Claudette Colvin Read Online Free PDF Page A

New York City. She came to school early and stayed late. She was tough, but she was out to make you learn.
    We were supposed to be an English literature class, but Miss Nesbitt used literature to teach life. She said she didn’t have time to teach us like a regular English teacher—we were too far behind. Instead, she taught us the world through literature. She taught the Constitution. She taught the Magna Carta and the Articles of Confederation. We studied Hawthorne and Poe. We discussed Patrick Henry’s speech—“Give me liberty or give me death”—and applied it to our own situation. We’d pick out a passage from the Bible and examine it from a literary standpoint. We wrote poems and essays and themes. We even wrote obituaries.
    She brought in her own books from home, because we had so few books in our library at school. One day we all came into class and Miss Nesbitt had her face buried in an open book. We all said, “Why are you doing that?” Finally she came up with a big smile and said, “Ahhhh . . . there’s no smell as good as the smell of a new book.”
    Right at the end of sophomore year, the Supreme Court ruled that public schools like ours would have to be integrated, though they didn’t say when. Whenever it happened, it was bound to be a big change. Segregation was so total. It wasn’t just that we went to separate schools: we even walked to school on opposite sides of the highway from whites, shouting insults at each other across the street. In class we asked each other, “Would you want to sit next to a white student?” A lot of kids said things like “If they don’t want to sit next to me on a bus, why would I want to sit next to one in class?”

    Geraldine Nesbitt, Claudette’s favorite teacher
    I felt differently. I wanted to go to college. I wanted to grow up and greet the world, and so did my best friends. I thought if whites came into our schools, maybe our textbooks would improve. Sometimes when I babysat I’d sneak looks at the textbooks of white students who lived in those families. There were essays on the Lincoln-Douglas debate, which I had never heard of. They made me think for the first time about the economic basis for slavery. While we were taking routine math, whites my age were studying algebra. Our school’s entire set of encyclopedias only had two articles about blacks—Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver. In fact, we had very few books of any kind in our school library, and the library downtown—the “colored” library—didn’t have many more. I didn’t care who I sat next to. I wanted a good education.

    The children involved in the landmark civil rights lawsuit
Brown v. Board of Education
, which challenged segregation in public schools, in Topeka, Kansas, 1953: (left to right) Vicki Henderson, Donald Henderson, Linda Brown (the Brown of the case’s name), James Emanuel, Nancy Todd, and Katherine Carper
    Miss Nesbitt made us see that we had a history, too—that our story didn’t begin by being captured and chained and thrown onto a boat. There had been life and culture before that. She related literature back to our lives. She would ask, “Why do we celebrate the Fourth of July—Independence Day—when we are still in slavery?” “Why are there no black people except Sammy Davis, Jr., and Pearl Bailey on TV?”
    I had Miss Nesbitt in both tenth and eleventh grades, and during those years I grew in confidence. In those two years she challenged many assumptions I had taken for granted. She said, “There’s no such thing as ‘good hair’—hair is just hair. Everyone is born with the hair they have and you just do the best you can with it.” Same with skin color. She wanted us to love whatever color we were. Our history teacher, Miss Josie Lawrence, was the blackest teacher in the whole school, but she