Claudette Colvin

Before this book, I had never heard of Claudette Colvin. All those years in school with “Black History Month,” and it seems like all we ever talked about was Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks. Although crucial figures in the Civil Rights movement, it gets a little tiresome hearing about the same central figures year after year, especially when it is essentially the same information about these figures. We need more local stories to open the students’ eyes; what happened in THIS state / city / small town during the Civil Rights movement? Even if for some odd reason that educators are uncomfortable with discussing local reactions to civil rights and oppression, there is no reason we should not have more books like Claudette Colvin available for our students to get a more thorough picture of this time period. Just like you should never only teach The Diary of Anne Frank, you should not only teach Martin Luther King, Jr.

Having said that, I thought this book was a great introduction to Colvin’s life that would prompt even more questions from readers. Perhaps because I am used to more thorough biographies, but I found myself wishing there was more information about Claudette’s family. What happened to her birth mother and father? How did they react to Claudette’s imprisonment / pregnancy / life? I felt the story ended abruptly; what really happened after she moved to New York? How much of a culture change was it? What experiences did she have with her two sons? Did they ever ask her questions about her life, and how did she explain it to them?

I think young adult readers would enjoy hearing about Claudette because of her humanity alongside her heroic actions. The first-person accounts were for me the best part of the narrative. Although she performed brave deeds, she was still a person after all: she worried (and not worried) about her classmate’s reactions to her, she got pregnant, and she had bills to pay just like everyone else. Most of all, she is still alive. This seems like such a silly thing, but a lot of young adults believe that the Civil Rights movement is from some far-away time period that has no bearing on their life here in 2010 when in reality it was not that long ago that schools were segregated.