Lesa Cline-Ransome - She Persisted: Claudette Colvin

On September 5, 1939, before Claudette Colvin became Claudette Colvin, her family didnt know what they would call her. But once they saw her perfectly high cheekbones, they named her after Claudette Colbert, the famed high-cheekboned actress and well-loved beauty.

One Claudette was Black and one was white. One Claudette was from Birmingham, Alabama, and one lived in Hollywood, California. But only one Claudettes brave stand for civil rights would push her into the spotlight by the time she was fifteen years old. And that Claudette was Claudette Colvin.

One year after Claudette was born, her little sister, Delphine, arrived and they both were sent to live with their aunt Mary and uncle Q.P. Colvin in a small town called Pine Level, Alabama. Q.P. fixed up the bedroom left behind by their grown daughter, Velma, who was away teaching school. Both Mary and Q.P. were happy to have their home filled with little girls again.

Mary and Q.P. raised and loved Claudette and Delphine like daughters and the girls loved them back just the same. Before long they called them Mom and Dad. Together, they made a family.

Claudette was just as tiny as could be when she arrived in Pine Level, but soon she grew as tall as a weed, and skinny as one too.

It was Q.P. who built their home, by himself from the ground up. Small and simple, it looked like many of the other sharecropper homes in Pine Level that sat on land rented from white landowners. Sharecroppers like Mary and Q.P. were farmers who planted and grew their plots in exchange for a small share of the profit from the crops they harvested. Claudettes family didnt have much, but the house had everything Claudette needed. Best of all, there were chickens, cows, pigs, a horse she could ride and a dog named Bell.

Every second Sunday of the month, the Reverend H.H. Johnson traveled from Montgomery to Pine Level to preach the Sunday service on what folks called Big Meeting Sunday. From midday to well after dark, Claudette sat with her parents in the pews through regular service, selections from the choir and the glee club, Reverend Johnsons afternoon sermon, early supper, Reverend Johnsons evening sermon and a late supper. Then everyone headed home in the dark, their bellies filled with good food and their hearts filled with the good word.

Claudette loved church so much that she set up chairs in her backyard, sang hymns, read scripture and shouted out sermons with her best friend Annie Ruth Baines, pretending to be in church even when she wasnt.

Pine Level had just one general store, one church and a one-room white wooden schoolhouse. At Spring Hill School, the classes went from first to sixth grade with only one teacher giving all the lessons in the large room. In the middle was a potbellied stove to keep them warm on the days when the Alabama sun did not.

Seated two to a desk, Claudette and her classmates learned their letters and numbers. But after first grade, when Claudette started reading the Bible and dictionary on her own, the teacher had to move her up to sit with the third graders.

Two things folks in Pine Level knew about little Claudette Colvin: she loved learning and God in equal measure.