Too Young to Matter, Old Enough to Change History

On March 2, 1955, fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin boarded a Montgomery, Alabama city bus after classes at Booker T. Washington High School. When the driver ordered her to give up her seat for a white passenger, Colvin did something that would be remembered — and then nearly forgotten. She refused to move.

Two police officers dragged the teenager off the bus and arrested her. She later recalled that she felt the hands of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth pressing her down into that seat. In her high school classes, she had been studying the Constitution, Black history, and the meaning of citizenship. That afternoon, her education became conviction, and her conviction became defiance.

Nine months before Rosa Parks made the same stand on December 1, Montgomery's civil rights leaders considered rallying around Colvin's case but decided a teenager was too young to be the face of a movement. Yet Colvin went on to become one of four plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, the 1956 federal case that declared bus segregation unconstitutional. The girl they thought too young helped dismantle the law itself.

Paul wrote to young Timothy, "Don't let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers." God has never waited for the world's permission to use the young. The courage He plants in a fifteen-year-old's heart can shake an unjust system to its foundations. When the Almighty calls, no one is too young to answer.