claudette colvin twice toward justice by phillip hoose

One year after her arrest, while her infant son slept at home, she became a star witness in the landmark federal lawsuit attacking segregation, Browder v.

She was kicked out of school, and her family decided to send her away to Birmingham.Ĭolvin read about Rosa Parks and the bus boycott and decided she had to return to Montgomery to take part in the movement she’d helped ignite. While her civil disobedience made Colvin a hero to strangers, classmates ridiculed her and called her “crazy.” A few months later, she became involved with an older man who seemed sympathetic and found herself pregnant.

Publicity about the case spotlighted the meanness of the segregation law and prepared the way for Rosa Parks’s famous stand. Her refusal to move on the bus one day after school and her subsequent arrest became a rallying point for the burgeoning civil rights movement suddenly everyone knew her name. “We seemed to hate ourselves,” she told Hoose in an interview. She shocked her peers when she stopped straightening her hair and challenged the dominance of the light-skinned, popular girls at school. Growing up in Jim Crow Montgomery, Colvin questioned everything. Hoose describes her personal struggle against the culture around her in terms young people of any era can readily understand. But it was her rebellious act that got things going. The adults who brought about the monumental transformations of the civil rights era decided not to make an example of Colvin’s case they feared she wouldn’t be the right public face for the Montgomery bus boycott.

In “Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice,” Phillip Hoose gives depth and context to the larger-than-life, sometimes mythologized history of the civil rights movement. Unlike Parks - a seasoned civil rights worker whose protest was carefully planned - Colvin took her stand spontaneously and suffered the consequences alone. On March 2, 1955, nine months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Ala., bus, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested, roughed up and thrown in jail for doing the same thing. Here are two books about young women who had the courage to change the world during the stiflingly conformist 1950s. Sometimes it takes a stubborn woman to start a revolution.

Claudette colvin twice toward justice by phillip hoose