Claudette Colvin, the teenager who refused to surrender her seat on a segregated Montgomery, Alabama bus nine months before Rosa Parks did the same — and whose courage helped ignite the modern civil rights movement — has died at age 86.

Colvin was just 15 years old on March 2, 1955, when she declined to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery city bus. She was arrested, handcuffed, and dragged off. The incident predated Parks’ more widely known act of defiance by nearly a year, yet for decades Colvin remained largely in the shadows of history — her role minimized, her name unfamiliar to many who could readily recite the story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

That began to change in her later years, when historians and activists worked to restore her rightful place in the record. Colvin later became one of the four plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, the landmark federal lawsuit that resulted in a Supreme Court ruling declaring Montgomery’s bus segregation laws unconstitutional. That ruling — not just the boycott — was what legally ended segregated seating on the city’s buses. Colvin was part of the foundation.

Her story is a reminder of how history is written, and who gets left out. Movement leaders at the time made a calculated decision not to make Colvin the face of the boycott campaign — she was young, unmarried, and pregnant. Rosa Parks, a trained NAACP organizer, was deemed a more strategically viable symbol. The calculus of respectability politics shaped the historical record for generations.

But Colvin never stopped speaking the truth of what happened. In interviews and public appearances over the years, she remained clear-eyed about her contribution and about the forces that had worked to obscure it. “History had me to step aside,” she once said, “but I always knew what I did.”

Her death comes in the same week that the nation marked the 61st anniversary of Bloody Sunday — March 7, 1965 — when civil rights marchers were beaten by state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Colvin’s act of resistance in 1955 was part of the long, painful arc that made Selma possible. And Selma made everything that followed possible.

She was born September 5, 1939, in Alabama, and spent much of her adult life in New York. She was 86 years old.

Rest in power, Claudette Colvin. History always knew your name.

The Sun-Reporter staff contributed to this report.