Civil rights pioneer seeks expungement of '55 arrest record

MONTGOMERY, Ala. -- Months before Rosa Parks became the mother of the modern civil rights movement by refusing to move to the back of a segregated Alabama bus, Black teenager Claudette Colvin did the same. Convicted of assaulting a police officer while being arrested, she was placed on probation yet never received notice she'd finished the term and was on safe ground legally.

Now 82 and slowed by age, Colvin has asked a judge to end the matter once and for all. She wants a court in Montgomery to wipe away a record her lawyer says has cast a shadow over the life of a largely unsung hero of the civil rights era.

"I am an old woman now. Having my records expunged will mean something to my grandchildren and great grandchildren. And it will mean something for other Black children," Colvin said in a sworn statement.

Supporters sang civil rights anthems and clapped as Colvin entered the clerk's office and filed the expungement request Tuesday. Her attorney, Phillip Ensler, said he was seeking all legal documents to be sealed and all records of the case erased.

Montgomery County District Attorney Daryl Bailey later said he agreed with the request to clear Colvin's record, removing any doubt it would be approved.

"I guess you can say that now I am no longer a juvenile delinquent," Colvin told a crowd including relatives, well-wishers and activists.

Also present was famed civil rights attorney Fred Gray, now 90, who's not currently involved in her case.

Recalling her arrest, Colvin told the crowd: "My mindset was on freedom."

"So I was not going to move that day," she said. "I told them that history had me glued to the seat."

Colvin left Alabama at age 20 and spent decades in New York, but relatives always worried what might happen when she returned for visits since no court official ever said she had finished probation, according to Ensler.

"Her family has lived with this tremendous fear ever since then," he said. "For all the recognition of recent years and the attempts to tell her story, there wasn't anything done to clear her record."

Currently living in Birmingham before a move to stay with relatives in Texas, the octogenarian Colvin made her request to a juvenile court judge oddly enough since that's where she was judged delinquent and placed on what, for all practical purposes, amounted to a lifetime of probation, Ensler said.

Montgomery's city bus system, like the rest of public life across the Deep South, was strictly divided along racial lines in the 1950s. Blacks had to use one water fountain while whites used another; the front of a bus was for white people while Blacks had to take the back by law.

Parks, a 42-year-old seamstress and activist with the NAACP, gained worldwide fame after refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man Dec. 1, 1955. Her treatment led to the yearlong Montgomery Bus Boycott, which propelled the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. into the national limelight and often is considered the start of the modern civil rights movement.

A 15-year-old high school student at the time, Colvin got fed up and refused to move even before Parks.

A bus driver called police March 2, 1955, to complain two Black girls were sitting near two white girls and refused to move to the back of the bus. One of the Black girls moved when asked, a police report said, but Colvin refused.

The police report said Colvin put up a struggle as officers removed her from the bus, kicking and scratching an officer. She was initially convicted of violating the city's segregation law, disorderly conduct and assaulting an officer, but she appealed and only the assault charge stuck.

The case was sent to juvenile court because of Colvin's age, and records show a judge found her delinquent and placed her on probation "as a ward of the state pending good behavior." And that's where it ended, Ensler said, with Colvin never getting official word she'd completed probation and her relatives assuming the worst -- that police would arrest her for any reason they could.

Ensler said it's "murky" as to whether Colvin is actually still on probation, but she never had any other arrests or legal scrapes. She even became a named plaintiff in the landmark lawsuit outlawing racial segregation on Montgomery's buses. Still, Colvin said, the trauma endured, particularly for relatives who constantly worried for her.

"My conviction for standing up for my constitutional right terrorized my family and relatives who knew only that they were not to talk about my arrest and conviction because people in town knew me as 'that girl from the bus,'" she said.

Ensler said it was uncertain when a judge might rule.

Reeves is a member of the AP's Race and Ethnicity team.