On March 2, 1955 — nine months before Rosa Parks — fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to surrender her seat on a segregated Montgomery bus, was dragged off by police, and was jailed. Rather than the celebration Parks later received, Colvin was shunned and dismissed; a year later she stood again, as a named plaintiff in Browder v. Gayle, the federal case that struck down bus segregation. Hoose's biography for young readers, built on extensive interviews with Colvin herself, won the 2009 National Book Award for Young People's Literature and was named a Newbery Honor Book.
Author: Phillip Hoose · Original publisher: Melanie Kroupa Books, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York), 2009
