Is Image Really Everything?

I found an interesting nugget of civil rights history a few days ago while hearing about NPR news story. 9 months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, there was a black teenager by the name of Claudette Colvin also did the same and who also aided with her testimony to the US Supreme Court in Browder v Gayle, that would overturn Montgomery's bus segregation policy.  But because she didn't fit the image of what the NAACP wanted so she left out of the very fight she help started. My question why discriminate against your own? If you're fighting against segregation, then discount a person just because of their age and social station? She laid the foundation that gave for the protest that got MLK to speak in Montgomery, AL and yet we hear little about her in history. Years later this teenager would leave Montgomery for New York and later become a forgotten side note of a major event in civil rights history. A book by Phillip Hoose called Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice was published in 2009 that tells more of the overlooked backstory of the events leading to the Montgomery Bus Boycott not just from her point of view but others as well. When being to cross and alienate the very people you claim to help, you are not helping them for the right reasons. This also makes you a hypocrite, which added another question. Why is image so important when we have been told since childhood to never judge a book by it's cover.