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They were civil rights trailblazers, too

BY TINA SUSMAN | STAFF WRITER

November 3, 2005

Five years ago, Mary Ware went to her dresser, pulled a pile of yellowed newspaper clippings from a drawer and spread them out for her teenage granddaughter, Kanoshua, to see.

The stories told of a young black woman arrested in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955 for refusing to give her bus seat to a white person. What stunned Kanoshua wasn't the tale, but the name of the rebellious woman: it wasn't Rosa Parks. It was her grandmother.

More than 1,000 miles away from Ware's Montgomery home, in a pleasant Bronx apartment building, neighbors of Claudette Colvin were similarly stunned yesterday to learn that Colvin also had been arrested in Montgomery in 1955 for refusing to relinquish her bus seat to a white passenger.

"Oh my God, this lady should be credited!" exclaimed Mohammad Chowdhury, 36, a Bangladeshi immigrant who lives across the hall from Colvin.

That neither women's defiant actions garnered the attention of Parks', although they were arrested months before she was, is as much a result of civil rights leaders' thinking at the time as of the two women's desire for anonymity.

In 1955, Ware was 18 and Colvin was 15. Neither had the poise of Parks, who was 42, and there were concerns they lacked the sympathetic image needed to galvanize mass support for a bus boycott. The boycott began only after Parks' arrest in December 1955.

"I didn't feel any envy toward Rosa Parks, nothing like that, because I knew she was a more mature person than I was, and also Claudette was very young," said Ware, now 68, in a telephone interview.

With the passage of time, and with attention focused on Parks' role as a civil rights heroine, the women and those who know them want to ensure their contributions aren't forgotten.

It is a delicate task, one that if mishandled could be perceived as sour grapes, Ware's granddaughter, Kanoshua Smith, acknowledged yesterday. "They didn't want to take the spark away from Rosa Parks," she said, speculating as to Ware's and Colvin's reluctance to speak out over the years.

Smith described Ware as shy and not given to bragging, but not one to be pushed around either. The decision to tell Smith her story came out of the blue several years ago, when the topic of the civil rights movement came up.

"She just pulled the old newspapers out and said, 'I was one of those people. I've been in jail,'" Smith, 22, recalled. "I was like, 'Grandma! For real? That was before Rosa Parks!'"

Ware says she was driven by a need to convince her skeptical granddaughter how bad things had been for blacks in the 1950s.

Speaking in a soft, girlish voice that belies her years, Ware said Kanoshua had doubted her memories of blacks having to pay bus fare at the front of the bus before entering through the back "black" door, and of having to stand in the aisles with sacks of groceries while whites sat. She wanted her grandchildren to know that sometimes the driver would pull away from the curb before she could enter the back door, and that often, as she disembarked, the doors would close on her skirt.

"It just seemed unreal to them that something like that had happened," Ware said of her grandchildren. "They don't think about how hard their parents suffered to get where they are, or to get the jobs they have. They just take it for granted."

Her October arrest came seven months after Colvin, a schoolgirl active in the NAACP, was arrested for the same thing. "I said I was just as good as any white person, and I wasn't going to get up," court transcripts quote Colvin as saying. She was convicted of resisting arrest and violating municipal segregation laws and placed on probation. Ware was convicted of violating segregation laws and fined.

Colvin, 65, who did not answer her door yesterday and who Ware said was attending Parks' funeral, has avoided the media except for rare public appearances. "I feel proud of what I did," she told the Montgomery Advertiser earlier this year. "I do feel like what I did was a spark, and it caught on."

Both women became plaintiffs in the federal suit that led the Supreme Court to declare bus segregation unconstitutional in 1956. After that, they led unassuming lives, keeping in sporadic touch and occasionally meeting Parks and other civil rights figures, most of whom had never heard of them.

Ware retired as a hospital housekeeper two years ago. Smith said her grandmother is always delighted when someone recognizes her role in the civil rights movement with a plaque or an invitation to attend a special event.

Colvin moved to New York in 1958 and found work as a nurse's aide. Chowdhury described her as always smiling and polite.

"It's because of what ladies like her did that we can be here today," said Chowdhury's cousin, Zia Hashem, 29.

Then, as the door closed, someone could be heard shouting to a woman in the next room, "There's a lady who was a hero of the civil rights movement living here!"