Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson

Histories of the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955–1956 typically focus on Rosa Parks, who refused to yield her bus seat to a White man, and on a young Martin Luther King Jr., who became the spokesman for the Black community organization set up to pursue a boycott of Montgomery’s segregated city buses. In an important revision of the traditional account, this extraordinary personal memoir reveals an earlier and more important role played by a group of middle-class Black Montgomery women in creating the boycott.

As head of the Women’s Political Council, the most active and assertive Black civic organization in the City, Jo Ann Robinson was centrally involved in planning for a boycott far in advance and was able to immediately initiate it the evening Rosa Parks was arrested. Robinson also took part in crucial but ultimately unsuccessful negotiations with White officials both before and during the protest. Her proud, moving narrative vividly portrays her colleagues in the struggle, their strategies and decisions, and evokes the complex emotional currents in Montgomery during the boycott.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott ignited the civil rights movement and has always been vitally important in southern history and African American history. This seminal publication, named to Wall Street Journal ’s top ten list of books on the civil rights movement, has long been a milestone publication in understanding America’s complicated racial history.