Claudette Colvin by Phillip Hoose Page B

Colvin.
    About the only person not involved in these discussions was Claudette. “Nobody ever came to interview me about being a boycott spokesperson,” she later said. “I had no idea adults were talking about me and looking into my life. The only one of those people I talked to was my lawyer, Fred Gray.”
    The NAACP and other Montgomery groups decided not to protest Claudette’s conviction with a bus boycott, but they did raise money to appeal the ruling, partly to clear her name and partly so they could keep using her case to attack the segregation law. Leaders were eager to appeal it all the way up tofederal court. Throughout March, Montgomery’s black churchgoers were asked to drop a little extra into the collection plate for Claudette Colvin’s case. By the end of the month, fourteen churches and four civic groups had chipped in to raise almost all of what the lawyers were charging.
    Virginia Durr, a wealthy and influential white Montgomerian who supported the NAACP, launched her own support drive for Claudette. She wrote Curtiss McDougall, a college professor she knew, and asked him to persuade his students to collect money for the appeal and write Claudette messages of support. “I just can’t explain how this little girl was so brave,” Mrs. Durr wrote. “It was a miracle . . . Even after being deserted [on the bus] by her other companions she still
would not move
. In this setting and in this town and with
four
big burly white men threatening her—isn’t that amazing?” More than one hundred letters soon arrived addressed to Claudette in care of Mrs. Rosa Parks, Secretary of the Montgomery NAACP.
    APPEALING A LEGAL DECISION
    The U.S. legal system begins with city and county courts, goes on to state courts, then to federal courts, and finally to the U.S. Supreme Court. If a person does not agree with a court decision, she or he can usually appeal the case to a higher court.
    It is tempting to appeal, to take a second chance. But lawyers are expensive, and winning cases on appeal is not always easy, as judges are sometimes reluctant to reverse the decisions of their colleagues on lower courts.
    In Claudette’s case, black leaders decided to appeal a decision made in Montgomery’s juvenile court to the next level, Montgomery Circuit Court, which was still within the state of Alabama’s court system.
    On May 6, 1955, Gray went back to Montgomery Circuit Court to appeal Claudette’s conviction. After hearing testimony, Judge Eugene Carter dropped two of the three charges against Claudette—disturbing the peace and breaking the segregation law. But he kept the third, her conviction for “assaulting” the officers who had lifted her out of her seat and dragged her off the bus. He sentenced Claudette to pay a small fine and kept her on probation in the custody of her parents.
    It was a dispiriting outcome on two scores. First, Montgomery’s black leaders had hoped to keep using Claudette’s case in higher courts to challenge the constitutionality of segregated bus seating. But now that Judge Carter had shrewdly dropped that charge, there was nothing left to appeal that was specifically about segregation. All the leaders but Gray lost interest in appealing Claudette’s case any further.
    Second, Claudette still had a criminal record. She had been convicted of assaulting police officers, information that would forever blemish her job applications, credit record, and school transcripts. By keeping the assault charge, Judge Carter deprived Claudette of peace of mind. Now she feared that people would see her as a juveniledelinquent, a criminal, someone with a mark against her name. Had she thrown away her dreams by taking a stand?
    As cold, rainy weather set in, blacks returned to the buses. Claudette went back to school to finish out the last few weeks of her junior year. She soon found that attitudes at Booker T. Washington had