## A Note on Sources and the Limits of the Record
The available record on Claudette Colvin’s life is more complete in some areas than others, and it is worth being explicit about these limits.
The March 2, 1955 arrest is well-documented through Colvin’s own retrospective accounts, through contemporaneous community knowledge, and through the court records that followed. The specific details of what was said on the bus and during the arrest are known through Colvin’s later accounts; they are recollections rather than contemporaneous documentation, and should be understood as such.
The juvenile court proceedings and their outcomes are documented in the court records, though the expungement and destruction of those records in December 2021 means that the original documents no longer exist. The appeal outcome — the dropping of the disturbing-the-peace and segregation charges, the survival of the assault conviction — is documented in accounts of the proceedings.
The Browder v. Gayle case is well-documented through the court record, which includes the opinions of the three-judge panel and the Supreme Court’s affirmance. The plaintiffs’ testimony before the panel is part of the court record, though the specific content of Colvin’s testimony is known in general terms rather than through a publicly available complete transcript in the sources available for this account.
The details of Colvin’s post-Montgomery life — her arrival in New York, her work as a nurse’s aide, the details of her sons’ lives — are known primarily through her retrospective accounts in the interviews she gave after her public rediscovery in the 2000s. These are reliable in broad terms but should be understood as her memory of events that occurred decades earlier.