(AURN News) — According to The Associated Press, Claudette Colvin — whose refusal to give up her seat on a segregated Montgomery bus helped ignite the modern civil rights movement — has died at 86.
Her death was announced Tuesday by the Claudette Colvin Legacy Foundation, which said she died of natural causes in Texas.
Colvin was just 15 years old when she was arrested on March 2, 1955, nine months before Rosa Parks’ more widely known act of resistance. A high school student at the time, Colvin refused a bus driver’s order to surrender her seat to a white passenger, later saying, “My mindset was on freedom.”
Colvin later became one of four plaintiffs in the landmark lawsuit that ended bus segregation in Montgomery, laying critical legal groundwork for the civil rights movement that followed.
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