As she recounted how she had been kicked and objectified by the police, the sound of muffled sniffs and the labored breathing of crying filled the courtroom. On cross-examination, the city’s attorney tried to trap Claudette into saying that she had been swindled by the silver-tongued Martin Luther King, who put her up to all of this. But Claudette was too smart for him. “Why did you stop riding the buses?” the attorney asked, hoping she would talk about how the Montgomery Improvement Association had told them to. She stared him in the eye and confidently said, “Because we were treated wrong,
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