Claudette Colvin was 15 when she was arrested for refusing to give her seat to a white woman on a bus in Montgomery, Ala. in March 1955. Later, she told her biographer, Phillip Hoose, “As a teenager, I kept thinking, ‘Why don’t the adults around here just say something?’ I knew then and I know now that, when it comes to justice, there is no easy way to get it. You have to take a stand and say, ‘This is not right.’ And I did.”Pauli Murray accomplished more than any single human could be expected to do, becoming a teacher, a writer, a poet, a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, a lawyer, a starter of organizations like the Congress of Racial Equality and NOW, and a coiner of terms like “Jane Crow,” rolling together sexism and racism. Murray also was arrested for sitting in the “whites only” section of a bus. That was in Virginia in 1940. Some histories refer to Murray as feminine, but Murray questioned the notion of gender. In 1977, Murray became “the first Black person perceived as a woman” in the U.S. to become an Episcopal priest, according to the Pauli Murray Center.A mob screamed outside the Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans when six-year-old Ruby Bridges showed up for her first day in 1960 — she was the school’s first Black student. Last fall, on NPR’s All Things Considered, she told Mary Louise Kelly, “I had no idea that it was going to be a white school. It wasn’t something that my parents explained to me. As a matter of fact, the only thing they said is, ‘Ruby, you’re going to go to a new school today, and you better behave.’ ” Bridges spent a lot of time alone that year. She has been talking with people about tolerance pretty much ever since.
