Claudette Colvin

I never swore when I was young.

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

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

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 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.

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.

We were churchgoing people.

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.

I sleep when the sleep comes down on me.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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.'

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.