The Rosa Parks of Rosa Parkses

I wasn’t going to do a Black History Month column, but since I’m quarter Turkish, I’m technically the 6th or 7th blackest person on this campus.

In 1955, Rosa Parks became the first black woman to refuse to move to the back of the bus. And if you believe that, you might be a UNC athlete.

Meet Claudette Colvin: the Winklevoss twins to Parks’ Mark Zuckerberg. In Montgomery, Ala., nine months before Parks’ arrest in the same city, Colvin, who was just 16, refused to give up her seat first. If you’ve never heard of her, you’re not alone. Colvin, who knew Parks, was a dark-skinned girl who became pregnant in her teens, so local black activists decided she wasn’t the right figurehead for the movement.

“My mother told me to be quiet about what I did,” Ms. Colvin said to The New York Times in 2009. “She told me: ‘Let Rosa be the one. White people aren’t going to bother Rosa — her skin is lighter than yours, and they like her.’”

And that’s exactly what Colvin did for more than five decades, while Parks, the Erin Andrews of civil rights activists, accepted awards and accolades for the rest of her life.

Look — for any black woman in the Jim Crow South to refuse to give up their seat took a kind of bravery I don’t have one one-millionth of a fraction of. I’m just saying if Parks (who had the NAACP behind her) had steel balls, young Colvin (who didn’t) had elephant ones.

Only ONE man finally got Colvin to tell her story: Phillip Hoose, who wrote a book about it, “Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice.”

I couldn’t wait to help spread the word. I wrote Hoose this week, asking if he had a few minutes for an interview or could recommend someone to help me get my facts straight to write this piece.
“I want it to be impossible to tell the story of the civil rights movement without Claudette,” he had told Newsweek.

According to a New York Times article, Colvin had asked him, “Can you get it into schools?”

His email to me was almost as inspiring as Colvin’s story, itself.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Walker, but I just don’t have time. Good look with your project.”

To which I responded, “The time to recommend someone else, either?”

To which he responded, “I know of no one.”

To which I responded, “Must be a hell of a book.”

Now, I can appreciate the hard truths black leaders of the time had to consider. But why is Colvin, who is still alive, not taught about in schools now?

I never learned about her from teachers. I didn’t even find out about her through Hoose’s book. I had to find about her from “The Howard Stern Show,” a thing that, like Parks herself, I also used to have a strong opinion on without knowing anything about.

So Happy Black History Month. Remember the underdogs. Question what you know. And baba booey.