Maine Humanities Council

Phillip Hoose and Claudette Colvin on board a Portland METRO bus during the Understanding Courage Exhibit. Credit: Mark Mattos

In February, the MHC funded a project at Portland’s King Middle School that narrated how an African American teenager took a big step for the Civil Rights movement in 1955. Fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin was riding the bus home from school, her mind full of the day’s lesson on Harriet Tubman and Sojurner Truth, when she was asked to give up her seat to a white passenger. Colvin refused. When arrested, she courageously protested that her constitutional rights were being violated. This was nine months before Rosa Parks’ similar action made headlines. In his recent book Claudette Colvin: Twice Towards Justice, Phillip Hoose explores why Colvin’s story was not more publicized at the time and what her action truly meant. Hoose is currently a National Book Award finalist for this book.

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The Shoe Vendor, Cuba, ca. 1895–1920. Photo courtesy Frank and Frances Carpenter Collection, Library of Congress

“Cuban Exceptionalism: Reflections on Latin American History” is a MHC public symposium in Portland on December 4. This study of the island’s tensions and relationship with the United States, explored in part through Christina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban, will help participants see new sides of this angle of Latin American history. For more information, please check out our website.

Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family, Alexander Waugh’s story of four generations of male Waughs, is fascinating mostly for the insight it gives readers into the development of his most famous relative, Evelyn Waugh.

He starts at the beginning with Evelyn’s grandfather, Alexander Waugh, known to all the family as “the Brute” for his sadistic behavior (he once made his wife hold still so that he could swat a wasp that had landed on her face with the butt of a whip; both the wasp and the whip caused the poor woman some pain).

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