It was a spring afternoon in 1955 when a teenager’s spontaneous act of defiance changed US history. Why did it take 40 years for her to get any credit?
Aged eight, she moved to Montgomery, to the low-income Black neighbourhood of King Hill. It was here, as she entered adolescence, that her experiences paved the way for 1955. Her sister Delphine died from polio just days before she started high school. She recalls in Hoose’s biography, Twice Toward Justice, how the experience awakened her: “One thing especially bothered me – we Black students constantly put ourselves down … And the N-word – we were saying it to each other, to ourselves. I’d hear that word and I would start crying. I wouldn’t let people use it around me.”
