Jo Ann Robinson and the Women's Political Council

The name most associated with the Montgomery Bus Boycott is Martin Luther King Junior. He was twenty-six years old and had been pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church for barely a year when Rosa Parks was arrested. He was chosen to lead the boycott in part because he was new enough to Montgomery that he had not yet made enemies among the city's white establishment. He was persuasive. He was brilliant. He was also, in the movement's first twelve hours, catching up to what the Women's Political Council had already done.

Jo Ann Robinson was an English professor at Alabama State College. She had joined the Women's Political Council in nineteen forty-nine, five years before King arrived in Montgomery, and had spent those years organizing against the specific indignities of Montgomery's bus segregation, including an incident in which Robinson herself had been screamed at by a bus driver for accidentally sitting in the front section. The council had drafted a bus boycott plan two years before Rosa Parks was arrested, and kept it in a drawer, waiting for a moment the leadership judged could carry the weight.

The moment came on December first, nineteen fifty-five, when Parks was taken off the bus. Robinson did not wait for a committee meeting or a vote. She went to the Alabama State College mimeograph machine that night, along with students and colleagues, and printed fifty thousand leaflets calling for a one-day boycott. They were folded, distributed to schools, churches, barber shops, and beauty parlors, and spread across Montgomery's Black neighborhoods before dawn the next morning.

The one-day boycott became three hundred eighty-one days. The Women's Political Council is why the first day worked. The organization that remembered the boycott as King's was built by women who had been organizing since before he arrived.