Civil rights pioneer Claudette Colvin, who testified in bus segregation lawsuit, dies at 86 

Civil rights activist Claudette Colvin died on Tuesday at the age of 86.

On March 2, 1955, at the age of 15, Colvin was told to give up her bus seat to a white woman, but she refused. This all happened nine months before Rosa Parks’ historic defiance arrest. Colvin was arrested and charged, but that was just the beginning of her entry into the early beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement. Colvin would testify in what eventually became a landmark anti-segregation lawsuit later to be affirmed by the United States Supreme Court.

Colvin’s story resurfaced in the late 1970s and was shared throughout the world.