I picked up Phillip House’s “Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice” at SuperPizzaBoy’s book fair. Talk about a find! Claudette Colvin was a fifteen year old black teenager who was arrested for not giving up her seat on a city bus in Montgomery,Alabama on March 2, 1955 long before Rosa Parks was arrested for the same offense. Ms. Colvin was not celebrated like Rosa Parks was, Colvin was not considered a suitable  representative for the cause because she was so young and was not perfect.

She disappeared for a time until Phillip House heard about her story and convinced her to share it with the world. She was brutalized verbally by the policemen who arrested her and shunned by her community for causing trouble. She had other problems that made her less than the perfect representative for her people. She moved north and worked for years in obscurity, resentful of the attention that Parks got.

It is a great book about the Civil Rights movement but more than that it’s about life not being fair and perfect and how you have to persevere anyway.

I give this book four stars out of five.