Claudette Colvin by Phillip Hoose

black students on the Highland Gardens bus the day Claudette was arrested, most of them her classmates at Booker T. Washington. Grayarranged for the high school principal to issue passes for students willing to testify at Claudette’s hearing. Just before the trial, he spoke to them as a group, coaching them about what they might be asked and how best to answer.
    In the days before Claudette’s hearing, black leaders rallied around her. The Citizens Coordinating Committee, a group of prominent black men and women, mimeographed a leaflet and passed it around Montgomery. Entitled “To Friends of Justice and Human Rights,” it described Claudette’s arrest and demanded that she be acquitted of charges. It also called for punishment of the bus driver and insisted on clarification of the long-standing city bus rule—constantly ignored by drivers—that said no rider had to give up a seat unless another was available.
    Claudette’s hearing was held on March 18, 1955, late in the morning. A cousin drove Claudette, Q.P., and their neighbor Annie Larkin off the Hill and down to Montgomery County’s juvenile court. Claudette felt certain her troubles would be over by nightfall. “I thought Fred Gray was a very good lawyer,” she remembers. “He seemed to have prepared very well. I was confident.”
    Because Claudette’s plea of not guilty to breaking the segregation law was important to every black bus rider in Montgomery, several leaders attended the hearing, including Jo Ann Robinson and the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, pastor of the First Baptist Church. It was nearly noon when Claudette and Fred Gray were summoned into the small courtroom to appear before Juvenile Court Judge Wiley Hill, Jr. Students remained in the hall, straining to hear what was going on behind the door and waiting for their names to be called.
    Claudette faced three separate charges: violating the segregation law, disturbing the peace, and “assaulting” the policemen who had pulled her off the bus. Judge Hill heard testimony from Patrolmen Paul Headley and T. J. Ward, the arresting officers. Ward testified that when he’d placed Claudette under arrest, she had “fought” the officers, kicking and scratching them. “She insisted she was colored and just as good as white,” Ward informed the judge. The two officers were able to show a letter written by a white passenger on the bus that day, praising them as “gentlemen almost to the point of turning the other cheek” who spoke to Claudette in “tones so soft that I doubt if any of the other passengers aboard the bus even heard them.” When called,Fred Gray’s student witnesses offered a very different story, of two police officers confronting a teenage girl with frightening force on a packed bus. Gray challenged the laws themselves, contending that the provisions of Alabama’s laws and Montgomery’s city ordinances requiring racial segregation were unconstitutional.
    Just before lunchtime, Judge Hill delivered his blunt ruling: guilty of all charges. Claudette would be placed on probation, was declared a ward of the state, and was released to the custody of her parents. He cracked his gavel, dismissing the case. As the words washed over Claudette, she felt a wave of anguish, and then everything she had been holding inside for the past two weeks came pouring out. “Claudette’s agonized sobs penetrated the atmosphere of the courthouse,” wrote Jo Ann Robinson. “Many people brushed away their own tears.”

    C LAUDETTE: Now I was a criminal. Now I would have a police record whenever I went to get a job, or when I tried to go to college. Yes, I was free on probation, but I would have to watch my step everywhere I went for at least a year. Anyone who didn’t like me could get me in trouble. On top of that I hadn’t done anything wrong. Not everyone knew the bus rule that said they