Claudette Colvin was an fifteen-year-old student at Booker T. Washington High School in March 1955 when she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus to a white person. Her action preceded Rosa Parks’ by almost nine months. Almost a year later, in February 1956, Ms. Colvin was one of the plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, the federal court case that desegregated Montgomery’s city buses.

On March 4, 2005, almost fifty years to the day after her arrest, students from BTW’s Creative Writing and Law magnets joined Ms. Colvin, her younger sister Gayle Gadson, a long-time friend Annie Larkin Price, and Dr. Gwen Patton for a luncheon in Troy University Montgomery’s Whitley Hall. The discussion was arranged and mediated by Dr. Georgette Norman, the director of the Rosa Parks Museum.