Civil rights activist Claudette Colvin, arrested in 1955 after she refused to give up her bus seat to a white person, has had her criminal record expunged. “My name was cleared,” Colvin said in a CBS News interview that aired Thursday. “I’m no longer a juvenile delinquent at 82.” Colvin had been 15 in March 1955, nine months before Rosa Parks’ similar act of defiance, when she was refused to get up after a bus driver told her to move for a white woman. “I said I could not move because history had me glued to the seat,” she recalled.
Facing three charges, just one—assaulting a police officer—stuck with Colvin for more than six decades. She was placed on an “indefinite probation” after her conviction, and was never informed it had ended, according to her legal team. She applied in October to have her record cleared, and an Alabama family court judge authorized an order to do so on Nov. 24. He granted the motion over “what has since been recognized as a courageous act on her behalf and on behalf of a community of affected people,” he said.
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