Claudette Colvin, the first black woman in the United States to refuse to give up her seat to a white man, died

According to US media reports, Colvin, who was known for opposing Jim Crow laws in 1955, died in the US state of Texas.

The news did not mention any health issues as the cause of Colvin's death.

Colvin is considered one of the people who ignited the civil rights movement by refusing to allow a white woman to sit on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. After Colvin, a woman named Rosa Parks committed the same act in Montgomery.

He opposed the law against blacks

Under Jim Crow laws, seats on buses were segregated by race. Black passengers were required to sit in the back seats, and if the area reserved for whites was full, the driver could ask black passengers to vacate their seats.

Additionally, black passengers were not allowed to sit in the same row as white passengers, which meant that black passengers had to move to the back even if there were empty seats next to white passengers.

The bus driver asked Colvin and three other black passengers who boarded the Montgomery city bus on March 2, 1955, when he was 15 years old, to change seats, but Colvin remained seated.

After the driver called the police, Colvin was arrested by officers and charged with disturbing the peace, violating segregation laws and assaulting an officer.

As a result of the case in which Fred Gray, Rosa Parks' future lawyer, represented him in court, Colvin was sentenced to a fine and a suspended sentence.

In an interview with a newspaper in 2009, Colvin said that local civil rights activists did not want him to be portrayed as a symbol of discrimination because “his skin color was too dark and too poor” to attract the support of Montgomery's black middle class, and that his mother warned him not to speak about the incident.

When Parks couldn't find a seat in the white section of the bus in Montgomery on December 1, 1955, she responded to a white man who asked for a seat by not standing up.

Black people protesting the arrest of Parks, who refused to stand up, didn't ride the buses for more than a year. After this decisive measure, the American federal court banned the practice of black-white segregation on buses.

Parks' refusal to give in is considered one of the milestones of black resistance in the United States.