MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Justice has finally arrived for Claudette Colvin, decades in the making.
The 82-year-old was just 15 in 1955 when she refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. That was months prior to Rosa Parks and well before the better-known woman became the mother of the civil rights movement.
Colvin's lawyers earlier this year filed a petition to have her records expunged as she, even growing up, never received word that her probation had ended. After all these years, some good news.
"My record was expunged," Colvin told "CBS Mornings." "And my name was cleared. And I'm no longer a juvenile delinquent at 82."
She initially was accused of violating the city's segregation law, disorderly conduct and assaulting an officer, but it all was reduced to only the assault charge, according to The Associated Press. Colvin said on CBS that she was with three classmates in a section allowed for "colored people" when a white woman got aboard and moved to the back of the bus to sit down.
At the time, Colvin said, a Black person and a white person could not sit in the same row, so she had to move. Her classmates did, she did not.
"I said I could not move because history had me glued to the seat," she recalled on "CBS Mornings." "And they say, 'How is that?' I say, 'Well, it felt as though Harriet Tubman's hands were pushing me down on one shoulder, and Sojourner Truth hand was pushing me down on the other shoulder.'"
Authorities accused her of clawing and kicking the police, which resulted in the assault charge — and that didn't happen, she said.
It was important to have her record cleared because of the message it would send to her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, Colvin told CBS.
"Because when they go out into the world, the struggle of being African American is still going on," she said.
