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 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary: “There’s the Girl Who Got Arrested”
Claudette’s arrest quickly gained nationwide attention among Black people—including local activist Jo Ann Robinson, who was president of the Women’s Political Council (WPC), an organization of Black female Montgomery professionals. In the 1950s, Robinson and the WPC had succeeded in persuading white business owners to include “Mr.,” “Mrs.,” or “Miss” on communications with Black customers, a step toward increased respect for adults in the Black community. Robinson had had her own run-in with a bus driver in 1949, shortly after moving to Montgomery. She was forced off of a bus for accidentally sitting in a white-only seat, narrowly escaping a physical assault by the driver. The incident would not leave her mind, and she began keeping a record of anecdotes from Black Montgomery residents about their own humiliating interactions with bus drivers. In 1954, Robinson arranged meetings with bus companies and city officials, and wrote a letter to the Montgomery mayor, in an attempt to bring Montgomery’s bus rules in line with other Southern cities. Despite Robinson’s efforts, there was no positive movement on the matter, even when she mentioned that several Black organizations planned to boycott the bus system if nothing changed.
When Claudette returned to school, she was celebrated by some classmates and teachers and met with skepticism by others, who believed her actions would make life harder for them. Some parents seemed embarrassed that a teenager had been the one to finally stand up to the bus rules. Everyone wanted to hear her story, and she heard students whisper about her as she walked through the hallways. Claudette could not concern herself with gossip, as she had to prepare for a criminal trial. If it went poorly, she could end up in a reform school and her bright future would be jeopardized.
A relative referred Claudette’s family to E. D. Nixon, the local NAACP president. Nixon was instrumental in both helping Claudette with her case and bringing it to the attention of influential Black people across Montgomery. He facilitated a meeting between the police commissioner, the bus company, and Black leaders (including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in his political debut), in which the bus company all but admitted Claudette had not broken the law, and the police force agreed to clarify bus rules. The meeting eased the tension in Montgomery, but it did not clear Claudette’s name. As the trial approached, Nixon approached Rosa Parks, the NAACP secretary and leader of its youth division. He wanted her to encourage Claudette to join the NAACP. Claudette remembers her first meeting with Parks, who helped her raise money to pay for a lawyer. Parks wanted to help Claudette after finding out she was a good student, and seeing that she was a small girl, not a “big old burley overgrown teenager who sassed white people out” (42). She also knew Claudette’s mother, as she had previously lived in Pine Level.
Claudette’s lawyer, Fred Gray, was only 24 years old and one of the only Black lawyers in Montgomery. Claudette identified with him, as he had done what she hoped to do in the future—studied law at a Northern university before returning to the South to help dismantle segregation. Gray took Claudette’s case immediately, as he saw it as a good chance to prove that segregation laws were unconstitutional. By pleading not guilty, Claudette could set Gray up to take on both the city of Montgomery and the state of Alabama’s Jim Crow laws. He warned her family about the notoriety that this would bring, but Claudette insisted that she was ready. Gray met with the 13 Black students who had been on the bus with Claudette. He asked them to testify on her behalf and helped them practice answering potential questions. Meanwhile, Black leaders distributed a leaflet around Montgomery to gather public support. They demanded that Claudette be cleared of all charges, that the bus driver who threatened her be punished, and that Montgomery police and bus drivers begin to follow the law that no one had to relinquish a seat on a full city bus.
When the trial began on March 18, Claudette and her team believed that she would be acquitted. She was charged with three crimes—violation of the segregation law, disturbing the peace, and an “assault” on one of the police officers—who claimed in his report that Claudette had kicked him as they dragged her to the police car. White and Black witnesses told different versions of the events, with the white “witnesses” painting the officers as noble gentlemen tasked with wrangling an unruly delinquent, and the Black witnesses describing a terrifying scene of two adult men harassing and manhandling a teenage girl. Despite Claudette and her supporters’ confidence, and the fact that she had not broken any laws, the judge declared her guilty of all three crimes.
Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary: “‘Crazy’ Times”
Claudette’s conviction sent a shockwave through Montgomery’s Black community, and the thought of boycotting the buses was in the forefront of leaders’ minds. But ultimately, the leaders decided that it would jeopardize their cause for Claudette’s case to be viewed as the catalyst for a city-wide movement. While most Black activists were well-connected professionals, Claudette came from King Hill, a poor neighborhood with a bad reputation even among Black people, and her family had no connections to the elite Black community in Montgomery. To add to this, she was a teenager, and could easily be painted as unruly and overly emotional. According to people like Jo Ann Robinson and E. D. Nixon, she was simply not the right person to become the public face of the bourgeoning war over segregation on buses.
Fred Gray stood by Claudette’s side, confident that he could appeal the judge’s ruling as a way to both free Claudette from probation and further his goal of fighting segregation laws on a larger scale. However, the appeal was a disaster. The judge overturned the charges of violating segregation law and disturbing the peace, but maintained Claudette’s assault charge. This meant that she was still an offender in the eyes of the law, but her case no longer had any direct link to segregation. She would carry a criminal record throughout her life, but was largely forgotten by everyone in elite activist circles other than Fred Gray and Rosa Parks.
Claudette’s conviction and the failure of her appeal not only put her future in jeopardy, but caused her to become somewhat of a laughingstock at school. Instead of hiding in the face of ridicule, Claudette did something that shocked everyone. In an era when most Black girls straightened their hair as much as possible, she gave herself cornrows and began to declare pride in her African heritage. Alean Bowser, a classmate, remembers feeling respect for Claudette, and regrets that she and other students made fun of her instead of letting her inspire them to do something about racial injustice. The first summer after her conviction, Claudette rarely socialized for fear of someone reporting her for something that would violate her probation. She spent her time going to church, crocheting with her cousin, and attending meetings with Rosa Parks and the NAACP youth. She spent much of her time in the house that Parks and her mother shared, but had a hard time connecting with other NAACP teenagers, who were mostly private school students from privileged backgrounds.
Shortly after Claudette returned to school for her senior year, a second Black teenager, Mary Louise Smith, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus. Like Claudette, she was from a poor background, although rumors that her father struggled with alcoholism and that she lived in a “shack” were unfounded. Despite the fact that she lived in a respectable house with a hardworking father, Black leaders again chose not to use her case to pursue bus boycotts.
Part 1, Chapters 5-6 Analysis
Soon after her arrest, Claudette became well-known in Montgomery. At first, the reaction was mostly positive. Although many Black people were afraid of the repercussions of what she had done, most were in awe that someone, especially a teenager, had finally done a noticeable act of resistance against bus segregation.
The cultural response to Claudette through the spring and summer of 1955, and her own feelings about her actions, highlight the prejudices that were rampant even in the Black community, and her status as a teenager who was largely naive to the reality of the well-defined internal structure of the Montgomery activist community. At first, she was ecstatic as NAACP members and other leaders rallied around her. But after her background came into question, her wider support system began to fall away, especially after she became pregnant.
Hoose uses this context to explore how the early civil rights movement was a well-planned endeavor, not simply a sudden response to injustice as it is often portrayed. Leaders like Jo Ann Robinson, Fred Gray, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been planning a bus boycott for months, and were looking for a marketable incident to use as the catalyst for a large organized protest. Claudette’s case was not overlooked; it was specifically decided that she was not the right fit to be used as the face of the protest. Civil rights leaders worried that a teenager would not be capable of handing the pressure, but they also judged Claudette on a personal level; she was from a poor neighborhood, did not attempt to look or act like white people, and, by the end of the summer, she was pregnant. She had also lost the ability to be used as a tool for challenging the segregation laws, as a judge overturned this portion of her conviction.
Claudette’s conviction and later pregnancy are two major turning points in Claudette Colvin. Prior to these events, she remained a confident rebel, marked by her decision to wear a natural hairstyle in the looks-conscious halls of Booker T. Washington High. She trusts lawyer Fred Gray and believes that her name will be cleared, that she will be able to continue on her path to becoming a civil rights lawyer. The conviction and failed appeal mark the first blows to Claudette’s confidence, but she remains in regular contact with Rosa Parks and other prominent figures, dedicating herself to the cause of social justice even if her specific arrest cannot be overturned. Chapters 8-9 begin to reveal how Claudette was somewhat used by the more powerful figures in the movement, possibly unintentionally. When she is seen as someone whose court case can be used to further the cause, leaders are happy to work with her. However, once her charge of breaking the segregation laws is dropped, she begins to have less influence. Although Claudette was smart, she was still a teenager and somewhat naive to the reality of her position. To make a large movement work, leaders had to be extremely careful to act at the right moment; they planned all of their actions for months so they could appear as legitimate as possible to sympathetic white people, and convince the larger Black population that it was worth putting their lives at risk. If Claudette had been used as a symbol, many people may have continued to write her off as an angry teenager, not a representation of widespread injustice.
