Free Audiobooks: Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice and While the World Watched

Two audiobooks are available for free from SYNC this week (through July 17th).

Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice
by Phillip Hoose
On March 2, 1955, a slim, bespectacled teenager refused to give up her seat to a white woman on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Shouting “It’s my constitutional right!” as police dragged her off to jail, Claudette Colvin decided she’d had enough of the Jim Crow segregation laws that had angered and puzzled her since she was a young child.

But instead of being celebrated, as Rosa Parks would be when she took the same stand nine months later, Claudette found herself shunned by many of her classmates and dismissed as an unfit role model by the black leaders of Montgomery. Undaunted, she put her life in danger a year later when she dared to challenge segregation yet again–as one of four plaintiffs in the landmark busing case Browder v. Gayle.

Based on extensive interviews with Claudette Colvin and many others, Phillip Hoose presents the first in-depth account of a major, yet little-known, civil rights figure whose story provides a fresh perspective on the Montgomery bus protest of 1955-56. Historic figures like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks play important roles, but center stage belongs to the brave, bookish girl whose two acts of courage were to affect the course of American history.

While the World Watched
by Carolyn Maull McKinstry with Denise George
Fifteen-year-old Carolyn Maull McKinstry was just a few feet away when the Klan-planted bomb that killed four of her friends exploded in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. It was one of the seminal moments in the Civil Rights movement, a sad day in American history . . . and the turning point in a young girl’s life.

Carolyn’s story is a poignant and gripping eyewitness account of what it was like to grow up in the Jim Crow South–from the bombings, riots, and assassinations to the historic marches and triumphs that characterized the Civil Rights era.

A unique and moving exploration of how racial relations have evolved over the past five decades, While the World Watched is an incredible testament to how far we’ve come–and how far we have yet to go.

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To get either audiobook (or both!), click the link in their title, above, or start at the download page.

For the SYNC audiobooks, you'll need to install the OverDrive® Media Console™ first, but the page walks you through that. The audiobooks have download buttons below the green sync-head thing in the third column of the page.

Enjoy!