Many consider Rosa Parks to be “the mother of the civil rights movement,” a designation she earned after refusing to give up her bus seat in Alabama to a white man and launching the Montgomery Bus Boycott—but Claudette Colvin’s work began months before any of that. 

Colvin was convicted in 1955 of striking a police officer while being arrested after refusing to move to the back of a segregated Alabama bus. She was placed on probation but never received notice that she had completed the term.

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The 82-year-old is now asking a judge to expunge a record which her lawyer claims has put a shadow on the life of the largely unheralded hero of the civil rights movement, per The Associated Press.

“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,’” said Colvin, per AP. “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 left Alabama at the age of 20 and spent decades in New York before making her way to Birmingham, but according to AP, relatives are always concerned about what might happen in the interim because of her probation status.

The civil rights pioneer who went on to become a nurse is due for a stay with family in Texas soon. She plans to make her request in front of a juvenile court judge, since that’s where she was declared a delinquent and sentenced to what amounted to a lifetime of probation. 

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In March of 1955, Colvin was a 15-year-old high school student when a bus driver reported two Black girls sitting next to two white girls on the bus and refusing to go to the back. Colvin stood her ground and per the police report, fought officers as they pulled her off the bus, kicking and scratching one of them. 

She was initially found guilty of breaching the city’s segregation legislation, disorderly conduct and attacking an officer, but only the assault charge remained. The case was referred to juvenile court, where a judge declared her a delinquent and placed her on probation “as a ward of the state awaiting good behavior,” according to court records—and her fate ended there. 

In December of that same year, nine months after Colvin, a 42-year-old Parks was commuting home by bus from a long day of work at the Montgomery Fair department store when she refused to give up her seat. She was found guilty of violating segregation regulations and received a suspended sentence and a $10 fine plus $4 in court expenses, which CPI Inflation Calculator says equates to nearly $143.30 today, a $129.30 gain in purchasing power over 66 years.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott, a civil rights movement in which African Americans refused to ride city buses to protest segregated seating, began four days after Park’s arrest and lasted just over a year. It is considered the first large-scale anti-segregation demonstration in the United States, and led to the Supreme Court ordering Montgomery’s bus system to be integrated, per History.com.

Colvin stated in her motion to have her record expunged that she wants to see society progress rather than regress, per CNN. She added that the reason she’s attempting to have her name cleared 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.”

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