12.05.2009

Who Is Claudette Colvin?

A few weeks ago, it was announced that Phillip Hoose won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature for his biography Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice. When she was just 15 years old, Colvin was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat for a white woman in Montgomery, Alabama. If this story sounds a bit familiar, it's important to note that Colvin did this on her own a good nine months before Rosa Parks! Why did history remember one and forget the other? You'll have to read the book, or at least this New York Times article.

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