This calculus was not unique to Colvin’s situation or to Montgomery. The logic of respectability politics — the strategic decision to present Black claimants for rights in terms that the dominant white culture could not dismiss as confirmation of negative stereotypes — ran through civil rights organizing in this period. The decisions it produced were sometimes pragmatically defensible and sometimes deeply unjust to the individuals who were made to bear the cost of a strategic choice that served the movement’s purposes while harming theirs.
Colvin paid that cost. She had done something genuinely brave on that bus in March 1955, and the community that would later celebrate Rosa Parks was not ready to celebrate her.
## Rosa Parks
The decision not to center Colvin’s case did not mean that the civil rights community in Montgomery stopped looking for a legal opportunity to challenge bus segregation. The leaders continued watching the Montgomery bus system, waiting for an arrest that could be built into a test case.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks — the NAACP secretary who had been one of the people evaluating Colvin’s case nine months earlier — refused to give up her bus seat to a white man. She was arrested. Her case began moving through the state court system.
The story of Rosa Parks as a “spontaneous” act of individual courage, or as a simple expression of being tired at the end of a long working day, is an oversimplification that Parks herself resisted. Parks was an experienced civil rights organizer who understood the significance of her own action. She had been thinking about resistance to bus segregation for years. She had followed the Colvin case. She had her own legal case positioned in the state courts as a vehicle for challenging the segregation ordinance.