E.D. Nixon, the president of the local NAACP chapter, was also paying attention. Nixon had connections across the Black community in Montgomery, had experience organizing, and understood the strategic requirements of a legal challenge. He, Robinson, and others began evaluating Colvin as a potential plaintiff in a test case.
Rosa Parks, who was secretary of the Montgomery NAACP chapter, was involved in these conversations as well. Parks was not a newcomer to civil rights organizing; she had been to the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, a training center for civil rights organizers, and she had experience with the strategic and practical dimensions of mounting a challenge to segregation. She was one of the people who evaluated what the Colvin case might be able to accomplish and what risks it carried.
What they were assessing was not simply the legal merits of Colvin’s situation. They were assessing whether Colvin could survive the social and personal pressure of becoming the public face of a legal challenge to Montgomery’s bus system. That pressure would be immense. It would come from the white community in the form of legal jeopardy, economic retaliation, and the possibility of violence. It would also come from within the Black community, in the form of the respectability politics that governed how civil rights leaders thought about who could most effectively represent the cause.
## The Charges and the Juvenile Case
Claudette Colvin was charged with three offenses arising from her March 2 arrest: disturbing the peace, violating the city’s segregation ordinance, and battery and assault on a police officer.