Civil Rights Pioneer Claudette Colvin's Record Is Expunged 66 Years After Arrest Over Bus Seat
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Tamika Moore / Guardian / eyevine/Redux; Alamy
The juvenile record of Claudette Colvin was expunged 66 years after her arrest for refusing to give her seat to a white person on an Alabama bus, PEOPLE confirms.
The civil rights pioneer, 82, had her name cleared after an Alabama family court judge granted Colvin's petition to expunge her record last month, her family said in a statement released Thursday. Montgomery Court Judge Calvin Williams signed the order for her record to be destroyed on Nov. 24, his office confirmed to NBC News.
"My reason for doing it is I get a chance to tell my grandchildren, my great-grandchildren, what life was like living in segregated America, in segregated Montgomery," the trailblazer explained in a press conference, according to the Montgomery Advertiser. "The laws, the hardship, the intimidation that took place during those years and the reason why that day I took a stand and defied the segregated law."
"I am so grateful that after all of these decades Claudette's name has finally been cleared," Colvin's attorney Phillip Ensler tells PEOPLE. "Our hope is that she is able to feel a sense of peace and relief. So many in Montgomery and those who believe in justice, freedom and equality throughout the world are moved by this monumental decision."
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Birmingham, Ala., Public Library Archives
In 1955, Colvin was a 15-year-old student at Booker T. Washington High School in Montgomery, Alabama. She was inspired by Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth when she refused to give up her seat to a white person on a bus, and police were called to arrest her.
"I said, 'I'm not getting up,'" she told PEOPLE in a profile published earlier this month. "It felt as though Harriet Tubman's hands were pushing me down on one shoulder, and Sojourner Truth was pushing down on another. History had me glued to the seat."
After she filed her initial expungement motion in October, Colvin — who recently moved to Texas to be closer to her son — spoke to a throng of supporters. It was a familiar scene, her speaking out about her rights outside the courthouse. Only this time, in reverse.
"How did the story end?" her son Randy, an accountant and educator, told PEOPLE. "We know how it began. We know what happened in the middle. And so now, before everything is done, we can go ahead and get that note in history to say, 'It wasn't right then, and we made it right now.'"
With her arrest record now cleared, the civil rights activist still wants to see criminal justice reform in America.
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Dudley M. Brooks/The The Washington Post via Getty
"Double standards still exist in the judicial system," she said at the press conference this week. "One set of rules for African Americans, and another set of rules for Caucasians."
Colvin realized that her actions may have surprised some people at the time but she knew their importance.
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"Everybody portrayed me as if something was wrong with me," she previously explained to PEOPLE. "'That's not normal behavior for a Negro girl, to speak out and be brave against the injustice you see right before your eyes.' "
"I'm glad to speak out," she continued then. "We've had some triumphs and some failures. But, like that Langston Hughes poem ['Mother to Son'], I'm still going, I'm still climbing."
