Claudette Colvin: the woman who refused to give up her bus seat – nine months before Rosa Parks

It was a spring afternoon in 1955 when a teenager's spontaneous act of defiance changed US history. Why did it take 40 years for her to get any credit?

It was 2 March 1955, and an unusually humid spring day when students at Booker T Washington high school, a segregated school in the heart of the Jim Crow south, had been let off early to make their way home. A group boarded a segregated public bus, which wound through segregated neighbourhoods gradually filling up with passengers.

A 15-year-old gifted Black student, with aspirations to become a civil rights attorney, took a window seat near the exit door. She gazed outdoors until the white driver instructed her to give up her seat for a white passenger standing nearby.