CLAUDETTE COLVIN

A Civil Rights activist who sat on a bus before Rosa Parks did and paid the price tells her story.

Colvin and Hoose collaborated on a YA memoir in 2009 (Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice), but this boiled-down version preserves both major events—as a 15-year-old Montgomery resident in 1955, she was arrested for refusing to give up a bus seat and later participated in an Alabama lawsuit that succeeded in making racially segregated buses illegal in the state—and her claim to have inspired, but subsequently been overshadowed by, Parks. Jackson portrays her as a neatly dressed, studious-looking teen who sits stubbornly with the spirits of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth behind her while the white bus driver delivers an angry lecture; she then goes on to kneel fearfully in an empty cell after being manhandled by white police officers. Finally, she poses in forthright dignity before a panel of white judges as she delivers her testimony. What emerges most strongly from her account is her forceful conviction, undimmed through all the years since, that injustice must be fought: “Because you can’t just ask for change,” she writes. “You can’t sugarcoat it. You have to take a stand and say, ‘This is not right.’ Like I did.” As well as honoring her as one of the earliest and last-surviving Civil Rights pioneers, the book might well inspire readers to take up Hoose’s closing suggestion to ask, “Is there a little Claudette in me?”

Courageous acts, long undersung but well worth remembering.