US civil rights pioneer Claudette Colvin, arrested at age 15 for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white woman in Montgomery, Alabama, nine months before Rosa Parks’s similar but more famous act of defiance, died on Tuesday at age 86.
Although she remained a largely unsung figure in the civil rights movement for decades, Colvin’s 1955 act of rebellion inspired Parks and others and helped form the basis for the federal lawsuit that outlawed racial segregation in US public transportation.
Her death, under hospice care in Texas, was confirmed by Ashley Roseboro, a spokesperson for her family and the Claudette Colvin Foundation.
In one of the first publicized acts of civil disobedience against Montgomery’s Jim Crow rules governing city bus seating by race, Colvin refused to relinquish her seat for a white woman, as ordered by the driver, and stayed put until she was dragged off the bus by police.
According to accounts of her testimony in court, Colvin recalled she had been studying anti-slavery abolitionist heroes in school, and felt that she had Harriet Tubman on one shoulder, Sojourner Truth on the other, and “history had me glued to the seat.”
Human Rights Glance
Israeli occupation forces carried out multiple invasions, home break‑ins, abductions, and movement restrictions across the occupied West Bank on Saturday, targeting communities in the northern Jordan Valley, Bethlehem, Hebron in the southern West Bank, Salfit in the central West Bank, Jenin in the northern West Bank, Qalqilia in the northwestern West Bank, Ramallah in the central West Bank, and occupied Jerusalem.
Mohammed Ibrahim wants to run and play soccer again, but the 14-year-old has had three surgeries since an accident this summer when he was run over as he tried to grab food off an aid truck for his starving family.
The UK has settled out of court by paying a “substantial sum” to a Guantánamo Bay detainee who was suing the government for its alleged complicity in his rendition and torture, according to the inmate’s legal team.
A Maryland woman has been released and reunited with her family after spending 25 days in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody – despite her attorneys saying documentation showed she was born in the US and therefore is a citizen.
Three Israelis were arrested after settlers wounded at least two people and set fire to cars at a Palestinian factory near Nablus in the West Bank earlier today, according to Israeli security forces and the Palestinian Red Crescent Society.
Israeli forces clashed Tuesday with students during a raid at Birzeit University, north of Ramallah in the West Bank, in what the military said was an operation aimed at disrupting a pro-terror gathering.





























