Quotes by Claudette Colvin

That was worse than stealing, you know, talking back to a white person.

When I got to 10th grade at Booker T. Washington High, I had a teacher, Miss Geraldine Nesbitt. I think she came from New York. She helped me begin to question things.

When I told my mother I was pregnant, I thought she was going to have a heart attack.

I'd like my grandchildren to be able to see that their grandmother stood up for something, a long time ago.

I wanted to be an attorney. My mother would say I never stopped talking. I always had a lot of questions to ask, and I was never satisfied with the answer. A lot of things I wasn't satisfied by.

I knew then and I know now, when it comes to justice, there is no easy way to get it.

I lost most of my friends. Their parents had told them to stay away from me, because they said I was crazy, I was an extremist.

I became aware of how the world is and how the white establishment plays black people against each other.

For African-Americans, it's still going to be -- some people say double hard -- I'd say four times as hard. Be an opportunist. Take advantage of your resources, because the only way to win is with education, self-esteem, having value in yourself.

There were many African Americans -- many, many stories similar to my story.

I always tell young people to hold on to their dreams. And sometimes you have to stand up for what you think is right even if you have to stand alone.

The light-skinned girls always thought they were better looking. So did the teachers, too. That meant most of the dark complexion ones didn't like themselves.

I just couldn't move. History had me glued to the seat.

I've always told my children that once they go out into the world, they must have two heads and two minds: one to keep grounded, the other to deal with corporate America.

What do we have to do to make God love us?' I always grew up with that. I always used to go around thinking that. 'God loved the white people better. He must've. That's why he made them white.'

I wanted the young African-American girls also on the bus to know that they had a right to be there, because they had paid their fare just like the white passengers.

We learned about people like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington and Marian Anderson. Harriet Tubman was my favorite.

New York is a completely different culture to Montgomery, Alabama.

A lot has changed since I grew up, but there's still a long way to go. I don't think we can move forward with Donald Trump as the president. There's a disconnect there. We don't want to regress, we want progress.

There was segregation everywhere. The churches, buses and schools were all segregated and you couldn't even go into the same restaurants.

I never swore when I was young.

As long as white people put people of color, African Americans and Latinos, in the same dispensable bag, and look at our children of color as insignificant and treat women of color as not as deserving of protection as white women, we will never achieve true equality.

I was about four years old the first time I ever saw what happened when you acted up to whites.

When our founding fathers drafted the Constitution and Bill of Rights, black people weren't even considered human.

I remember during Easter one year, I was to get a pair of black patent shoes but you could only get them from the white stores, so my mother drew the outline of my feet on a brown paper bag in order to get the closest size, because we weren't allowed to go in the store to try them on.

A lot of African American women wanted to emulate white women. But I said in my mind, rationally thinking, there is no way you are going to get your hair that straight, especially in the summer.

When you've been abused daily and you see people humiliated and harassed, you just get tired of it.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott began in December 1955, and by 1956 NAACP leaders came to me and asked me to be part of a lawsuit they wanted to file on my behalf and that of three other women, to challenge segregation on public buses.

Rosa Parks wasn't the first one to rebel against the segregated seats. I was the first one.

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

Being dragged off that bus was worth it just to see Barack Obama become president, because so many others gave their lives and didn't get to see it, and I thank God for letting me see it.

I left the South in 1963 and was living in Morristown, New Jersey, when the March on Washington took place, so I watched it on television instead.