Claudette Colvin, US civil rights pioneer, has died at 86

Claudette Colvin sits for a portrait in New York on February 5, 2009. JULIE JACOBSON / AP

Claudette Colvin, who refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Alabama in 1955 and became a US civil rights pioneer, has died aged 86, her foundation said Tuesday, January 13.

Colvin, at 15, made her protest several months before Rosa Parks' similar act of defiance became a key moment in the birth of the modern civil rights movement in the United States. She "leaves behind a legacy of courage that helped change the course of American history," her foundation said.

Colvin had been studying Black history in school on March 2, 1955, when she was detained after she refused to give up her seat to a white woman on a bus in Montgomery – the same southern US city where Parks' protest made headlines.

"I remained seated because the lady could have sat in the seat opposite me," Colvin told reporters in Paris in April 2023. "She refused because...a white person wasn't supposed to sit close to a negro."