Colvin had made her own stand in March 1955. She had testified in federal court. She was one of four named plaintiffs in the case that produced the Supreme Court ruling ending bus segregation. And she had been living in the Bronx working as a nurse’s aide while the movement she had contributed to was celebrated in histories that did not consistently include her name.
She did not, by the accounts available, spend these decades in bitter protest at this situation. She raised her sons, worked her job, and lived her life. The silence around her name was something she had largely accepted, even if it was not something she had chosen.
## The Rediscovery
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, historians and journalists began looking more carefully at the events that preceded the Montgomery bus boycott and examining the role of individuals who had not received proportionate credit in the movement’s received narrative.
Writer Phillip Hoose began researching Colvin’s story and eventually published Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice in 2009, a young adult book that brought her name and story to a new generation of readers. The book won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature and the Sibert Medal, and it introduced her to an audience that had no prior knowledge of her role in the events of 1955 and 1956.
The book prompted a wave of articles, interviews, and public recognition. Colvin began giving interviews — she had rarely spoken publicly about her experiences in the preceding decades — and describing what she remembered about the arrest, the juvenile case, the decision not to use her as the movement’s public face, and her subsequent life in New York.