1. Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice

Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phillip Hoose (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2009).

Genre

Non-fiction; Biography

Honors

Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Award, 2010, nominee
Publishers Weekly Best Children's Books, 2009, winner 
National Book Awards, 2009, winner 
Newbery Medal, 2010, nominee
Jane Addams Children's Book Award, 2010, nominee 
Carter G. Woodson Book Awards, 2010, nominee 
New York Times Editors' Choice, 2009, winner
School Library Journal Best Books of the Year, 2009, winner
Young Hoosier Book Award, 2011, nominee
Volunteer State Book Award, 2011, nominee

Review

The first section of the book recounts the early childhood of Claudette Colvin, which helps to provide context for the ground shaking actions that she took.  She performed a sit-in in a segregated bus several months before Rosa Parks.  The book explores how this action sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott.  In fact, it details why Rosa Parks was seen as the perfect figure to rally around (instead of Colvin: her age, her charges of resisting arrest, and her subsequent pregnancy made her a less than ideal figurehead).  The book also shows how Colvin's case formed the backbone of the Supreme Court case that determined that segregated buses did indeed violate constitutional rights.

Opinion

Though Colvin was not unheard of in her day, her story has slipped through the cracks of history.  Hoose's story helps remind us that the civil rights movement was more than Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, and Lyndon Johnson's pen.  Nor was the movement a tidal wave.  Colvin makes a ripple that all of the other figures build upon.  Hoose carefully details the importance of a number of key players: E.D. Nixon, Fred Gray, Emmett Till, Mary Louise Smith, and others.  A movement is many, not one.

Ideas

The book would be ideal for a unit on the civil rights movement or social justice.  It shows that a child's actions can spark change and play as much a role as a sophisticated orator.