Free Claudette Colvin by Phillip Hoose

face of a mass bus protest.
    During the summer and fall of 1955, Montgomery’s adult black activists thought hard about the buses—which looked increasingly like Jim Crow’s Achilles’ heel. Each considered what to do in his or her own way. Jo Ann Robinson, E. D. Nixon, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and others continued to meet with city and bus officials, consistently pressing for black drivers, courteous treatment, and a revised seating plan.Every polite refusal increased their resolve. Dr. King thought the officials were digging their own grave. “The inaction of the city and bus officials after the Colvin case would make it necessary for them . . . to meet another committee, infinitely more determined,” he later wrote.
    Rosa Parks and Fred Gray met for lunch nearly every day, often talking about what could be learned from Claudette’s case that could end segregation on the buses. In July, Mrs. Parks slipped away for a two-week workshop on interracial relations at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. Here, for the first time, she saw blacks and whites treated as equals. She returned saying it had changed her life.
    The time was ripe for change. There was a growing impatience with segregation. Claudette had crossed a line, proclaiming that at least one young Alabaman would
not
share her future with Jim Crow. Seven months later, Mary Louise Smith had joined her. Now, a year and a half after
Brown v. Board of Education
, a few brave young people were demanding a different future. Education may have been the way up, but transportation was the way out. If they were branded “uncontrollable” or “emotional” or even “profane,” so be it. Claudette and now Mary Louise Smith had shown through their courage that at least some young people were ready to act.

    Rosa Parks with E. D. Nixon (at left). At last the African-American community of Montgomery was united and ready for action

CHAPTER SEVEN
“A NOTHER N EGRO W OMAN H AS B EEN A RRESTED ”
    Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise
.
    â€”Maya Angelou, “Still I Rise”
    O N D ECEMBER 2, 1955, tens of thousands of black Montgomery residents studied an unsigned leaflet bearing a brief typewritten message. It began: “Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown in jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down. It is the second time since the Claudette Colbert [
sic
] case that a Negro woman has been arrested for the same thing. This has to be stopped.” It concluded:
    We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial. Don’t ride the buses to work, to town, to school or anywhere on Monday. You can afford to stay out of school for one day if you have no other way to go except by bus. You can also afford to stay out of town for one day. If you work, take a cab, or walk. But please, children and grown-ups, don’t ride the bus at all on Monday. Please stay off the buses Monday.
    The author was Jo Ann Robinson, who had been up all night with two student assistants at Alabama State, feverishly running the flyers off on the college’s mimeograph machine and bundling them into packages. When they finished, she placed a phone call to activate a network of distributors already in place. Soon twenty or so allies were stationed at their posts throughout the city, craning their necks watching for Robinson’s car to come into view so they could receive their bundles of flyers and start passing them out in schools, offices, factories, stores, restaurants, and beauty parlors. “Read it and pass it on!” the distributors instructed and sped off. Two of Robinson’s most trusted lieutenants were Claudette’s favorite teachers, Miss Nesbitt and Miss Lawrence. By nightfall most blacks in Montgomery knew what was up. Those