bronx after her conviction, but returned to Montgomery at the peak of the bus boycott that Mrs. Parks had subsequently sparked. Black leaders at the time believed that since Mrs. Parks had lighter skin, she would be a better face of the movement and more likely win sympathy from white people.

“My mother told me to be quiet about what I did,” Ms. Colvin told The New York Times in 2009. “She told me: ‘Let Rosa be the one. White people aren’t going to bother Rosa — her skin is lighter than yours and they like her.’”

Mrs. Parks and Ms….