Phillip Hoose is the author of Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice, which received the 2009 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature and a Newbery Honor. Here, Hoose pays tribute to the legendary civil rights activist, who died on January 13, and to the legacy she leaves behind.

Not long ago, Claudette Colvin telephoned me from a hospice facility in Texas to say goodbye. Her sister Gloria Laster was beside her. She was bedridden but in good spirits. Her voice was strong. We sang “Jambalaya” and “Your Cheating Heart,” favorite songs she learned from the radio as a girl.

We remembered the time during our book tour when patrons coiled around the block outside the Birmingham, Ala., public library for the chance to meet her. Most were Black women. “My momma always told me there was someone before Rosa Parks,” some of them said tearfully.

Back in the day, in the mid-1950s, there were many people in Montgomery who would have been glad to see her dead. She was smart, outspoken, and resilient. She hated the humiliating Jim Crow laws but didn’t know what one girl could do to erase them. She tied her hair in pigtails to mock her classmates who straightened theirs. She went door-to-door raising money to hire a lawyer to defend her classmate Jeremiah Reeves, who had been accused of raping a white woman—and was executed shortly after he turned 21.

At the age of 15, History finally came to Claudette. On the way home from school, she refused a bus driver’s order to surrender her seat to a white woman. She said she felt the weight of Harriet Tubman pressing down on one shoulder and Sojourner Truth on the other. “History kept me glued to my seat,” she said.

Two white cops came charging down the aisle, grabbed her backwards by the armpits, and hoisted her off the bus, sending her schoolbooks flying. After handcuffing her, one officer jumped in the back seat of the police car with her, making lewd remarks all the way to City Hall. She feared she would be raped. They jailed her overnight. Once freed, she insisted on fighting the charges filed against her. Montgomery’s Black churches, and the NAACP raised enough money to hire a lawyer. Her defense failed but her courage later inspired Montgomery’s Black leaders, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to launch the famed Montgomery Bus Boycott. Months later, as the boycott dragged on, Claudette’s passionate testimony in a federal lawsuit challenging Montgomery’s bus rules contributed to the end of segregated bus seating in the South.

After a four-year courtship, she finally consented to let me interview her for a book. “Can you get it to the children?” she wanted to know. I interviewed her in in person and by telephone 14 times in 2007. When the book came out, it was well and widely reviewed. The Christian Science Monitor said, “Today... a new generation of girls—and boys—can add Claudette Colvin to their list of heroines.”

She did not go anonymously. She made Rosa Parks scoot over. Streets and buildings and days were named after her. The mayor of Portland, Maine gave her the key to the city during a whirlwind tour. A biopic is in the works. In December 2021, Colvin’s juvenile record was expunged and destroyed. District Attorney Daryl Bailey commented: “Her actions back in March of 1955 were conscientious, not criminal; inspired, not illegal. They should have led to praise and not prosecution.”

Her lawyer, Fred Gray, said, “Claudette Colvin had more courage, in my opinion, than any of the other persons involved in the Movement.” And what did Claudette learn from her journey? “Mine was the first cry for justice, and a loud one,” she told me. “I knew then and I know now that when it comes to justice, there is no easy way to get it. You can’t sugarcoat it. You have to take a stand and say, ‘This is not right.’ ”