Is it really justice that a 15 year-old girl who made history should be written out of it because she was pregnant? Being black didn't help - not in Alabama in 1955 - but this girl was as important to the growing civil rights movement, in her way, as more famous people were to become, but prejudice within her own community stifled that importance.

Everyone who knows anything about the civil rights movement knows the story of December 1st, 1955, when Rosa Parks, a 49 year old black seamstress got on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama and took a seat. Three stops on, some white passengers boarded and driver James Blake ordered Rosa to surrender her seat to one of them. She refused.

This was unknown and unacceptable behaviour for a black person, and Blake went to find a policeman. Rosa was arrested, and outrage among the black community was such that her treatment sparked off the infamous bus boycott. A chain reaction followed across the southern states, making American apartheid an international issue within a very short space of time.

Rosa's iron determination and courage was the trigger for a rapidly growing stance of defiance among black people, ultimately catapulting a previously unknown 26-year-old preacher called Martin Luther King on to the world stage. King said of Rosa that "She was a victim of both the forces of history and of destiny, tracked down by the zeitgeist - The spirit of the times."

Before long, they were referring to her as "Saint Rosa" - "An angel walking" and as a "heaven sent messenger." Her lawyer - Fred Gray - spoke of her in glowing biblical terms, but somewhere en route to her legendary status, the truth got buried. Rosa was no innocent victim or wallflower, but a feminist and political activist of long standing, and she certainly wasn't the first to make a stand.

The real heroine had taken her stand a full nine months earlier. Claudette Colvin had been thrown off a bus in the same town, in an almost identical situation, and like Parks pleaded not guilty to breaking the law. The local black community had also rallied round her, at the time, but she never did get into the civil rights hall of fame.

Just as her case was starting to attract national interest, she became pregnant. Black community leadership in her town was mainly middle-class, church-going and male, so Colvin was suddenly seen as a fallen woman - not someone whose cause they could take up with any degree of comfort, so the support she'd known dried up.

Colvin was a clever, confident young woman - deeply religious, but nonetheless rebellious. Her disadvantage within the black community was that she was very dark skinned, and the prejudice among blacks themselves meant this fact put her at the bottom of their social scale. Darker skinned girls tended to be shy and retiring - knowing their place - but not Colvin.

Even at ten years old, she wanted to be President of the USA, and her desire to "go north and liberate her people" was seen as a sign of her being crazy by her teachers. She was especially inflamed about the case of a schoolmate - Jeremiah Reeves - a teenage delivery boy found having sex with a white woman. Though he claimed it was by consent, the woman cried rape.

This was a violation of a deeply felt southern taboo on sex between races, and when Claudette was in the ninth grade, the police took Jeremiah away and put him on death row, where he was executed four years later. So it was that this angry, articulate young girl got on the Highland Avenue bus on March 2nd 1955, opposite Martin Luther King's church on Dexter Avenue, Montgomery.

The law said that whites should sit in front and blacks at the back, and blacks were obliged to give up seats to white passengers who were standing, but Colvin refused to do this, as she was occupying the very last seat normally reserved for blacks. After heated exchanges, she was taken to city hall and charged with misconduct, resisting arrest and violating city segregation laws. She was terrified, though convinced she hadn't broken the law - not knowing what might happen to her - as the impact of what she'd done began to dawn on her.

News traveled fast, even in those days, and meetings began to be called among black communities all over town. Local black activist Ed Nixon wanted to make hers a test case, and meetings with the commissioner resulted in a promise that harassment would stop. Despite pleading innocent at her trial, Colvin was found guilty and put on probation.

All the same, her heroic defiance had sent shock waves through American society, and letters of support arrived from places as far apart as Oregon and California. Still, the elders of her own black community had their doubts about her worthiness to represent them. After all, she was working-class and very black. When she also fell pregnant, that did it for them, and they decided to wait for someone who should look better in the public eye.

Rosa Parks was married and "morally clean" as well as being lighter-skinned, so hers became the case that everyone remembers, but this hardly seems fair or just to Claudette Colvin. After all, her March stand was important because it came less than a year after the US supreme court had outlawed the "separate but equal" policy on which racial segregation was legally based, but she was also the first person ever to plead NOT GUILTY to a violation of the bus seating ordnance.

Even today, Colvin is still resentful, sad and bewildered at the way she was treated, and she surely has a valid point. As a ten year old, she had a dream of freedom for her kind, and there is little doubt that her actions really did sew the seeds of future change in the laws on civil rights in America. Whatever the history books have tried to say, she truly was the first to stand up and be counted when it mattered. Isn't it time she had some proper recognition? I believe it is.