The Year of the Poet X ~ April 2023

Foreword

Children: Difference Makers

Claudette Colvin

The Poetry Posse Family has another gift to offer for the April 2023 Issue: The Power of Justice and how Claudette Colvin lived to see that change.

Claudette Colvin really proved that all of us should stand for it; she posted, ''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.'

Mary Jane Gadson and C. Austin gave birth to Claudette Colvin on September 5, 1939, in Montgomery, Alabama, USA.

According to many online resources, Colvin attended the city's segregated Booker T. Washington High School in 1955. Her family didn't own a car, so she had to rely on the city's buses to go to and from school. Although African Americans made up the majority of passengers on the bus system, they were subjected to discrimination due to the system's practice of segregated seating. Colvin had been studying the civil rights movement in school and was a part of the NAACP Youth Council. She was forcibly removed from the bus and arrested by the two policemen because she refused to give up her place on the bus.

The arrest of Parks, another woman who nine months after Colvin, received a lot of attention in writing about the civil rights movement in Montgomery. Colvin's narrative has received little attention, in contrast to Parks, who has been hailed as a civil rights hero. Several people have made changes to that. The poem "Claudette Colvin Goes to Work" by Rita Dove was eventually turned into a song.

In the young adult biography Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice, Phillip Hoose wrote a detailed account of her life, published in 2009. He claimed that he wanted the general public to be aware of the 15-year-old because, in reality, without his initial cry for freedom, Rosa Parks and Dr. King would not have existed.

Claudette Colvin became an American pioneer of the 1950s civil rights movement and retired nurse aide. Colvin assisted in advancing civil rights initiatives in Montgomery, despite the fact that her contribution to the struggle to remove segregation there may not be publicly acknowledged. "Claudette inspired moral courage in all of us; if she had not done what she did.''

Claudette Colvin and many more unsung heroes may be forgotten, but their legacies live on and see how society changed for the better.



Caroline 'Ceri Naz' Nazareno Gabis