On March 2, 1955, she was arrested at the age of 15 in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her seat to a white woman on a crowded, segregated bus.

It occurred nine months before the similar, more widely known incident in which Rosa Parks, secretary of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), helped spark the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott.

[3] Colvin was one of four plaintiffs in the first federal court case filed by civil rights attorney Fred Gray on February 1, 1956, as Browder v. Gayle, to challenge bus segregation in the city.

On June 13, 1956, the judges determined that the state and local laws requiring bus segregation in Alabama were unconstitutional.

One month later, the Supreme Court affirmed the order to Montgomery and the state of Alabama to end bus segregation.

She has said, "Young people think Rosa Parks just sat down on a bus and ended segregation, but that wasn't the case at all.

Colvin was a member of the NAACP Youth Council and had been learning about the civil rights movement in school.

[5] Colvin did not receive the same attention as Parks for a number of reasons: she did not have "good hair", she was not fair-skinned, she was a teenager, and she was pregnant.

[16][19] When Colvin refused to get up, she was thinking about a school paper she had written that day about the local customs that prohibited blacks from using the dressing rooms in order to try on clothes in department stores.

"[citation needed] The police officers who took her to the station made sexual comments about her body and took turns guessing her bra size throughout the ride.

Colvin was initially charged with disturbing the peace, violating the segregation laws, and battering and assaulting a police officer.

[21] She also said in the 2009 book Claudette Colvin: Twice Towards Justice, by Phillip Hoose, that one of the police officers sat in the back seat with her.

A group of black civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King Jr. was organized to discuss Colvin's arrest with the police commissioner.

[16] Through the trial Colvin was represented by Fred Gray, a lawyer for the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), which was organizing civil rights actions.

When Colvin's case was appealed to the Montgomery Circuit Court on May 6, 1955, the charges of disturbing the peace and violating the segregation laws were dropped, although her conviction for assaulting a police officer was upheld.

Her political inclination was fueled in part by an incident with her schoolmate, Jeremiah Reeves; his case was the first time that she had witnessed the work of the NAACP.

The case, organized and filed in federal court by civil rights attorney Fred Gray, challenged city bus segregation in Montgomery as unconstitutional.

Colvin left Montgomery for New York City in 1958,[6] because she had difficulty finding and keeping work following her participation in the federal court case that overturned bus segregation.

NPR's Margot Adler has said that black organizations believed that Rosa Parks would be a better figure for a test case for integration because she was an adult, had a job, and had a middle-class appearance.

[32] In 2005, Colvin told the Montgomery Advertiser that she would not have changed her decision to remain seated on the bus: "I feel very, very proud of what I did," she said.

"[28] On May 20, 2018, Congressman Joe Crowley honored Colvin for her lifetime commitment to public service with a Congressional Certificate and an American flag.

"Had it not been for Claudette Colvin, Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, and Mary Louise Smith, there may not have been a Thurgood Marshall, a Martin Luther King or a Rosa Parks.

Mayor Todd Strange presented the proclamation and, when speaking of Colvin, said, "She was an early foot soldier in our civil rights, and we did not want this opportunity to go by without declaring March 2 as Claudette Colvin Day to thank her for her leadership in the modern day civil rights movement."

Daryl Bailey, the District Attorney for the county, supported her motion, stating: "Her actions back in March of 1955 were conscientious, not criminal; inspired, not illegal; they should have led to praise and not prosecution".

[46] Former US Poet Laureate Rita Dove memorialized Colvin in her poem "Claudette Colvin Goes To Work",[47] published in her 1999 book On the Bus with Rosa Parks; folk singer John McCutcheon turned this poem into a song, which was first publicly performed in Charlottesville, Virginia's Paramount Theater in 2006.

[49] A re-enactment of Colvin's resistance is portrayed in a 2014 episode of the comedy TV series Drunk History about Montgomery, Alabama.

[citation needed] In the second season (2013) of the HBO drama series The Newsroom, the lead character, Will McAvoy (played by Jeff Daniels), uses Colvin's refusal to comply with segregation as an example of how "one thing" can change everything.

He remarks that if the ACLU had used her act of civil disobedience, rather than that of Rosa Parks' eight months later, to highlight the injustice of segregation, a young preacher named Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. may never have attracted national attention, and America probably would not have had his voice for the Civil Rights Movement.

[50] The Little-Known Heroes: Claudette Colvin, a children's picture book by Kaushay and Spencer Ford, was published in 2021.

[51] In 2022, a biopic of Colvin titled Spark written by Niceole R. Levy and directed by Anthony Mackie was announced.