Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice

Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. After the end of the Civil War, the US government authorized a series of measures to help rebuild the Southern states, called Reconstruction. What were some of the measures of Reconstruction? How did Reconstruction lead to the establishment of “Jim Crow” laws in the South? What did these laws focus on and who did they target?

Teaching Suggestion: This question orients students with the historical precursor to Phillip Hoose’s account. The Reconstruction Era was largely considered to be a failure, as the measures to support the transition of Southern states from slave-based economies were abandoned after a decade. Furthermore, most Southern states resisted attempts to integrate fully and, as a result, passed a number of state laws that legalized the segregation of races in public spaces. Without the federal government’s removal of these local legislations, these codes, colloquially known as “Jim Crow” laws, became entrenched in the lives of Black communities living in the South and contributed to the Internal Prejudices in 1950s Black Montgomery. Hoose’s account follows Claudette and other civil rights leaders in defeating these racist laws 80 years later.