For Colvin, then seventy-nine years old, the memorial was a form of public recognition that was a long time coming. The granite marker with her name on it in Montgomery, Alabama — the city she had left in 1958 because she could not find work, sixty-one years earlier — was the most public official acknowledgment that what she had done in March 1955 was worth recognizing permanently.
## The Expungement
In October 2021, Claudette Colvin filed a motion in Montgomery County family court asking that her 1955 juvenile record be expunged and destroyed.
The motion was supported by Montgomery County District Attorney Daryl Bailey, who recognized both the legal basis for the expungement and its historical significance. In December 2021, Judge Calvin L. Williams granted the motion and ordered the record expunged.
Colvin had been eighty-one years old when she filed the motion. She said she wanted to no longer be seen as a juvenile delinquent. She said that having her records expunged would mean something to her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. After the order was granted, she said she wanted people to move forward and be better, and that clearing her name would show young people that progress is possible.
The 1955 juvenile court record had formally classified her as a delinquent. The charges were the product of her having refused to comply with a segregation law that the federal courts had subsequently found to be unconstitutional. In formal legal terms, she had been found delinquent for declining to comply with a law that was later held to violate the United States Constitution. The expungement did not retroactively adjudicate the 1955 charges; it cleared the record in a forward-looking way that removed the formal stigma from her name.