the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
January 19, 2026
Recently, an “Unsung Hero” of the Civil Rights movement, Claudette Colvin, died at age 86.
On March 2, 1955, nine months before Rosa Parks, Colvin, then 15 years old, refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white woman in Montgomery, Alabama. She stayed put until she was dragged off the bus by police and arrested.
Colvin, and untold numbers of ordinary people like her, opened the door to the role that Rosa Parks played. Unsung, because after Colvin’s courageous stand, she lived her life as a caregiver and nurses’ aide, struggling as a single mother—like countless other black working-class women in this society.
The actions of people like the Claudette Colvins of the 1940s and 50s and 60s played pivotal roles in paving the way to push back some of the racist practices that were the norm in society at that time. In the court case that followed, challenging the city’s Jim Crow policies, Browder v. Gayle, Colvin was a principal witness. The lawyer in that case credited Colvin with helping to ignite the battle against segregation in the Deep South.
And in her words, during that court case that led to the landmark 1956 U.S. supreme court decision banning segregation in public transit as unconstitutional, Colvin, who was in high school at the time, said she felt that she had Harriet Tubman on one shoulder, Sojourner Truth on the other, and “history had me glued to the seat.”