On March 2, 1955, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested for not giving up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama.
This was 9 months before Rosa Parks did the same thing. Colvin was one of the plaintiffs of the landmark civil rights case Browder v.
Gayle, which ended segregation on public transportation in Alabama. Colvin moved to New York City and became a nurse’s aide. She
retired in 2004 and moved to South Texas. A book about her life, “Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice,” by Phillip Hoose, won the
National Book Award for Young People’s Literature in 2009.
