A personal anecdote from Claudette Colvin opens Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice. She remembers being in a store as a young child, standing in line while her mother Mary Jane waits to pay. A group of white boys starts mocking her, although four-year-old Claudette does not understand why. When the youngest boy, who has just cut her in line, asks her to show him her hands, she holds them up and he touches her. This immediately draws the attention of both Claudette’s mother and the white boy’s mother, and, to Claudette’s shock, her mother slaps her. She tells Claudette to never touch a white person.

The book then shifts to an overview of life in Alabama under the Jim Crow laws of the 1940s and 1950s. Most Black people, Claudette’s parents included, were restricted to earning money working as servants. The few exceptions were Black teachers and ministers in Black schools and churches. Black and White life were kept almost completely segregated. Black and white people could not play together or get married, swim in a pool or ride in an elevator at the same time, and were assigned separate drinking fountains and bathrooms.