Claudette Colvin Read Online Free Page B

him well, and admired him like everybody else did. We girls thought he was like a rock star because he was so stylish. He always wore a starched clean shirt, and there was never a spot of mud on his shoes. He was a wonderful drummer in the school band and in bands around town.

    Jeremiah Reeves, with poems he wrote in prison
    The NAACP was called in to take his case. That was the first time I had ever heard of them. I think that’s why the jury sentenced him to death—to show that the NAACP couldn’t take over the South. Everyone talked about Jeremiah Reeves at school. There were rumors that the jailers pulled out his finger-nails and tortured him. One girl hid in a delivery truck and got into the jail but didn’t make it to his cell. We showed movies to try to raise money for his lawyers. I would take whatever we raised to his mother.
    The hypocrisy of it made me so angry! Black girls were extremely vulnerable. My mother and my grandmother told me
never
to go anywhere with a white man no matter what. I grew up hearing horror story after horror story about black girls who were raped by white men, and how they never got justice either. When a white man raped a black girl—something that happened all the time—it was just his word against hers, and no one would ever believe her. The white man always got off. But now they were going to hold Jeremiah for years as a minor just so they could legally execute him when he came of age. That changed me. That put a lot of anger in me. I stayed angry about Jeremiah Reeves for a long time.

    I N 1954 , the U.S. Supreme Court threw out Reeves’s conviction and ordered a new trial. (By then, Reeves had retracted his confession, insisting he had been forced by police to make it. For the rest of his life he maintained he was innocent.) But after two days’ testimony, the new jury—again entirely white—took only thirty-four minutes to restore Reeves’s death sentence. Now all hope was gone.
    Many at school wept for their classmate, but Claudette fumed. Why did everyone accept injustice? How could adults complain at home about the insulting way they were treated at work and then put on a happy face for their white employers? Why did her classmates worry about “good hair” when they had no rights? When was anybody ever going to stand up? Claudette was still furious about Jeremiah Reeves’s plight when, on the first day of her sophomore year, she met someone who gave her the confidence to transform her anger into action.
    ONE GIRL’S MEMORY OF JEREMIAH REEVES
    One friend and classmate of Claudette’s was especially active in Jeremiah Reeves’s defense. After an exchange of letters, Reeves invited the girl to visit him on death row, along with his parents. Later she remembered what it was like:
    To reach death row you had to be escorted by a guard through several halls one by one. You’d step in one room and the guard would slam the door loud behind you and turn the key. Then you’d go to the next room. Finally you walked out in the backyard and up a flight of steps. At that point you passed right by the electric chair. I saw it. I’ll never forget the sight of it.
    Jeremiah was eighteen or nineteen when I saw him in prison. He was a fine-looking young man in good health. He hadn’t been tortured. He and three other prisoners had formed a quartet on death row. They couldn’t see each other through the walls but they could hear. Someone would sing a note and they would start in. His voice was rich and beautiful; they sang spirituals.
    Jeremiah was a very spiritual person. Very caring. Again and again he told me he believed he would get out someday.

    C LAUDETTE : Miss Geraldine Nesbitt dressed sharp—more like a saleslady than a schoolteacher. She was slender and petite. She grew up in Montgomery and went to Alabama State College, but she had a master’s degree in education from Columbia University in