Claudette Colvin by Phillip Hoose Read Free Book Online

the bus but then get off and reenter through the rear door to find a seat at the back.
    3. A requirement that drivers stop at every corner in black neighborhoods just as they did in white neighborhoods.
    Robinson’s diplomatic letter contained one fragment of steel. In the third to last paragraph she wrote that, if things did not get better, “there has been talk from twenty-five or more local organizations of planning a city-wide boycott of busses.”
    The idea of a bus boycott had been gaining momentum throughout the black community for months. Its power was obvious: three-quarters of Montgomery’s bus passengers were black. If everyone quit riding, they could
starve
the City Lines bus company into reason. Still, the letter stopped short of calling for an end to segregated seating. As Robinson later wrote, “In Montgomery in 1955 no one was brazen enough to announce publicly that black people might boycott City buses for the specific purpose of integrating those buses. Just to say that minorities wanted ‘better seating arrangements’ was bad enough.”
    BUS BOYCOTTS
    The idea of boycotting—or staying off—public vehicles until reforms were made was nothing new, but it had never succeeded for long on a large scale. Between 1900 and 1906, Montgomery was one of twenty-five Southern cities to protest segregated streetcars through boycotts. More recently, in June 1953, the black community of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, had boycotted the city’s buses for several days to protest segregated seating. Though they weren’t able to evict Jim Crow, the Baton Rouge protesters developed a free-ride transportation system and left a detailed blueprint for other bus protesters to follow.
    Robinson’s letter led only to more polite meetings. The whites offered coffee, nodded, and smiled, but refused to budge an inch when it came to Jim Crow. Still, Claudette Colvin’s arrest had stripped the veneer of politeness from the talks. She had been wrenched from her seat and dragged off a bus by police in front of shocked witnesses. People were angry.
    Claudette’s arrest made her the center of attention wherever she went. On the following Sunday, Reverend Johnson led the congregation in prayer for the girl among them who had been arrested forbravely standing up to the bus driver and the police and challenging the whole ugly system. The next day classmates swarmed around her when she pulled up to Booker T. Washington High School in her cousin’s car. They followed her into homeroom and asked to hear her story. Students pointed at her in the halls, whispering, “There’s the girl who got arrested.”
    Opinion at Booker T. Washington was sharply divided between those who admired Claudette’s courage and those who thought she got what she deserved for making things harder for everyone. Some said it was about time someone stood up. Others told her that if she didn’t like the way things were in the South, she should go up North. Still others couldn’t make up their minds: no one they knew had ever done anything like this before.
    â€œA few of the teachers like Miss Nesbitt embraced me,” Claudette recalls. “They kept saying, ‘You were so brave.’ But other teachers seemed uncomfortable. Some parents seemed uncomfortable, too. I think they knew they should have done what I did long before. They were embarrassed that it took a teenager to do it.”
    Facing serious criminal charges, and with her court hearing only two weeks away, Claudette feared she might be sent to a reform school as a juvenile delinquent. She had a lot to lose: she was a good student with dreams of college and a career. She was not about to plead guilty to anything, but she didn’t know what to do or whom to turn to. Somehow, she had to find a lawyer, and figure out how to pay for one. She had no time to lose.

    C LAUDETTE: Everybody got busy. We started working family