I thank Dianne and Clyde Jones for allowing me to walk through Claudette’s childhood home in King Hill when I visited Montgomery for research. Jeanne Smiley, the niece of Geraldine Nesbitt, kindly drove me around the city, pointing out landmarks of the bus protest and of her youth. I’m deeply grateful to Alean Bowser and Annie Larkin Price for talking with me and providing photographs. I thank the famed civil rights attorney Fred Gray, who answered my questions at his law offices in Tuskegee and afterward by phone.
For advice, wisdom, connections, and overall resourcefulness, I thank Georgette Norman, director of the Rosa Parks Library and Museum. Norwood Kerr and Meredith McLemore of the Alabama State Archives provided helpful research assistance, as did Linda Harvey of Alabama State University.
For help in obtaining photographs and rights to publish them, I thank Kenneth Hare, Wanda Lloyd, and Karen Doerr of the Montgomery Advertiser; John Thorp of the Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University; Claudette’s sister Gloria Laster; Ashni Mohnot of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute; Penny Weaver; Laura Anderson of the Birmingham Civil Rights Museum; Judge Reese McKinney, Jr.; Tricia O’Connor of the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis; and John Broderick.
This book would not exist without the generosity of the USA Today reporter Richard Willing, who put me in touch with Claudette. I thank my longtime friend and editor Melanie Kroupa for her faith in this book and skill in helping me create it. Once again, Melanie’s assistant, Sharon McBride, helped immensely. Thanks to Grace Hine for all she taught me. I thank Kirsten Cappy of Curious City for insightfully commenting on an early draft of the book. Thanks to Cheryl Hart, Toby Hollander, and Ruby and Hannah Hoose for reading portions of the manuscript as it was in production, and for letting me read to them. Sandra Lee Ste. George shared this book’s creation intimately with me from first page to last.
Most of all, I thank Claudette Colvin for taking a chance on a writer she had never heard of. I hope I earned her trust.