… Parks, who carried an air of refinement that the young Colvin had yet to embrace.
“Her skin texture was the kind that people associate with the middle class,” says Colvin. “She fit that profile.”
Parks became a civil rights icon when she refused to give up her seat on the Cleveland Avenue bus nine months after Colvin was arrested for the same act. In author Phillip Hoose’s 2009 book “Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice,” Colvin was quoted as saying, “My mother told me to be quiet about what I did. She told me to let Rosa be the one: white people aren’t going to bother Rosa, they like her.”
Like many who lived through and have studied the civil rights movement, this isn’t a matter of one person’s actions being any more important than the other. They were both crucial to the achievement of freedom and rights for black Americans.