For the first time since I’d come up with my project plan, I heard one tiny, buzzy voice in the back corner of my brain wondering if I was too small for a plan so big. Nothing could ever make me give up, of course. But if we didn’t even learn about Cecilia Payne in school, the person who had discovered these amazing things about the universe, how hard was a new audacious plan going to be for a scar-hearted girl eating yogurt while her mom braided her hair?

Then I had Ms. Trepky’s class.

“How many of you have heard of Rosa Parks?” she started. Most of us raised our hands. (We’d read about her in our assigned reading, so it wasn’t smart that Dustin didn’t raise his hand because then Ms. Trepky knew he hadn’t done his homework.)

We talked about Rosa Parks for a while. We talked about how she was brave. Ms. Trepky wrote the words Civil Disobedience on the whiteboard and we talked about following the leaders of our world, and thinking for ourselves, and the times those two things overlap, and the times they don’t.

“Now,” said Ms. Trepky. “How many of you have heard of Claudette Colvin?”

At first I was worried, because I hadn’t heard of her, and I thought maybe I’d missed something in our reading, but when I looked around, nobody else was raising their hand, either.

“Claudette Colvin did what Rosa Parks did. She refused to move to the back of the bus when someone told her to, and she got arrested. Plus, she did it nine months before Rosa Parks.”

So Ms. Trepky knew about people who should have been in our textbook, too. How many were there? A hundred? A thousand?

I raised my hand.

“So why isn’t she in our textbook?”

Ms. Trepky looked at us, scanning our faces.

“That’s a very good question,” she said. “It’s hard to say why certain people gain renown and others do not. Perhaps another way to think about it is this: If we had a textbook with everyone of importance, we would need a textbook with everyone.”

She let us think about that for a minute. I pictured myself in a textbook, my face a small square photo next to a block of text and a heading with my name. I imagined a girl just like me reading about … me. What would it say? I looked around and imagined a section about everyone in the class. Even Dustin would have a section. That made me want to laugh.

Maybe I didn’t need a section in a history textbook, but I still thought I knew someone who did.

Don’t worry, Cecilia. I’ve got this.

“The point is,” Ms. Trepky continued, “both of these women had an influence, even though we tend to study only one of them. And there are many, many more whose names we do not know. People who sat at counters and didn’t leave, people who carried signs, people who got sprayed down with fire hoses. Each of them played a part in changing laws and shaping our country, and even though we’ve read a lot about people like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, it wasn’t just these few people who changed things. They needed help. Think of Martin Luther King’s friends and parents and family who helped him. He was a Martin Luther King junior, after all, with a father who bequeathed him his own name. We would likely not even have him in our textbook if it wasn’t for them.”