When she moved to New York in the late 1950s, she was making a geographic escape from the specific constraints of Montgomery without escaping the broader racial dynamics of American life. The Bronx of the late 1950s had its own patterns of racial segregation — housing discrimination, employment discrimination, differential access to public services — that were different in form from Montgomery’s but were not absent.
The geography of her later life — the nursing home in Manhattan where she worked for thirty-five years, the Bronx neighborhood where she lived, the Texas city where she spent her final years — is the geography of a working-class Black woman’s life in twentieth-century America. It is not the geography of civil rights movement tourism or of historical commemoration. It is the geography of ordinary life after the historical moment had passed.
## The Teachers Who Made a Difference
Claudette Colvin’s capacity to articulate a constitutional argument at fifteen years old — to tell police officers that she had a constitutional right to her seat — was not accidental. It was the product of education, and that education was provided by teachers who worked within a segregated school system that was systematically underfunded but whose individual members were highly capable.
Geraldine Nesbitt, Colvin’s English teacher at Booker T. Washington High School, is the teacher most specifically credited in accounts of Colvin’s education with providing the constitutional context that shaped her response on the bus. Nesbitt had been working with students on the Constitution, on American history, and on the stories of Black Americans who had resisted oppression.