Claudette Colvin

Starred review from September 2, 2024
Previous collaborators and National Book Award winners Colvin and Hoose reteam to relate the actions of a young Claudette Colvin (b. 1939) in reaction to segregation in Montgomery, Ala. Crisp text based in lived experience recounts how the protagonist “always asked big questions,” including, as a child, “Why do white people think they’re better than me?” Detailing an era in which “signs... told me where I could and couldn’t go,” first-person narration asks another question: “I wanted change. But what could I do?” Colvin soon found out, inadvertently becoming a civil rights pioneer when, at age 15, she refused to give up her bus seat to a white woman, saying, “It’s my constitutional right to sit here!” Vibrant illustrations from Jackson (Summer Is Here) depict characters past and present with precision, from Colvin’s act (which occurred nine months before Rosa Parks’s protest) to the Supreme Court ruling that segregation on public buses was unconstitutional. It’s a telling both personal and historical that reflects the urgency and determination of the civil rights movement via the perspective of one figure working urgently toward equality and justice. An author’s note concludes. Ages 4–8.