Claudette Colvin by Phillip Hoose Page A

in Birmingham gave me a chance to clear my head. I thought a lot about what was going down in Montgomery.
    A protest of some kind had been coming on for a long time. Black people weren’t going to take segregation much longer. If you were black, you experienced abuse every day of your life. Every day. You couldn’t even walk through the park without looking over your shoulder for a policeman. The bus boycott was a way of expressing anger at the system at last.
    I was thinking, Where are we going? In church the adults kept saying Reverend King would eventually be driven out of Montgomery or they’d murder him, since whites would never give in. People were saying the boycott wouldn’t succeed. But I was glad it was happening. So many black people were just struggling from day to day—most of us. We had to do it. There had been so much injustice, from Jeremiah Reeves to all the horror stories involving black women abused by white men, to my own arrest. I really wanted to be a part of the boycott.
    I also used the time to clear my head about my own life. When I left Montgomery, everyone was saying I was “mental” and “crazy.” But I wasn’t. The most horrifying part of my last year hadn’t been finding out I was pregnant, or getting kicked out of school. It was the sound of the jailer’s key in the cell door. It was my arrest. And I had gotten through that. The pregnancy was, in a way, a chance to regroup and think about my life. I was a healthy young woman and I was going to have this baby, and I would deal with motherhood when it came. I could take the G.E.D.—a high school equivalency exam—in Montgomery and get my diploma that way.
    I only stayed in Birmingham about two weeks. I missed my dad, Q.P. He was always there for me. Besides, I’d had justice on my mind for a long time. Just because I was pregnant didn’t change my mission. I had been talking about revolution ever since Jeremiah Reeves. I wanted to be part of the bus boycott even if I couldn’t be a leader. I had helped get all this started.
    So I went back home.

CHAPTER EIGHT
S ECOND F RONT , S ECOND C HANCE
    We are going to hold our stand. We are not going to be a part of any program that will get Negroes to ride the buses again at the price of the destruction of our heritage and way of life
.
    â€”W. A. “Tacky” Gayle, mayor of Montgomery
    W ITH THE TURN of the new year of 1956, Montgomery throbbed with excitement. Day by day, reporters and photographers poured into town to cover the Negro bus protest in the heart of Dixie. As the boycott entered its second month, black leaders continued to press for the same three modest changes that Jo Ann Robinson and others had requested two years earlier—which did not include integrated seating—but city officials wouldn’t budge. “Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile,” they told one another. The City Lines bus company declared the proposed changes illegal and said that, unfortunately, their hands were tied.
    Members of Montgomery’s black community gather at the Holt Street Baptist Church in support of the boycott
    Mass meetings continued at black churches every Tuesday and Thursday night. Young, round-faced Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who urged boycotters to refrain from violence and seek charity toward whites in their hearts, inspired crowds with stirring speeches that often included ideas and philosophies from distant times and places. He talked about the power of love to change the world. “He had poetry in his voice, and he could snatch scripture outa the air and make it hum,” said E. D. Nixon, who admitted “he was saying it better ’n I ever could.” King began to emerge as a charismatic national figure.
    Determined to apply economic pressure peacefully, black protesters let the nearly empty buses rumble on by like green ghosts, ignoring the doors that snapped open invitingly at