Rebecca Traister
speaker
165 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 20 Mar
Rebecca Traister’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So this is an attempt for me to begin to tell some of those stories that I don't think got recognized or appreciated.
And it's specifically about the anger that didn't get appreciated as catalytic and righteous.
Well, there are a lot of people who are very important.
I will tell you somebody I've been thinking about recently, in part because she just died.
A woman named Claudette Colvin.
And that's a name that a lot of people might not immediately recognize.
And that's, in fact, kind of nuts.
Claudette Colvin was 15 in 1955, March of 1955, almost exactly 70 years ago, when she, as a 15-year-old girl, refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery.
This is nine months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat.
Now, the Civil Rights Movement, which had been planning to stage an action around this, did not want Claudette Colvin, this 15-year-old girl, to be the face of that action.
She did get arrested.
She became a plaintiff in the Supreme Court case that ultimately, that in 1956, would bar racial segregation on public transportation.
She's incredibly important.
Her choice that day on that bus actually changed the law.
And yet we're not taught about her.
There are a lot of very messed up reasons that we're not taught about her and that the movement itself wanted to choose Rosa Parks, who herself is angry in ways we're not taught about.
She's also in this book.
But one of the reasons that I think about Claudette Colvin in particular
writing this book for young readers is that the way she described her choice that day as a high school student was that because she'd been reading history specifically about the abolition movement a century before her, she says that she felt like the ghosts of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth were pushing on her shoulders, gluing her to that bus seat.
And it reminds me of why it's so important that we have this history, that we do tell these stories of anger and resistance because a 15-year-old girl can be inspired by them
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