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Today is the fifty-fifth anniversary of the day that Rosa Parks was asked to move to the back of a Montgomery, Alabama city bus, and refused.

Rosa Parks is well worth remembering, of course, and she is well remembered. But it’s also worth remembering Claudette Colvin, who took the same stand earlier that year.

In the spring of 1955, Claudette Colvin was a junior at Booker T. Washington High School in Montgomery. On March 2 of that year, on her way home from school, she was told to move to the back of the bus to allow a white person to take her seat.

Like Rosa Parks nine months later, she refused. Like Rosa Parks, she was arrested.

So why do we know Parks’ name and not Colvin’s?

Because where Parks was a 42-year-old civil rights activist, Colvin was a 15-year-old schoolkid.

Because where Parks was a respectable married woman with a good job, Colvin was poor … and would shortly become pregnant by an older, married man.

Because where Parks responded to injustice with quiet dignity, Colvin responded with noisy anger.

(When the bus driver told Rosa Parks that he would have to call the police if she didn’t get up, Parks replied, with extraordinary self-possession, “You may do that.” When the police arrived, she went without resistance. When the cops came for Claudette Colvin, she yelled at them that they were violating her rights, and refused to move. They dragged her from the bus. When they kicked her, she kicked them back.)

Rosa Parks is one of my heroes. Claudette Colvin is too.

Update | There’s another part of the Claudette Colvin story that’s worth telling. (I discovered it this morning in Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phillip Hoose, and it’s stuck with me.)

In November 1952, a black high school student named Jeremiah Reeves was arrested in Montgomery, charged with the rape of a married white teenager. It was widely believed in Montgomery’s black community that the two had been having an affair. Police were able to extract a confession from him, however, by threatening him with the death penalty if he pled not guilty — they even had him sit in the electric chair where they said he’d be executed.

Reeves was quickly charged with raping or attempting to rape six white women, and brought to trial just weeks later. He was convicted by an all-white jury that included one of the police officers who had participated in the investigation. The jury deliberated for just 38 minutes, and sentenced Reeves to death.

Jeremiah Reeves was a classmate of Claudette Colvin’s at Booker T. Washington High School, and a neighbor. He was a senior, she was a first-year. He was handsome, popular, a talented drummer, a friend. Colvin rallied in his support, raised money for his defense, wrote him letters in jail. His arrest was, she later said, “the turning point in my life,” the moment when she really began to think critically about racism and injustice.

In 1954, the Supreme Court ordered that Reeves be given a new trial. He was, but the result was the same — and the jury’s deliberations even quicker. In March of 1955, Claudette Colvin sat down on a Montgomery bus and refused to give up her seat.

In 1958 Jeremiah Reeves was executed in the same electric chair in which he had been threatened with death six years earlier.

Thursday Update | All bets are off … for now. The Democrats have introduced a new version of the bill in an effort to bring wavering senators on board, while Republicans are pledging to block all legislation in the Senate until a vote is held on the extension of the Bush tax cuts. We’ll know a lot more by the weekend, maybe sooner. Check this post for updates.

Original Post | Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced on Tuesday that he would be “filing cloture” for the DREAM Act, the first step to bringing it to the floor. It now appears that action on the bill could come as early as this week.

The DREAM Act would give undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children a path to citizenship through college enrollment or military service. It’s expected to pass the House of Representatives easily, but in the Senate it needs a super-majority of sixty senators to end debate and allow an up-or-down vote to be held.

Thirty-five Democratic senators have signed on as sponsors of the DREAM Act, and another ten Democrats are understood to be reliable votes for its passage. On the other side, twenty-nine Republicans have long been known to be rock-solid in opposition. That leaves twenty-six senators who are at least theoretically up for grabs, and proponents of the bill need fifteen of those twenty-six to vote yes.

Last Friday I ran down the list of those twenty-six, sussing out where I thought each one stood. Some new info has emerged since then, so I’ve updated the count accordingly. To see my original rationale for each senator’s placement on the list, check out the original Friday post.

Against (8)

On Friday I listed Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Judd Gregg (R-NH), George LeMieux (R-FL), and Ben Nelson (R-NE) as firmly in the “no” column. Based on a Tuesday stories from Politico and Bloomberg I can add Scott Brown (R-MA), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), and Mark Pryor (D-AR) to that list.

Almost Certainly Against (3):

On Friday this category included Max Baucus (D-MT) and John McCain (R-AZ), along with as well as Brown, Hatch, Hutchison, and Pryor. Senator McCain again indicated today that he’s a likely “no” vote, but stopped short of a formal announcement. I’m moving George Voinovich (R-OH) here on the basis of today’s Bloomberg story — it described him as planning to vote no, as two bloggers had last week.

Likely Against (6):

Kent Conrad (D-ND), Byron Dorgan (D-ND), Kay Hagan (D-NC), Joe Manchin (D-WV), Olympia Snowe (R-ME), John Tester (D-MT). No change from Friday.

Unknown (5):

Sam Brownback (R-KS), Susan Collins (R-ME), Chris Coons (D-DE), Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK).

My hunch is that Coons and Landrieu both belong in the “likely for” category, by the way, but I don’t have anything solid to base that on, so I’m leaving them here for now.

Likely For (2):

Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Jim Webb (D-VA).

For (2):

Richard Lugar (R-IN), Robert Bennett (R-UT).

All the movement on the chart since Friday has been away from the DREAM Act, and unless I’m wrong about someone in the “against” or “almost certainly against” category, the bill now needs the support of every other wavering senator to get to sixty votes.

It’s not over, but it’s not looking good, either.

I’ve devoted a lot of attention in recent days to the extraordinary uprising of Britain’s students, but there’s a new student movement growing in Italy that’s at least as spectacular.

Last week Italian students occupied the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Colloseum in Rome, as well as Turin’s Mole Antonelliano (symbol of the 2006 Winter Olympics) and other national monuments. Today they are blocking roads, public squares, and railway tracks throughout the nation.

Italy’s government is looking to increase student fees and cut aid to higher education, as many other governments currently are, but the current Italian protests aim to block a much broader and deeper intervention into the nation’s higher education system.

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is seeking a radical overhaul of Italy’s higher education system — transforming campus governance and faculty recruitment while adopting a new funding structure that could lead to the closing of many institutions. In protest, many “ricercatori” — entry-level lecturers who teach some forty percent of Italian college courses — have refused to present their assigned courses, throwing many universities into disarray.

Berlusconi hopes to pass his higher education reform proposal, known as the Gelmini plan, before the end of the year, but his government, wracked by scandal, is on the verge of collapse.

Afternoon update | Some three thousand student protesters clashed with police in Rome’s city center today, throwing tomatoes, eggs, and smoke bombs. Police used tear gas to disperse the crowd, who were attempting to reach the Chamber of Deputies where the vote is scheduled to take place.

Second update | The Gelmini plan passed the Chamber of Deputies by a vote of 307-252. It now goes to the Senate for consideration there.

The third national day of action in as many weeks against the British government’s plans for massive student fee increases and higher education cuts is underway. The BBC has an overview of the day’s plans up here, while The Guardian is liveblogging. Twitter hashtags include #solidarity, #demo2010, and #dayx2.

A number of university occupations started last week are still ongoing, and one new one — at Nottingham University — was launched this morning. Their blog is here.

At last week’s London demonstration police used a tactic called “kettling” to bottle up demonstrators in confined spaces, often holding them for hours without charge. Journalist and blogger Laurie Penny, tweeting from the scene as @PennyRed, says today’s demonstrators are on the move — “running at full pelt” without leaders or direction, flummoxing the cops: “These kids just want to run, police can’t keep up.”

I’ll be liveblogging events as they unfold.

2:30 pm UK time | The Guardian is reporting that London’s protesters seem to be scattered throughout the city center, while it raises questions about the legality of the police kettling tactic.

2:50 pm | Tweeter @reallyopenuni reports from the University of Leeds that the campus’s Ziff Building — which houses “student administrative services” — was occupied about half an hour ago. A factional dispute appears to have arisen among the occupiers, with Socialist Workers Party representatives on one side and “everyday students” — including local schoolkids — on the other.

3:20 pm | A new BBC roundup page reports on demonstrations in Birmingham, Sheffield, Bristol, Manchester, Leeds, and Liverpool. Reports on Twitter of additional demonstrations in Newcastle, Brighton, Nottingham, Bristol, Oxford, Exeter, others.

3:30 pm | Huge kettle reported at Trafalgar Square.

3:50 pm | Protests at Belfast, Edinburgh, Warwick as well.

4:30 pm | The Welsh government has announced that it will be absorbing the costs of any tuition increases for all Welsh students next year, wherever they study in the UK. Welsh Education Minister Leighton Andrews says that with the new policy, Wales is “preserving the principle that the state will subsidise higher education and maintain opportunities for all.”

4:50 pm | Word from Twitter is that the kettle at Trafalgar has ended, and the crowd has mostly dispersed.

In the ranks of the most asinine, pointless, downright goofy acts of administrative censorship ever perpetrated against students in the twenty-first century, this one has got to be right up near the top of the list.

The administration at Cal State Long Beach is refusing to allow a graduate student production of “Night of the Tribades,” a 1975 historical drama about Swedish playwright August Strindberg (1849-1912) to be advertised on campus property.

Why? Because “tribade,” an archaic term meaning “lesbian,” is also a reference to a sexual act.

Tribadism, a type of frottage, is — thank you, Wikipedia! — “a form of non-penetrative sex in which a woman rubs her vulva against her partner’s body for sexual stimulation.” Nowadays, it’s more often referred to as “scissoring” or “tribbing.”

A tribade, then, is one who engages in tribadism. And according to CSULB theatre arts major Courtney Knight, because someone in the university’s administration did a Google image search on “tribade” and didn’t like what they saw (or liked it more than they’d anticipated), the play’s name got banned from the school theater’s marquee.

Again, this is a 1975 Swedish play about a Swedish playwright who died in 1912. (The play itself is a “metatheatrical drama” about tensions between Strindberg, his estranged wife, and a female friend of hers — it takes place at a Copenhagen theater during rehearsals for one of Strindberg’s plays, and incorporates considerable actual dialogue from that production.) It’s got nothing to do with scissoring, in other words. There’s no tribbing, actual or implied, in it. The title is a reference to two characters’ ostensible lesbian relationship, not to any particular sexual act.

But of course protesting the administration’s silliness by dressing up as affronted 19th century Swedes wouldn’t have been any fun at all, so CSULB’s students took a more obvious and more gratifying tack — they staged a scissor-in.

Some two dozen theater students gathered on campus, some with shirts reading “tribade” or duct-tape over their mouths … and tribbed. Or mock-tribbed.

The university has to date not commented on the brouhaha, though the production itself got good reviews. It’s playing — marqueeless — through December 11.