We did not know Claudette Colvin's story until writer Phillip Hoose won a National Book Award for writing it. Hoose aimed his prose at young people, shining light on a 15-year-old African-American girl who challenged the segregation law in Montgomery, Ala., in l955.

Claudette Colvin rode the city bus home from school. In March of l955, a white woman boarded the bus and black students sitting near Claudette moved to the back, leaving three empty seats.

But the white rider refused to sit down. To take a seat next to Colvin would have symbolized she and the black girl were equals, Hoose writes.

Claudette, remembering the words of her teacher, who encouraged students to hold fast to their constitutional rights, did not move to a back seat. The driver pulled over and two Montgomery policemen stepped on the bus.

They told her "to get to the back." She said she had paid her fare and was entitled to keep her seat because there were empty seats for white passengers. The policemen dragged her off the bus, handcuffed her, calling her a "Nigger bitch."

Colvin was taken to the city jail, charged with breaking a segregation law, disturbing the peace and assaulting a policeman. The minister of her church bailed her out, and, though classmates from the bus ride later testified she neither created a ruckus nor touched a policeman, she was saddled with a police record.

The night of her arrest, her uncle sat up with a shotgun across his knees, fearing retaliation from the Klan.

Colvin's treatment by police added fuel to a racial fire, smoldering. The local NAACP chapter protested her arrest. Though a bus boycott was the leverage African-Americans needed to challenge segregation, black leaders were hesitant to embrace a 15-year-old girl as a local Joan of Arc.

Even her schoolmates had their say, calling Claudette the "bus girl," seeing her as a trouble maker. No doubt, fear was at the heart of their taunting. They had no power to stand up to Montgomery authorities and their parents' jobs hung in the balance in the white community.

Claudette Colvin was a child of a revolution, rumbling, but not finding solid ground. Not yet.

The new preacher at Montgomery's Dexter Ave. Baptist Church was 26-year-old Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a slight man whose sermons sounded like poetry and whose message espoused hope, not violence.

"Here in Montgomery," he preached, "we are determined to work and to fight until justice runs down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream."

The work began when donations from across the country funded the cost of more than 30 station wagons, bought to car pool black workers to their jobs. In the black community, car owners loaned 200 cars to the cause of boycotting city buses after Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in December 1955.

Still, thousands of "foot weary soldiers" walked miles to work. King was arrested for driving 30 mph in a 25 mph zone while carpooling black workers.

He spent his first night in jail on a trumped-up charge. Three days later, a bomb was thrown through the window of his house.

Nine months had passed since Colvin had been arrested. Fred Gray, her lawyer, decided it was not enough to ask local bus drivers to be more courteous and hope for "modest reforms in seating."

If segregated schools were illegal, then why weren't segregated buses?

He mobilized a class action suit on behalf of black bus riders, knowing his only chance for a fair hearing would be in federal court.

As examples of segregation's abuse of individual rights, Gray chose five witnesses. One was Claudette Colvin. The federal court's decision, 2-1, "abolished segregated seating on Montgomery's and Alabama's buses."

With the help of a young girl, justice ran down like water, giving voice to equal rights, regardless of skin color.

Judy Elliott is an award-winning columnist from Marietta.