Claudette Colvin by Phillip Hoose Read Free Book Online Page B

me off because I refused to walk off.”
    Rosa had already asked the teachers at my school about me and found out I was a good student. She got even more interested when she realized she knew my mother—my biological mom—from Pine Level. Rosa had lived there, too, when she was younger. Mom was close friends with Rosa’s brother, Sylvester, before she left Pine Level for Birmingham.

    Rosa Parks worked as a department store seamstress and served for many years as the secretary of Montgomery’s branch of the NAACP. Pleasant and soft-spoken, she was a steely foe of racial segregation
    We did all sorts of things to raise money for my lawyer. Rosa’s mother baked and sold cookies. I was always eating them, and Rosa would come up and say, “Claudette, don’t eat all the cookies or we won’t have any to sell.” Rosa put me up for Miss NAACP, Montgomery Chapter. I finished second, but it didn’t matter; all the money from the contest went to pay my lawyer anyway.

    C LAUDETTE’S LAWYER wasn’t much older than she was. Bespectacled, serious, sporting a pencil-thin mustache, and usually seen in a neatly pressed suit, twenty-four-year-old Fred Gray was just six months out of law school in March 1955. The youngest of five children, he had grown up riding the Montgomery city buses in a triangle between school and home and his job with a newspaper. He had never himself been beaten or threatened on a bus, but he had heard more than enough insults and witnessed more than enough abuse of black passengers to last a lifetime. Like Claudette, he had vowed to study law in the North and then return home to “destroy everything segregated I could find.”
    After high school, Gray worked his way rapidly through Alabama State Collegeand then went off to law school in Ohio. True to his pledge, he returned to Montgomery soon after graduation, passed the Alabama bar exam, and opened his practice in a tiny downtown office, finding his first clients though black churches and NAACP meetings. He had lunch almost every day with Rosa Parks, who worked across the street at the Montgomery Fair department store. When E. D. Nixon suggested he take the Claudette Colvin case, Gray leaped at the chance. Since Claudette had been charged with breaking the city and state segregation laws, Gray hoped he could use the case to show they were unconstitutional. There had never been a chance before, since no one except Claudette Colvin had ever pleaded not guilty to breaking the segregation laws in a bus arrest.

    Claudette’s lawyer, Fred Gray—young, smart, and “determined to destroy everything segregated I could find”
    One March evening, Gray and his secretary, Bernice Hill, drove out to King Hill to meet Claudette and her parents. They sat around the Colvins’ small kitchen table sipping coffee and talking, while Hill took notes. Since Claudette was still a legal minor, one of her parents would have to file the lawsuit on her behalf. Given its importance, both parents would have to strongly support it. Gray took an instant liking to the entire family, sizing them up as brave and self-reliant. For her part, Claudette admired Fred Gray as the first person she had ever met who was doing what she herself wanted to do someday.
    Gray urged all three to consider the hazards of contesting the charges in court. By pleading not guilty, Claudette would be doing more than just talking back to whites: she would be challenging Jim Crow dead-on. Her name would almost certainly be in the paper. Homes had been bombed, jobs lost, and people lynched for less. All three Colvins simply looked back at him, unshaken. Gray turned to Claudette and asked if she was sure.
    â€œYes, I am,” she replied.
    Her quick response and the family’s unity of purpose sent Fred Gray off King Hill with a sense of hope. Whatever was to come, at least the Colvins were not people who would back down.
    There had been thirteen