Moral Reformer As I begin to develop the conception of what a moral reformer is, I imagine a person who is likely considered

to be a dissident; someone who rises up and says that the current moral system is inadequate or is immoral. By inadequate I mean lacking in something like the absence of a social law that guides moral behavior. Many people know the story of Rosa Parks. She came to my mind as one of the dissident moral reformers of her time. However, in my search for information on Parks I came across another woman named Claudette Colvin whose peaceful protest preceded Parks by nine months. I believe that Claudette Colvin is a moral reformer because she felt an obligation to stand up for her constitutional rights and acted courageously to set an example for others to follow. Claudette Colvin, like Rosa Parks, was also living in Montgomery, Alabama and refused to give up her seat within the same bus system. She is was one of four women to have challenged the bus segregation laws in court in Browder v. Gaylei that overturned the bus segregation law. In the article Before Rosa Parks, There was Claudette Colvinii the historian David Garrow is paraphrased as saying, "people may think that Parks' action was spontaneous, but black civic leaders had been thinking about what to do about the Montgomery bus for years."iii Despite Colvin's courageous action of standing up against an immoral law, she was not brought into the public eye as Parks had been. In the afore mentioned article, Colvin said "the NAACP and all the other black organizations felt Parks would be a good icon because she was an adult. They didn't think teenagers would be reliable."
i

Browder v. Gayle, 352 U.S. 903 (1956) Retrieved from http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/encyclopedia/enc_browder_v_gayle/ ii Adler, Margot, and Phillip Hoose. "Before Rosa Parks, There Was Claudette Colvin." NPR. NPR, n.d. Web. 10 Mar. 2014. iii Adler, Margot, and Phillip Hoose. "Before Rosa Parks, There Was Claudette Colvin." NPR. NPR, n.d. Web. 10 Mar. 2014.