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English, 29.05.2020 15:58 jnsebastian2002

Help Please! Refer to one or more details from the text to explain what Claudette Colvin learns about the difference between Montgomery’s segregation laws and actual practice on buses at that time. Base your answer both on evidence that is directly stated and ideas that you infer from clues in the text. (Sorry if it is too long)

Claudette Colvin was an A student at all-black Booker T. Washington High. She must have been paying attention in her civics classes, for she insisted on applying the lessons she had learned after boarding a city bus on March 2, 1955. Claudette was on her way home from school that day. She found a seat in the middle of the bus, behind the section reserved for whites. As more riders got on, the bus filled up until there were no empty seats left. The aisle was jammed with passengers standing, mostly blacks and a few whites. The driver stopped the bus and ordered black passengers seated behind the white section to get up and move further back, making more seats available for whites. Reluctantly, black riders gave up their seats and moved into the crowded aisle as whites took over the vacated seats. Claudette didn’t move. She knew she wasn’t sitting in the restricted white section. She felt that she was far enough back to be entitled to her seat. A pregnant black woman was sitting next to her. When the driver insisted that the woman get up and stand in the aisle, a black man in the rear offered her his seat, then quickly left the bus to avoid trouble. Claudette was now occupying a double seat alone. “Hey, get up!” the bus driver ordered. Still she refused to move. None of the white women standing would sit in the empty seat next to Claudette. It was against the law for blacks to sit in the same row as a white person. The driver refused to move the bus. “This can’t go on,” he said. “I’m going to call the cops.” He did, and when the police arrived, he demanded that Claudette be arrested. “Aren’t you going to get up?” one of the police officers asked. “No,” Claudette replied. “I don’t have to get up. I paid my fare, so I don’t have to get up.” At school, Claudette had been studying the U. S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and she had taken those lessons to heart. “It’s my constitutional right to sit here just as much as that [white] lady,” she told the police. “It’s my constitutional right!” Blacks had been arrested before for talking back to white officials. Now it was Claudette’s turn. She was crying and madder than ever when the police told her she was under arrest. “You have no right to do this,” she protested. She struggled as they knocked her books aside, grabbed her wrists, and dragged her off the bus, and she screamed when they put on the handcuffs. “I didn’t know what was happening,” she said later. “I was just angry. Like a teenager might be, I was just downright angry. It felt like I was helpless.” She remained locked up at the city jail until she was bailed out later that day by the pastor of her church. Under Montgomery’s segregation laws, Claudette was in fact entitled to her seat behind the whites-only section. If no seats were available for blacks to move back to as additional white passengers boarded the bus, then they were not required to give up their seats. That was the official policy. But in actual practice, whenever a white person needed a seat, the driver would order blacks to get up and move to the back of the bus, even when they had to stand in the aisle. Prosecutors threw the book at Claudette. She was charged not only with violating the segregation laws, but also with assault and battery for resisting arrest. “She insisted she was colored and just as good as white,” the surprised arresting officer told the judge at the court hearing.

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