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Informationen zum Autor Sherri L. Smith is a children's book author, and the author of Who Were the Tuskegee Airmen? She currently lives in Los Angeles, California. Klappentext Relive the moments when African Americans fought for equal rights, and made history. Even though slavery had ended in the 1860s, African Americans were still suffering under the weight of segregation a hundred years later. They couldn't go to the same schools, eat at the same restaurants, or even use the same bathrooms as white people. But by the 1950s, black people refused to remain second-class citizens and were willing to risk their lives to make a change. Author Sherri L. Smith brings to life momentous events through the words and stories of people who were on the frontlines of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. This book also features the fun black-and-white illustrations and engaging 16-page photo insert that readers have come love about the What Was? series! Leseprobe What Is the Civil Rights Movement? One afternoon in March 1955, fifteen--year--old Claudette Colvin boarded a public bus for home. A deep brown--skinned girl with large, dark eyes and black--rimmed glasses, Claudette was a high-school student in Montgomery, Alabama. On the bus, Claudette and three friends took seats in a row for Black passengers. At the time, public buses in the South were segregated by race. (Racial segregation meant keeping Black people separated from white people.) In Alabama, white passengers sat in the front rows marked by a sign that read “White.” Passengers of color had to take seats in rows behind the sign. If more white people boarded the bus after the “White” area was full, Black passengers who had seats were forced to give them up. That’s what happened to Claudette and her friends when a young white woman boarded the bus on their trip home. The other girls gave up their seats. But Claudette did not. Just for that, Claudette was arrested! She was locked up in an adult jail cell. “I can still vividly hear the click of those keys,” she later said. What made a teenage girl act so bravely? At school, Claudette had learned about Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. Both African American women had fought for years against the injustice of slavery. Claudette believed staying in her seat was doing what they would have wanted her to do. She said, “It felt as though Harriet Tubman’s hands were pushing me down on one shoulder and Sojourner Truth’s hands were pushing me down on the other shoulder. I felt inspired by these women because my teacher taught us about them in so much detail. I wasn’t frightened, but disappointed and angry because I knew I was sitting in the right seat.” Claudette took a stand for civil rights that day. Civil rights are protections promised to all citizens of the United States of America—-like the right to vote or the right to an education. Big changes can start with the bravery of a single person. Claudette was one of the many brave people who would work together for the three great promises of America—-life, liberty, and happiness. Chapter 1: A Troubled Past When people talk about the civil rights movement, they usually mean the period in the 1950s and 1960s when African Americans fought for the same rights that white people had. Segregation was the worst in the South. Besides having to sit in separate rows in buses, Black people went to separate schools, drank from separate water fountains, stayed in separate hotels, lived in separate neighborhoods, and were not allowed to vote. The United States Declaration of Independence says “all men are created equal.” But when it was written in 1776, one out of every five people was enslaved. They had been kidnapped from Africa and sold to white Americans like property. <...
