Category Archive

Yesterday was the fifty-sixth anniversary of the day that Claudette Colvin was asked to move to the back of a Montgomery, Alabama city bus, and refused. When Rosa Parks did the same thing nine months later, she sparked a movement that would change America.

But Claudette Colvin is worth remembering too.

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, 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 another.

And there’s another part of the Claudette Colvin story that’s worth telling. I first discovered it in Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phillip Hoose, and it’s stuck with me.

In November 1952, a black Montgomery high school student named Jeremiah Reeves was arrested and charged with the rape of a married white teenager four months earlier.

It was widely believed in Montgomery’s black community that the two had been having an affair. Reeves himself said that she had gone to the authorities only because she feared she was pregnant with his baby. But the police were able to extract a confession from him by threatening him with the death penalty if he pled not guilty — they even forced him to sit in the electric chair where they said he’d be executed.

After the confession 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 — despite the police’s promises — sentenced him 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 on the grounds that his confession should not have been admitted into evidence. (He was retried, with the confession excluded, but the result was the same — and the jury’s verdict came 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.

Updated with additional information December 1, 2011.

So it’s here — the kickoff to 2011’s Month of Action. I’ve started a Google Map to track what goes on today and throughout the month, and I’ll be updating it over the course of the day. The United States Student Association has actions listed in eleven states, most of which I haven’t had the chance to add yet, while the good folks at Defend Public Education have a lot of info on what’s going on in California.

If you know of something I haven’t put up, post a comment, and be sure to follow #March2 on Twitter for all the latest from around the country.

Update | As of 2:00 pm ET, I’ve got twenty-nine actions in thirteen states (and DC) on the map, with more to come.

Second Update | It’s 7:30 pm in the East now, and there’s all sorts of stuff going on. California had a bunch of actions that haven’t made it onto the map yet, several of which are still going on. There’s been one arrest at Laney College, a community college not far from Berkeley. There’s a sit-in happening at UC Santa Cruz, and a building is under occupation at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. (Those occupiers already have a blog, a Facebook page, and a Twitter account, by the way. Nicely done!)

The standoff in Wisconsin continues this morning, two weeks after it began, and all the weekend news is good for the opponents of Governor Scott Walker’s budget bill.

The Democrats in the state senate remain united in their determination to block passage of the bill, and widespread rumors Sunday claimed that they’d picked up their first defection from the other side. Twitter was abuzz yesterday evening with claims that Republican state senator Dale Schultz was planning to vote against the bill, though reporters were unable to reach Schultz or anyone from his office last night.

A dramatic showdown was averted yesterday afternoon as police withdrew an order for protesters camped out in the capitol building to vacate the premises. State officials had declared a 4 pm deadline for the building to be cleared, but after that deadline came and went with hundreds of people still peacefully occupying the space, Capitol Police Chief Charles Tubbs announced that there would be no arrests that night.

The New York Times this morning reported that it was unclear who had given the order to allow the demonstrators to stay, but the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel indicated that Tubbs himself had made the decision “after he saw how they moved aside while work crews went about cleaning the Capitol, including mopping and polishing floors.”

“People are very cooperative,” the paper quoted Tubbs as saying. “I appreciate that.”

This week is looking to be a big one in Wisconsin, and I’ll keep updating the story as news comes in.

I always get confused by February, by which I mean that March always sneaks up on me quicker than I expect, and this year is no exception. Which is why I only just realized that March 2 is only six days away.

March 4, 2010 saw a huge co-ordinated national day of action in support of public higher education, with well over one hundred campuses in more than thirty states participating. The March 2nd day of action, organized along the same loose lines, promises to be similarly impressive, kicking off a monthlong series of actions throughout the United States and beyond.

I’ll be putting together a map of planned actions over the next few days, as I did last year, and updating it as Wednesday draws closer. On the day itself, I’ll be liveblogging events as they occur. If you’ve got information about plans on a particular campus or links to state or national resources, please let me know!

A British judge ruled this morning that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange must be extradited to Sweden to face questioning from prosecutors on allegations that he raped two women there last year. This ruling is likely to revive debates on the nature and merits of those allegations, a subject I’ve addressed at some length in this blog. Here’s a summary.

I first addressed the Assange rape allegations in an early-December post that attempted to separate out fact from fiction based on the limited information available at the time. In those posts I noted that “sex by surprise” isn’t a crime under Swedish law, and that Assange’s accusers alleged non-consensual acts which would, if proven, constitute sexual assault under any standard definition of the term. (In a follow-up post I addressed the question of his guilt or innocence, and the question of prosecutorial misconduct.)

In early January I discovered that one of Assange’s accusers had given an interview to the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet last August — the only time either of the accusers has discussed the case at length in the press. I summarized that interview in this post, and later published its first-ever English-language translation.

Naomi Wolf has been one of Assange’s most prominent defenders, and she has consistently misrepresented the allegations against him. I first addressed those misrepresentations in this post about a Democracy Now television interview she gave in December. Later, I responded to Wolf’s argument that rape accusers’ names should be made public over their objections, addressed new oddities in an interview she gave on BBC radio, and fact-checked both a bizarre essay she wrote for Huffington Post in December and her later incomplete and dishonest “update” to that post.

I’ve also discussed the “honeypot” theory that Assange’s accusers were in the pay of the CIA or Karl Rove, and defended the journalistic practice of not naming rape accusers even when those names are readily available on the internet.

Oof. That’s a lot. By now some of you may be wondering why a blog called “Student Activism” has devoted so much energy to a story that’s not directly related to the campus. The short answer is that sexual assault policy is an important campus issue, and that I originally saw this case as a mechanism for addressing issues that have direct campus relevance. The slightly longer answer is that once I started writing about the case, I realized that there were a lot of misrepresentations and misunderstandings floating around, and didn’t want to let them stand unanswered when I could pitch in and help clear them up.