On December 1st, 1955, Rosa Parks famously refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. But nine months before, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested for doing the same thing on a bus in the  same city. She had been learning about black history at school that month. Reflecting on the day she was handcuffed and put in jail, she remembers it was as though Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman were on either side of her, holding her in her seat on that bus.

Colvin is now 69 years old and living in the Bronx. Her story is documented in a new book, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Philip Hoose. Why have most people never heard of her? In an NPR  interview, Colvin says it is because she was a teen at the time, and leaders of the civil rights movement believed Rosa Parks would make a better icon: “She was an adult. They didn’t think teenagers would be reliable.”

Though we mostly see pictures of adults representing the civil rights movement, the reality is that there were many teens whose activism made a huge difference. Hoose says he wrote his book so that more young people could be inspired by Colvin’s action.

Listen: “Before Rosa Parks, There Was Claudette Colvin”