“Being dragged off that bus was worth it just to see Barack Obama become president,” said Claudette Colvin, who was arrested before Rosa Parks was arrested for keeping her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama.

Claudette Colvin broke ground nearly 10 months before Rosa Parks.  In March 1955, Colvin, then just 15 years old, was arrested for violating an ordinance in Montgomery, Alabama, that required segregation on city buses, according to a Stanford University entry. Colvin went to jail without a chance to call her family, a University of Idaho researcher wrote.

Colvin and other women challenged the law in court. But black civil rights leaders, pointing to circumstances in Colvin’s personal life, thought Parks would make a better icon for the movement. “Being dragged off that bus was worth it just to see Barack Obama become president,” Colvin said in the 2017 book “Still I Rise.” “So many others gave their lives and didn’t get to see it, and I thank God for letting me see it.”