Book Review - Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice

Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phillip Hoose

This 2009 biography for young readers won the National Book Award, the Newbery Honor, the Robert F. Siebert Honor, and was a YALSA finalist for excellence in young adult nonfiction. And yet, I had never heard of it nor of its subject until very recently. Claudette Colvin was a civil rights pioneer in Mongomery, Alabama at the age of 15, and her story is inspiring, uplifting, infuriating, and utterly sad. Her beginnings were humble and impoverished. Her school days were marked by a growing indignity at segregation and second-class citizenship, at peers who judged one another and valued lighter skin and softer, straighter hair, and especially at adults in her community who complained bitterly at home but never took action to protest the injustice of their treatment under Alabama law.

"I was done talking about 'good hair' and 'good skin' but not addressing our grievances. I was tired of adults complaining how badly they were treated and not doing anything about it. I was tired of hoping for justice. When my moment came, I was ready."

Claudette's moment came on March 2, 1955, when at the age of 15, she refused to give up her seat to a white woman on a Montgomery bus. She was brutally arrested, jailed, and charged with three separate criminal charges. Her arrest galvanized a community while also rattling it. Many adult community leaders supported her and expressed feelings of shame that it was a 15 year-old, not an adult, who finally took a stand against injustice, but Claudette was shunned at school as a troublemaker. No one took action. Months later, another teenager did the same thing, but it wasn't until Rosa Parks also refused to give up her seat nine months later that a hero was born and a bus boycott was organized. Even then, the landmark court case that legally ended segregation of Montgomery buses had Claudette Colvin, not Rosa Parks as a plaintiff. Claudette grew up and grew old impoverished and shunned in the shadows of the civil rights movement she absolutely had a hand in launching. Her story's telling is long overdue!