Born 9/5/39 in Montgomery, Alabama.

3/2/55 arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated bus 9 months before Rosa Parks.

Member of the NAACP Youth Council.

She said: “My mother told me to be quiet about what I did. She told me to let Rosa be the one: white people aren’t going to bother Rosa, they like her”.

She was a named plaintiff and testified in the bus segregation case.

She said of her arrest: “I kept saying, ‘He has no civil right… this is my constitutional right… you have no right to do this.’ And I just kept blabbing things out, and I never stopped. That was worse than stealing, you know, talking back to a white person.”

She moved to New York because she couldn’t get a job in Montgomery as she was branded a trouble maker.

“I feel very, very proud of what I did. I do feel like what I did was a spark and it caught on.”

“I’m not disappointed,” Colvin said. “Let the people know Rosa Parks was the right person for the boycott. But also let them know that the attorneys took four other women to the Supreme Court to challenge the law that led to the end of segregation.”

She said: “[y]oung people think Rosa Parks just sat down on a bus and ended segregation, but that wasn’t the case at all.”

“I felt like Sojourner Truth was pushing down on one shoulder and Harriet Tubman was pushing down on the other—saying, ‘Sit down girl!’ I was glued to my seat,” she later told Newsweek.