Marginalia

January, 2006

Reality: While Parks's refusal to give her seat to a white rider in December 1955 sparked the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, two teenage girls had been arrested earlier that year for violating the same bus segregation law. However, because of the girls' youth and circumstances, local black leaders felt neither would withstand the scrutiny of an extended legal challenge. The first, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin, had been arrested on March 2. She caught the bus at the same place Parks would board...