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the new young pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, had recently moved to Montgomery from Atlanta, Georgia. An eloquent speaker who was willing to assume additional responsibilities, he was elected president of the MIA. The Montgomery Bus Boycott thus began not only the civil rights movement, but also Dr. King’s remarkable career as a world-famous leader of that movement.
    Some Montgomery segregationists were violent in their response to the bus boycott. Reverend Ralph Abernathy was a boycott leader with Dr. King. His home and church were bombed. Dr. King’s home was also bombed, and so was that of community leader E. D. Nixon. Even with these attacks, the success of the boycott inspired similar protests in other southern cities and towns. Black ministers throughout the South whose churches had supported the boycott established a new group that became the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) with Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., as president. SCLC, with other civil rights groups, was a main organizer of protest activities in the 1960s.
    Rosa Parks has been recognized as a hero of the movement for her determined resistance to discrimination that began the Montgomery Bus Boycott. But a careful reading of that first boycott leaflet shows that before Rosa Parks there was Claudette Colvin.

CLAUDETTE COLVIN
    Claudette Colvin was fifteen years old in 1955. On her own she defied the segregation laws on the Montgomery city buses when she refused to give up her seat to a white person. She was arrested, found guilty, and fined. Nine months after Claudette’s arrest, the boycott began. Claudette Colvin was ahead of her time.
    When I grew up, the South was segregated. Very much so. Your parents had taught you that you had a place. You knew that much. In the city you had the signs. You have to stay here, you have to drink out of this fountain, you can’t eat at this counter. I thought segregation was horrible. My first anger I remember was when I wanted to go to the rodeo. Daddy bought my sister boots and bought us both cowboy hats. That’s as much of the rodeo as we got. The show was at the coliseum, and it was only for white kids. I was nine or ten.
    It bothered me when I got old enough to understand. You could buy dry goods at the five-and-ten-cent stores, Kress‘s, H. L. Green, J. J. Newberry’s. You could buy, but you couldn’t sit down and eat there. When I realized that, I was really angry.
    Certain stores you couldn’t try on the clothes. You could just ask for what you wanted. I remember this girl in school. She was mulatto. We used to get her to go in Nachman’s to try on hats for us. Because she was white-looking, they didn’t know. We had one friend whose father had money. So if she saw a hat or shoes at Nachman‘s, she used to push this girl to go in and get it. We knew this girl could pass, and we just wanted to be able to say that somebody with black blood has been in there to try on a hat or a pair of shoes. This was before the boycott.
    At that time we were rebelling in different ways. I was always rebellious, but my mother said this is the way it is. The white people, they own everything, they bought everything, they built it—you know the whole story. That made me angry.
    I talked about it with my friends. We would say the older people let white people get away with it. They never said they didn’t like it. Older black people were always respectful to the white people. ut the younger blacks began to rebel.
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    In school we were always taught that we had to study hard. We had to learn and think twice as hard as a white person in order to get ahead. You must be educated. I went to Booker T. Washington. When I was in the ninth grade, my history teacher was always discussing current events.
    Most of the schoolteachers at Booker T. Washington came from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where Dr. Martin Luther King was pastor. And most of them got their