Claudette Colvin - Phillip Hoose

Nine months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was violently removed from a bus and held in jail. The NAACP, however, did not want a young and “emotional” teenager as the face of the bus boycott and a larger civil rights movement. Claudette Colvin: Twice For Justice (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $19.95) by Phillip Hoose tells a fuller story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, providing an overview of history about life in Montgomery under Jim Crow, the state of mind of many black and white families at the time, and details about the lesser known figures involved in igniting America’s civil rights movement. Ages 12 up.