Claudette Colvin was doing all of this too. She was not the face of the boycott — that place belonged to Parks, and to King, who had emerged as its primary public leader. But Colvin was a person who lived in Montgomery, who had made her own stand on a bus nine months before the boycott began, who was now twenty-five months younger than she would need to be to be taken seriously by the movement’s leadership, and who was pregnant with her son Raymond, who was born in March 1956.
She was also preparing to testify in federal court. Her role in Browder v. Gayle was active and documented, even if it did not carry the public visibility of what Rosa Parks represented for the boycott. She was one of four women whose names were on the lawsuit, and she sat in the federal courthouse in 1956 and testified about what had happened to her on a Montgomery bus in March 1955.
The juxtaposition is striking: the same community that had decided she was not the right person to be the public face of the challenge to bus segregation was using her testimony, in federal court, to establish the factual record that would make the constitutional challenge succeed.
## After the Victory
When the Supreme Court affirmed the desegregation ruling and the Montgomery bus boycott ended in December 1956, the legal framework of bus segregation in Montgomery had been dismantled. The practical reality of what Claudette Colvin’s life would look like in the aftermath was a different matter.