You have to take a stand and say, 'This is not right.' And I did.Lillian Cook, you astound us. "Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice" is not quite a beautiful book-there's a harshness in the white-on-black appearance of the sidebars, perhaps deliberately-but the photos of the era are riveting and Claudette's eloquent bravery is unforgettable: "Back then, as a teenager, I kept thinking, why don't the adults around here just say something? Say it so they know we don't accept segregation? I knew then and I know now that, when it comes to justice, there's no easy way to get it. It turns out that Claudette was an important actor not once, but twice: A year after being dragged off the bus, she filed a lawsuit, with three others, that ultimately forced the Montgomery bus company to integrate its vehicles. Hoose won the National Book Award for young people's literature with this gripping nonfiction account that intersperses Claudette's recollections with a history of the times. And history might have forgotten Claudette Colvin, or relegated her to footnote status, had writer Phillip Hoose not stumbled upon her name in the course of other research and tracked her down. Parks was a more suitable person to win public sympathy for the civil-rights cause. People gossiped that she was "emotional" and "uncontrollable" and "profane." After the incident, which not everyone applauded, Claudette further shocked her classmates by wearing her hair in cornrows rather than chemically straightened-and she was pregnant.
In short order, police dragged her off the bus and kicked, handcuffed and arrested her, all the while calling her names like "thing" and "whore." The courageous defiance of this young black woman could have made her a heroine, but the civil-rights activists of the time were uneasy about her. When Claudette's bus driver shouted for her to make way for a white passenger, Claudette refused.
Nine months before Rosa Parks declined to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Ala., bus-setting a match to the dry tinder of the civil-rights movement-a "smart, angry teenager" named Claudette Colvin actually did it first.
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