'History Had Me Glued To The Seat': Civil Rights Icon (Not Rosa Parks) Has Record Expunged

MONTGOMERY, AL — At 82, civil rights pioneer Claudette Colvin can finally proudly proclaim herself “no longer a juvenile delinquent.”

She acquired a criminal record in 1955 when she was only 15, at a time when Black people were still segregated in the back of Montgomery city buses, and nine months before Rosa Parks’ famous 1955 defiance of the Jim Crow-era law that spurred the civil rights movement.

Last month, a family court judge in Montgomery signed an order expunging Colvin’s record. She had been charged and convicted of disturbing the peace and violating Montgomery’s segregation ordinance — convictions that were later overturned on appeal — as well as a felony charge of assaulting a police officer that remained on her record for 66 years.

Ordering that all records, including references to Colvin’s arrest, be destroyed, Juvenile Court Judge Calvin Williams said history remembers Colvin’s actions on March 2, 1955, much differently.

Colvin’s refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger “has since been recognized as a courageous act on her behalf and on behalf of a community of affected people,” the judge said.

“My record was expunged," Colvin said in an exclusive interview with "CBS Mornings" on Thursday. "And my name was cleared. And I'm no longer a juvenile delinquent at 82."

Williams even traveled to Texas, where Colvin now lives, to deliver the news in person — and to deliver a belated apology.

“I want to, on behalf of myself and all the judges in Montgomery, offer my apology for the injustice that was perpetrated upon you,” he said.

'History Had Me Glued To The Seat'

Parks’ refusal to give up her seat and her arrest on Dec. 1, 1955, led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., that lasted more than a year and ended when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled bus segregation in Alabama to be unconstitutional.

Parks, who died in 2005 at the age of 92, was widely regarded as the “mother of the civil rights movement” and an enduring symbol of dignity and strength in the battle to end entrenched racism.

Colvin was one of the foot soldiers in that battle, too.

She and three of her classmates were “sitting in the section that was allowed for colored people” on March 2, 1955, when a white woman boarded the bus and moved toward the back of the bus.

That put Colvin and her classmates in violation of Montgomery’s law on bus segregation, even though they had boarded the bus first.

“In segregated law, a colored person couldn't sit across the aisle from a white person,” Colvin told CBS. “They had to sit behind the white person to show that they were superior and the colored people was inferior.”

Colvin’s classmates moved when ordered to do so by the bus driver. She stayed put.

“People said I was crazy,” Colvin told CNN of her decision not to move. “Because I was 15 years old and defiant and shouting, ‘It's my constitutional right!’ ”

She eloquently laid out her case.

“I said I could not move because history had me glued to the seat,” she told CBS. “And they say, ‘How is that?’ I say, ‘Well, it felt as though Harriet Tubman's hands were pushing me down on one shoulder, and Sojourner Truth hand was pushing me down on the other shoulder.’ ”

The bus driver wasn’t persuaded. He flagged down a traffic patrolman.

“And he asked me why I was sitting there,” Colvin continued in the CBS interview. “And I was even more defiant. And I said, ‘I paid my fare, and it's my constitutional rights.’ ”

She was arrested and “manhandled” by another police officer who boarded the bus a few stops later, thrown in a stark jail cell with no mattress on the cot. She was released after a few hours, but told CBS she still has nightmares about the ordeal.

She soldiered on in the fight for equality and civil rights.

Colvin was one of four African American women who joined as plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, the 1956 case that ended bus segregation in Montgomery, and across Alabama.

On Dec. 17, 1956, the Supreme Court declared Alabama’s bus segregation laws unconstitutional. The Montgomery Improvement Association voted three days later to end its 381-day bus boycott, and city buses were integrated the following day.

Despite all of that, she was a convicted felon under Alabama law.

'Conscientious, Not Criminal; Inspired,Not Illegal'

On Oct. 26, she petitioned Montgomery County Family Court to have her juvenile record expunged. Her petition won the support of Daryl Bailey, the county’s district attorney, who called her refusal to give up her bus seat an action that was “conscientious, not criminal” and “inspired, not illegal,” according to CNN.

Her actions, Bailey said, “should have led to praise and not prosecution.”

When she was convicted, Colvin was placed on “indefinite probation,” but has told reporters she was never notified the sentence had been served.

Why does what happened in a racist system still matter 66 years later?

“I am an old woman now,” Colvin said in a sworn statement accompanying the court petition. “Having my records expunged will mean something to my grandchildren and great-grandchildren. And it will mean something for other Black children.”

Colvin is still a foot soldier for racial justice.

“I want us to move forward and be better,” she wrote in the statement. “When I think about why I’m seeking to have my name cleared by the state, it is because I believe if that happened it would show the generation growing up now that progress is possible and things do get better.

“It will inspire them to make the world better.”