On March 2, 1955, Claudette Colvin was riding a segregated bus in Montgomery, Ala., when the driver ordered the Black high school junior to give up her seat to a white woman. Colvin, 15, refused. “It’s my constitutional right to sit here as much as that lady,” she told police, who dragged her screaming off the bus. Angered by the arrest, local NAACP officials considered using her case to fight the city’s Jim Crow laws. But they decided Colvin was not the right face for their fight: She was young, poor, and, some thought, too “mouthy.” Nine months later, they found a candidate deemed more sympathetic: Rosa Parks, 42, an unflappable, lighter-skinned seamstress and NAACP official. Her arrest for the same act of civil disobedience would lead to the yearlong…