claudette colvin twice toward justice sparknotes

For an informational text, I was surprised to find myself on the edge of my seat during some parts.

I hadn’t seen anything like this in nonfiction before, and I think the two styles blended well together and really worked. Phillip Hoose provides answers and describes Claudette’s background and childhood through a combination of his own narration, plus a compilation of interview responses from Claudette that he has written in a kind of autobiographical retelling. Both women were extremely important to the Civil Rights Movement, but one is well known and one is not. Rosa’s actions were planned out and strategic, designed to fuel change on a large scale.

The difference? Claudette’s actions were spontaneous, a kind of teenage rebellion based partly on her recent school studies about black history and the Constitution and partly on just being tired of tolerating unfair treatment. Historic figures like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks play important roles, but center stage belongs to the brave, bookish girl whose two acts of courage were to affect the course of American history.Almost one year before Rosa Parks took her famous stand (or sit – sorry, no pun intended) on a Montgomery bus, fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin had already done the same. Gayle.īased on extensive interviews with Claudette Colvin and many others, Phillip Hoose presents the first in-depth account of a major, yet little-known, civil rights figure whose story provides a fresh perspective on the Montgomery bus protest of 1955–56. Undaunted, she put her life in danger a year later when she dared to challenge segregation yet again - as one of four plaintiffs in the landmark busing case Browder v. Shouting “It’s my constitutional right!” as police dragged her off to jail, Claudette Colvin decided she’d had enough of the Jim Crow segregation laws that had angered and puzzled her since she was a young child.īut instead of being celebrated, as Rosa Parks would be when she took the same stand nine months later, Claudette found herself shunned by many of her classmates and dismissed as an unfit role model by the black leaders of Montgomery. On March 2, 1955, a slim, bespectacled teenager refused to give up her seat to a white woman on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama.

Claudette colvin twice toward justice sparknotes