The Women Who Printed Thirty-Five Thousand Leaflets
Near Montgomery, Alabama
On the night of December first, nineteen fifty-five, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give her bus seat to a white passenger. By the next morning, tens of thousands of mimeographed leaflets had been distributed across Black Montgomery calling for a one-day boycott on December fifth.
The woman who spent the night running the mimeograph machine was Jo Ann Robinson, an English professor at Alabama State College and the head of the Women's Political Council of Montgomery. The council she led had been planning for exactly this moment for more than two years.
Robinson had first approached Montgomery's city commissioners in nineteen fifty-three to protest the conditions Black riders faced on city buses: having to pay their fare at the front, then exit and re-board through the back door; being required to stand even when seats in the white section were empty; drivers who called Black riders by racial epithets. The council had drafted a citywide boycott plan and had it ready. When Parks was arrested, Robinson recognized immediately what kind of arrest it was, called the chairman of the Alabama State College business department, enlisted two students, and ran the press until morning.
The council's network of women, mostly teachers and community organizers from Alabama State, distributed the leaflets through churches, schools, beauty parlors, and personal contact. The boycott began on December fifth. Nearly the entire Black population of Montgomery, roughly forty thousand daily riders, stayed off the buses. It held for three hundred eighty-one days.
Jo Ann Robinson's name did not appear in most early histories of the boycott. She wrote her own account, published in nineteen eighty-seven.
