First published 2014
Fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin boards a segregated city bus in Montgomery, Alabama on March 2, 1955. When the driver orders her to surrender her seat to a white woman, she refuses. "It's my constitutional right!" she declares as police officers drag her from the bus. Nine months later, Rosa Parks will make a similar stand and become famous. But Colvin faces a different fate. Her classmates shun her. Community leaders dismiss her courage. The civil rights movement overlooks her sacrifice. Yet Colvin refuses to disappear quietly. A year after her arrest, she steps forward again as a key plaintiff in Browder v. Gayle, the Supreme Court case that ends bus segregation across the South. Phillip Hoose reconstructs the forgotten story of this teenage pioneer who challenged Jim Crow twice and helped change American law. This National Book Award winner and Newbery Honor book reveals how one girl's determination sparked legal victory even as history tried to erase her name.
Genres: 20th-century, african-american, biography-memoir, american-history
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: forgotten-history, underdog
Setting: Montgomery, Alabama
Period: 1955, 1950s
160 pages · Hardcover · Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)