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.
Themes
Perseverance Through Hardship and Injustice
As a poor Black girl in Alabama, Claudette Colvin was born into a difficult life. She faced repeated traumas at a young age, from her father’s abandonment of the family, to the death of her younger sister Delphine, to the unjust imprisonment of her good friend Jeremiah. These events deeply affected her, but she did not let them bring her down. Instead, the hardships of Claudette’s childhood and early teens radicalized her and made her more committed to her plan to do whatever she could to end racial prejudice. In particular, Jeremiah’s conviction and imprisonment took place not long after Delphine’s death, exacerbating her sensitivity. Young Claudette understood the value of human life, especially that taken by unjust circumstances, on a personal level. Prior to her arrest and the events that followed, she is presented as an ambitious figure, confident that she can use her intelligence to become a lawyer despite being poor, Black, and female.
Claudette’s courage, fueled by many hardships, is evident in her arrest. At any moment, she could have stood up, moved to the back of the bus, or gotten off the bus, and ended her torment. As the bus moves along its route, she is threatened first by the driver, then by one police officer, then by three. Through all of this, Claudette continues to sit, calmly repeating that she has a constitutional right to sit. Even as she is dragged off the bus, she remains calm, knowing that whatever happens to her it will be for the betterment of her community. She is terrified, especially when she is locked in an adult jail cell. At this point, Claudette turns to her faith in God for comfort. After her arrest, her life becomes harder in many ways. She is ridiculed at school and recognized everywhere, and must face the possibility that her actions will bring violent white backlash to her community. While many people would shut down in the face of such pressure, Claudette carries on. She sees the arrest as the beginning of an upcoming fight.
Although her life ultimately did not play out the way she planned, Claudette’s strength remains a defining trait well into her adulthood. She resists the urge to reveal who her son Raymond’s father is, sacrificing her own reputation for the safety of her family (despite the truth being that she was taken advantage of by an adult). She finds work wherever she can, even though it proves difficult, as business owners refuse to hire her due to her notoriety; furthermore, she cannot work in a private home since any white person might be a KKK member. Claudette leans on her family and faith for support, abandoned by her peers and civil rights leaders (due to her not being the perfect symbol for their cause).
Claudette’s life after Montgomery is not covered in Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice, but she remains someone who is unwilling to give up in the face of hardship. This can be seen in her continued fight for recognition for her story, and her battle to be cleared of criminal charges, which she did not win until 2021.
The Importance of Questioning the Status Quo
Claudette’s inquisitive nature is a defining part of her personality, and becomes a major factor in her story. Ever since she was a child, Claudette wanted to know why things were the way they were. When, at the age of four, she was punished for being touched by a white person, she began to ask herself why the white community had the right to oppress their Black neighbors. This question became a lifelong obsession, one that she could not find any reasonable justification for. The most direct explanation Claudette got was from her Sunday school teacher, who said that Black people were “cursed” in the Bible by Noah’s son. To Claudette, this made no sense. She read the Bible, and only found passages about God loving all of his creations equally. As she matured into a teenager, she began to resent the Black adults in her community who seemed to simply accept their inferior position out of fear or ignorance. Claudette knew that if everyone acted together in service of a common goal, they could do something about their poor treatment by white people.
Claudette also questions the status quo at her high school, where she notices that fellow students seem to have their own system of prejudice. She says, “For some reason, we seemed to hate ourselves” (22)—an example of internalized racism. Black students who do not go to great lengths to emulate white society (through their hairstyle, etc.) are at the bottom of the social ladder, and Claudette’s classmates constantly put themselves and each other down, making fun of “bad” hair and using racial slurs to refer to anyone viewed as “too” Black. These prejudices upset Claudette, but she tries her best to fit in. After Jeremiah’s arrest, her classes with Miss Nesbitt and Miss Lawrence, and then her own arrest, however, she decides that she is done accepting the internalized racism within the Black student community. She comes to school with a natural hairstyle, an unheard of, radical move in the 1950s, and begins declaring pride in her African heritage. Claudette says, “Back then we never used the word ‘African.’ Africa was the jungle, Africa was Tarzan. We were supposed to be ashamed of our African past. But Africa made me proud” (51). Despite both white and Black society’s shaming of the latter, Claudette is still young and hopeful, still not fully influenced by preexisting power structures.
Claudette retains a critical eye even after her arrest and trial. Upon realizing her place in the larger civil rights movement (or rather, lack thereof), she accepts it, but never stops voicing her disappointment. Her arrest was very much emblematic of the abuse of bus rules at the time, but due to her status as a poor, dark-skinned girl with no concrete connections to important activists, she was ultimately ignored in lieu of Rosa Parks’s planned arrest. Parks was a respected, light-skinned woman with the ties Claudette lacked, making her a more effective symbol for the bus boycotts that followed her arrest. In a way, the contrast between Claudette and Parks’s treatment by white and Black society mirrors the attitude of Claudette’s high school.
Internal Prejudices in 1950s Black Montgomery
One of the major themes in Claudette’s story is the internal prejudices within much of the leadership of the civil rights movement, which speaks to the assumptions held by both Black and white Montgomery residents at the time. These judgments are first revealed in the social situation at Claudette’s school, discussed in The Importance of Questioning the Status Quo section as well. This system, in which Black people who could best emulate white norms were elevated above others in the community, was not just restricted to high school. As soon as Claudette was arrested, people across Montgomery, both within the activist community and the larger population, began to analyze Claudette’s personal history, her family’s social status, as well as her looks, age, and other factors to determine whether or not she could be a sympathetic character (a symbol) on which to base the bus boycott. Ultimately, as local activist Jo Ann Robinson said, “opinions differed where Claudette was concerned” (48). Claudette herself was never involved in these discussions, but it was clear that she was being scrutinized for factors out of her control.
Because she knew the Montgomery community could be judgmental, Claudette understood their decision to choose Rosa Parks as their symbol instead of her. This was especially true when it came to the white community: The community and civil rights leaders needed their boycott spokesperson to be as impervious as possible to longstanding assumptions that Black people were naturally rebellious (regardless of such an assessment being fair or not). There could be no question that Parks was an upstanding, middle-class citizen. On a superficial level, she was also light-skinned with straight hair. Leaders hoped that the white community would be able to relate to her better than they could an “angry” teenager.
The prejudices within Black Montgomery, the civil rights movement, took a darker turn after Claudette became pregnant. She was especially judged for having a light-skinned baby, as people assumed he was part white, and did not seem to consider that the pregnancy might have been nonconsensual. Before her pregnancy was known, civil rights leaders like Rosa Parks continued to include Claudette, even if they did not make her a centerpiece of the movement. But by being a teen mother, she says she became a “fallen woman” in the eyes of both the activist community and larger society. This prejudice was not exclusive to the Black community of Montgomery by any means: Teen pregnancy was shunned across the country in the 1950s, which caused many families to leave pregnant daughters with relatives to have their babies in secret, before putting them up for adoption. This was often done for families to avoid the shame and stigma surrounding young mothers. Claudette’s family attempted this, sending her to Birmingham to live with her mother Mary Jane, and hoping she would have her son there and finish high school. But after just a few weeks, Claudette’s tendency to question the status quo reared its head, and she returned to Montgomery. She was not one to back down, even if it meant facing a society that was organized to dismiss her.
