Claudette Colvin Read Online Free Page A

even if it was aimed at someone besides me. One thing especially bothered me—we black students constantly put ourselves down. If you were dark-complexioned they’d call you “nappy-headed.” Not “nappy-haired.” Nappy-headed. And the “N” word—we were saying it to each other, to
ourselves
. I’d hear that word and I would start crying. I wouldn’t let people use it around me. How could you hear such things and not feel emotional? When girls said things like that, it was bad enough, but when boys said them to you, it really hurt.
    For some reason we seemed to hate ourselves. We students put down our hair texture and skin color all the time. Can you imagine getting up in the morning every day and looking in the mirror and saying to yourself, “I have bad hair”? Or “I’m black and nobody likes me”? The football players went for the girls with flowing hair and lighter skin. And who could grow wavy, shoulder-length hair? It’d be a biracial kid. The girls with the darkest complexions never got picked to be queen of anything. Middle-class black girls would always try to separate themselves from dark-skinned girls like me and emulate white girls.

    T RAGEDY STRUCK ONCE AGAIN in November, when Claudette’s schoolmate and neighbor, sixteen-year-old Jeremiah Reeves, was arrested and charged with raping a white housewife. Reeves confessed to the crime. Police quickly expanded the charges, claiming that he was responsible for raping six white women after breaking into their homes. Blacks in Montgomery were furious. Most were convinced that the police had forced him to confess. “One of the authorities had led him to the death chamber, threatening that if he did not confess at once he would burn there later,” Martin Luther King, Jr., then the new pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, wrote.
    After a brief trial, an all-white jury sentenced Reeves to death in the electric chair. This brought blacks throughout Alabama to a boiling point. Even if Reeves was guilty of the charges—something few blacks believed—he hadn’t killed anyone. Why should he pay with his life? Blacks knew that no white man accused of a similar crime against a black woman would have been convicted at all, let alone sentenced to die.
    The verdict radicalized many students at Booker T. Washington High. Reeves was a popular senior, widely admired as a talented drummer. He hadn’t fled from the police—in fact, he had turned himself in. Everyone had always predicted Jeremiah Reeves would go somewhere special. Now he wasn’t going anywhere at all. Unless something could be done, he would languish on death row until he turned twenty-one and became legally old enough to take the short walk from his cell to the electric chair.
    Jeremiah’s plight pulled Claudette’s attention away from her personal difficulties to the injustices blacks faced everywhere. She went to rallies, wrote letters to him in prison, and collected money for his legal defense. The effort to support Jeremiah Reeves became the first time many black teenagers in Montgomery ever acted to address injustices outside their own personal problems. Claudette Colvin was one of those teens.
    THE NAACP
    The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was formed in 1909 in New York City by a group of black and white citizens fighting for social justice. Ever since, the NAACP has organized demonstrations, pickets, and legal actions to expand and defend the rights of people of color. Many cities and communities have local NAACP chapters, including the Montgomery Chapter, which provided support to Jeremiah Reeves.

    C LAUDETTE : Jeremiah Reeves’s arrest was the turning point of my life. That was when I and a lot of other students really started thinking about prejudice and racism. I wasfurious when I found out what had happened. Jeremiah lived right below us on the Hill. I knew