The system had been in place in some form since the city’s bus service began. The 1900 vintage of Montgomery’s segregated transit arrangements is a reminder that the system was not a recent imposition; it was a decades-old structure that had outlasted many specific individuals and survived multiple legal and political challenges. By 1955, it was built into the infrastructure of daily life so thoroughly that challenging it required challenging not just a rule but an entire way the city had organized itself.
The NAACP and the Women’s Political Council — a Black civic organization led by Jo Ann Robinson — had both been looking for legal opportunities to challenge bus segregation in Montgomery for years before March 1955. They understood that a test case would need a plaintiff with a specific kind of profile: unimpeachable personal character, adult legal standing, emotional steadiness under pressure, and the ability to withstand the public scrutiny and social retaliation that a high-profile legal challenge would bring. They had been watching for the right person.
## Booker T. Washington High School
Claudette Colvin attended Booker T. Washington High School, the segregated Black high school in Montgomery, Alabama. She was born September 5, 1939, in Birmingham, and had grown up in Montgomery in a working-class household. Her family had limited financial resources and did not occupy the middle-class social position that civic leaders in the Black community tended to regard as advantageous for a public legal confrontation with white authority.
Booker T. Washington High School provided its students with a serious education despite the systematic underfunding of Black public education in Alabama. The teachers there, who could not work in white schools and whose professional options were substantially limited by segregation, were often highly trained and deeply committed educators. Colvin’s English teacher, Geraldine Nesbitt, had been working with students on the Constitution and on the rights it was supposed to guarantee. The subject was not abstract; it was directly relevant to the lives of Black students in Montgomery in ways that were obvious and immediate.