Claudette Colvin has record expunged 66 years after refusing to give up bus seat to white passenger

A Black civil rights pioneer who was charged with assault in 1955 for refusing to give up her bus seat for a white passenger has finally had the crime expunged from her record.

Claudette Colvin, 82, had borne the criminal record for 66 years after being arrested and sentenced to probation by authorities in Montgomery, Alabama when she was only 15 years old.

But on 24 November, county judge Calvin Williams granted her petition to clear the record and commended her "courageous act", ordering all references to her arrest to be destroyed.

The incident came nine months before Rosa Parks’ more famous arrest for a similar act of defiance in the same city, which triggered widespread protests that eventually led to the desegregation of Montgomery’s buses.

Local civil rights leaders declined to help Ms Colvin mount a lawsuit because she became pregnant when she was 16, which they feared would taint her case in the eyes of the press and opponents.

Ms Colvin said: "I appreciate the Judge’s decision to do it and that means that, I’m no longer, at 82, a juvenile delinquent.

"My reason for doing it is because I get a chance to tell my grandchildren, my great grandchildren, what life was like in segregated America ... the hardship and intimidation that took place in those years, and the reason I took a stand to defy the segregated law."

Judge Williams told NBC News: "It’s really a full circle moment for me to sit on the bench, when there were no judges of African American descent on the bench, to right a wrong that was perpetrated on her at the time."

Ms Colvin launched her petition in October, nearly seven decades after being convicted of breaking segregation laws, disorderly conduct, and assaulting a police officer. The first two verdicts were overturned on appeal, but the last one stuck.

At the time, Montgomery had separate buses and bus sections for black and white people, part of an all-encompassing system of segregation throughout the American South known as the Jim Crow laws.

In an affidavit, Ms Colvin said she would normally have taken a special bus for Black schoolchildren, but on 2 March 1955 she boarded a different one by chance because she finished school early that day.

Describing the moment when she was asked to give up her seat to a white woman, she recalled: "History had me glued to the sea ... Sitting there, it felt to me as though Harriet Tubman’s hand was on one shoulder pushing me down and Sojourner Truth’s hand was on the other."

She also told CNN: "People said I was crazy, because I was 15 years old and defiant and shouting, ‘it’s my constitutional right!’"

A police report said she had struggled as officers removed her, scratching and kicking one of them. Her lawyers said that she was never told whether her probation had ended, leaving her in legal limbo.

Afterwards, Ms Colvin said she became "notorious" in Montgomery, and was fired "over and over again" from jobs after employers found out she was "’that girl’ who had sat on the bus".