Bibliographic Information
Hoose, P. (2009). Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice. New York, NY: Melanie Kroupa Books. ISBN: 0374313229.
Plot Summary
Claudette Colvin was an African American teenager living in Montgomery, AL during the 1950s. After a classmate was wrongly convicted and executed due more to his race than his guilt, Claudette became interested in the civil rights movement. Nine months before Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white person, Claudette was forcibly removed from a bus for the same thing. She was tried and convicted of disturbing the peace, assaulting an officer, and breaking the segregation laws of the state. An appeal upheld one of the three convictions. While civil rights leaders of the time supported her in the court case, they abandoned Claudette after she was taken advantage of by an older married man and became pregnant. Instead, the more socially acceptable Rosa Parks was chosen to be the face of the Montgomery bus boycott. However, the boycott didn't end until Claudette and three other black women sued the mayor, claiming that the city's segregated bus laws were unconstitutional. The women won their suit and the subsequent appeal, ending the boycott and the practice of legal segregation in the South. Despite the victory, Claudette and her role in the civil rights movement was all but forgotten.
Review
The interesting thing about this story isn't just how blacks were treated by whites in the South, but how Claudette herself was treated by her black peers. Many shunned her for standing up to the segregation laws and when she became pregnant, she was ostracized and expelled from school. Also, black teens in general bullied one another due to their darker skin tones or the curliness of their hair. The bullying in this true tale comes from all sides. Tweens, particularly those of minority groups, will feel kinship to Claudette and her struggles and recognize differences and similarities in their own experiences.
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