Claudette Colvin- the Girl who Came Before Rosa Parks Civil Rights Movement.

Claudette Colvin (born September 5, 1939) is an American nurse and was a pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement. On March 2, 1955, she was arrested at the age of 15 in Montgomery, Alabama for refusing to give up her seat to a white woman on a crowded, segregated bus. Colvin acted a few months before the more widely known incident in which Rosa Parks, secretary of the local chapter of the NAACP, played the lead role, sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott that began that year.

Colvin was among the five plaintiffs originally included in the federal court case filed by civil rights attorney Fred Gray on February 1, 1956, as Browder v. Gayle, to challenge bus segregation in the city. She testified before the three-judge panel that heard the case in the United States District Court. On June 13, 1956, the judges determined that the state and local laws requiring bus segregation in Alabama were unconstitutional. The case went to the United States Supreme Court on appeal by the state, and it upheld the District Court ruling on December 17, 1956. Colvin was the last witness to testify. Three days later, the Supreme Court issued an order to Montgomery and the state of Alabama to end bus segregation, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott was called off.

For many years, Montgomery's black leaders did not publicize Colvin's pioneering effort. She was an unmarried teenager at the time, and was reportedly pregnant by a married man. Colvin has said, "Young people think Rosa Parks just sat down on a bus and ended segregation, but that wasn't the case at all." Her case helped pave the way.