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Before there was Rosa Parks, there was the then 15-year-old Claudette Colvin, who more recently received recognition for her refusal to surrender her seat to a white person on a Montgomery bus, nine months before Parks.

In 1955, Colvin’s rebellion against the Jim Crow-era bus law ended with her being charged with assaulting a police officer. A juvenile judge sentenced Colvin to probation, a sentence that has stayed with Colvin until Thursday at the age of 82.

Colvin was originally charged with breaking the segregation law, disturbing the peace, and assaulting an officer, but two of the charges were dropped by a juvenile judge. According to “The Rebellious Life of Rosa Parks”, the dismissal of the charges was a strategic move, without a conviction Colvin would have no grounds to challenge the Jim Crow law in court.

While some think Colvin’s records being expunged more than six decades after the wrongful sentence signifies Alabama’s willingness to acknowledge the racial injustice of the Jim Crow era, others think the decision was long overdue and an embarrassment in the year 2021 going into 2022.

“I am an old woman now,” said Colvin in an interview with NBC News in October 2020. “Having my records expunged will mean something to my grandchildren and great grandchildren, and it will mean something for other Black children.”

After the record was expunged she said, ” I appreciate the judges decision to do it and that means that I’m no longer, at 82, a juvenile delinquent.”