97 pages • 3 hours read
Phillip HooseClaudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice
Nonfiction | Biography | YA | Published in 2009A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Part 1, Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “Jim Crow and the Detested Number Ten”
A personal anecdote from Claudette Colvin opens Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice. She remembers being in a store as a young child, standing in line while her mother Mary Jane waits to pay. A group of white boys starts mocking her, although four-year-old Claudette does not understand why. When the youngest boy, who has just cut her in line, asks her to show him her hands, she holds them up and he touches her. This immediately draws the attention of both Claudette’s mother and the white boy’s mother, and, to Claudette’s shock, her mother slaps her. She tells Claudette to never touch a white person.
The book then shifts to an overview of life in Alabama under the Jim Crow laws of the 1940s and 1950s. Most Black people, Claudette’s parents included, were restricted to earning money working as servants. The few exceptions were Black teachers and ministers in Black schools and churches. Black and White life were kept almost completely segregated. Black and white people could not play together or get married, swim in a pool or ride in an elevator at the same time, and were assigned separate drinking fountains and bathrooms. According to author Phillip Hoose, Black people were so accustomed to these rules that they did not let most types of segregation bother them on a daily basis.
The one major exception was the one place where Black and white people were forced to be together in close quarters, the public bus system. Hoose describes the complex system of bus segregation in Montgomery, Alabama, where bus rules were more stringent than in other parts of the South. On all buses, the first 10 seats were reserved for white people, and would remain empty even if there were no white people on the bus and dozens of people standing in the aisles. Black passengers had to surrender their seats to new white passengers, and could not sit in the same row as any white person. Black people also had to enter the back door and exit through the front door of the bus after paying, even if they were the only passenger. Bus drivers, who were always white and often carried guns, were trained to constantly monitor Black passengers and confront anyone who broke the rules.
Hoose gives several examples of people breaking bus rules. Almost any violation would end in a person’s arrest or in one case (“Brooks”), death by police officer. Even Black people who broke the rules by accident, such as the Johnson siblings who were visiting from New Jersey and unaccustomed to Southern segregation, were punished. While people were able to cope with segregation in most other arenas, the bus became an increasing source of tension in Montgomery throughout the Jim Crow era. Black workers were often exhausted from working long hours at physically demanding jobs, and grew more and more resentful as they stood for long commutes with 10 empty seats right in front of them, or were forced to crowd into the aisle to allow a single white person to occupy a whole row in the integrated section. When Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka made school segregation illegal in 1954, many Black people, especially students, began to feel that societal change could be achieved, and buses would begin to be a place of peaceful protest.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “Coot”
Chapter 2 outlines Claudette’s life as a young child in rural Pine Level, Alabama. After being born in Birmingham, she was sent to Pine Level to live with her great-aunt Mary Ann and great-uncle Q. P. Colvin, who raised her and her younger sister as their own children (she calls them her parents throughout the book). She loved life in Pine Level, as the family had many farm animals and a dog, and she could always be outdoors playing with her best friend Annie. She was a precocious child from a young age, and remembers questioning everything from her dog’s place in heaven to Easter being on a Sunday. More than anything else, Claudette questioned why white people were allowed to oppress Black people. She was religious and believed that God loved everyone, so she doubted the adults who suggested she belonged to a “cursed race.”
Claudette spent much of her time at her mother’s friends’ houses, especially Baby Tell and Mama Sweetie. Baby Tell lived in a huge old house that her family had somehow gotten from a white family, which Claudette loved to explore. Mama Sweetie was well-read and always willing to answer Claudette’s questions about the world. Claudette adored learning; like many Black children in Alabama, she attended a one-room school with few resources, but took every opportunity she could to get ahead. She remembers, “I learned the entire second grade in advance just by listening to Annie—she was a year older than me—and by hearing Mama Sweetie read from her Bible and her Webster’s dictionary” (14). She ended up skipping second grade, and from then on, was the youngest in her class throughout school.
Claudette also loved going to church, especially on “Big Meeting Sunday” when Reverend H. H. Johnson would visit from Montgomery. The service would go from noon until nighttime, with sermons, choirs, a glee club competition, and plenty of food. She remembers seeing a white man, the owner of her family’s land, leaving the white church after 45 minutes on a Big Meeting Sunday, and realizing another difference between the Black and white communities: “How could anyone serve God on a Sunday in less than an hour?” (15).
Claudette and her family left Pine Level when she was eight, after Mary Ann inherited a house in the city. They moved to King Hill, a small, poor Black neighborhood with a reputation for being dangerous. They did not find the area threatening, as Claudette remembers her neighbors all taking care of each other. She shared a room with Delphine, who often kept her awake by talking or squirming around, but she has mostly fond memories of her early years in King Hill.
Although Claudette liked many things about Montgomery, she became angrier about racism as she got older and experienced it in new areas. Racism existed in Pine Level, and Claudette reports needing to be cautious around white people. They refused to call Black adults “Mr.” and “Mrs.”—instead creating dismissive nicknames for Black residents, with Claudette’s nickname being “Coot” after a doctor mispronounced the word “cute” while singing to her to distract her from a shot. In Montgomery, racism was ingrained in society to a level that Claudette had not experienced. She was not allowed to try on clothes or shoes at department stores, could not sit or play in the major city park, could not sit in waiting room chairs where white people might want to sit later, and was unable to go to the Roy Rogers rodeo because the Black show was canceled.
When Claudette was about to turn 13, tragedy struck the household. Delphine developed a fever one Sunday, and the next day, a doctor diagnosed her with polio. Claudette never saw her again after she left for the hospital, although she remembers trying to force her way into Delphine’s room. Delphine died on Claudette’s 13th birthday, just days before Claudette started high school.
Part 1, Chapters 1-2 Analysis
Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice shifts between Claudette’s first-person perspective, her direct stories, and Hoose’s third-person narration that includes important context. Chapter 1 (“Jim Crow and the Detested Number Ten”) is the one exception to the rule. Other than a short anecdote about Claudette’s earliest memories of white supremacy, the chapter comprises an overview of the social dynamics surrounding buses in 1950s Montgomery, Alabama. Hoose establishes why buses became a highly contested space in the early fight for civil rights. Segregation meant that Black and white people could largely avoid each other in most circumstances. Black people were fully banned from many white spaces and institutions such as schools, churches, and theaters. However, the bus marked the one place where Black and white people were forced to interact closely, and therefore became the place where white supremacy played out in the most direct manner.
Hoose discusses the symbolism of the number 10, in reference to the first 10 seats of the bus where only white people were allowed to sit. The chapter title reflects the hatred that developed toward this number in the Black community. It did not matter that Black people took buses in far greater numbers than white people, or that they often had long commutes after hard days of physical work as they were kept out of more sedentary careers. Even if a bus was full to the brim with Black passengers, the first 10 seats sat empty as a constant reminder that Black people were considered less important than even a nonexistent white passenger. In many ways, the bus laws reflected the flaws inherent in segregation laws. When Jim Crow laws were first enacted, Southern authorities saw them as a way to continue the practice of white supremacy without the ability to directly enslave the Black population. The laws hinged on the flawed judgment that Black people were naturally inferior to white people, and therefore would accept an inferior role in society. In many areas, white leaders were able to intimidate the Black population into accepting oppression, but the constant, direct humiliation of the bus rules proved a step too far, and would ultimately catalyze the destruction of the legal segregation system as a whole.
Claudette Colvin aims to paint a picture of a specific moment in the early Civil Rights Movement, but also connects the struggles faced by people of the period to the continued oppression of Black Americans today. An example of this is the anecdote about “Brooks,” the man murdered by police after refusing to exit a bus and reenter through the back door. After the driver confronted him, Brooks calmly asked for his fare back, stating that he would walk instead of being forced to board the bus in this manner. The driver called the police, and Brooks was shot by an officer who claimed he was “resisting arrest.” The officer faced no consequences, although Brooks ultimately died. This scene is instantly familiar to contemporary audiences. In the 21st century, well after the decline of racial segregation and the gains of the Civil Rights Movement, the story of a Black man being killed by a police officer, and an officer’s actions being justified by a vague feeling of being threatened, is all too familiar.
In Chapter 2, the book shifts from background information about the racial dynamics of Montgomery city buses to the specific story of Claudette Colvin, the girl who would ultimately plant the first viable seed of change. Hoose uses direct commentary, taken from many hours of in-person and phone interviews with Claudette, to help readers connect to her on a personal level as well as understand her motivations for taking a stand in such a hostile environment. The book introduces the primary support system that will ultimately help Claudette in her darkest moments—including her parents, her mother’s friends, and her pastor. It also establishes Claudette’s lifelong commitment to questioning and understanding the world around her, and her early exposure to the social separation between the Black and white populations. By introducing Claudette as a young girl in Pine Level before transitioning to her teen years in Montgomery, readers are able to understand her transformation from a precocious but innocent child to a self-aware teenager ready to take on segregation in any way she could. The contrast between Pine Level and Montgomery also highlights the differences between segregation in Alabama’s rural communities and cities. In the crowded context of city life, segregation was more direct and complex than in rural areas, where Black and white people largely lived separate lives.
