The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It - by Jo Ann Gibson Robinson (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Histories of the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-1956 typically focus on Rose 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.

Review Quotes

"This valuable first-hand account of the historic Montgomery Bus Boycott, written by an important, behind-the-scenes organizer, evokes the emotional intensity of the civil rights struggle. It ought to be required reading for all Americans who value their freedom and the contribution of black women to our history."
--Coretta Scott King

"This autobiographical account of the creation of the boycott is the most important document on that highly significant episode since Martin Luther King's own version, Stride Towards Freedom. I feel certain that scholars and students will refer to this unique historical source for generations to come."
--J. Mills Thornton, University of Michigan

"A sharply remembered addition to the literature on what has become an event of mythic proportions, and a sound primer for those interested in community organizing. The author is scrupulously honest, modest, and gives unsung heroes much deserved praise."
--Kirkus

"This fascinating memoir provides new evidence on the origins and sustaining force of the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-56)."
--Anthony O. Edmonds, Library Journal

"There's no substitute for this intimate memoir; it provides an immediacy and graphic intensity never before available."
--Marge Frantz, San Jose Mercury News

"This powerful memoir is a milestone in the history of that boycott and in the American Civil Rights Movement."
--American History Illustrated

"This absorbing study may become a minor classic in the literature of the Montgomery bus boycott. . . . Garrow correctly states in his Foreword that this book is the most important participant-observer account of the Montgomery protest available to students and scholars of the black freedom movement. . . . This straightforward, sensitive memoir is must reading for students of the civil rights movement. It is a powerful commentary on how a woman and the group she led rose up to throw off an injustice thrust upon them. When Jo Ann Robinson and other Montgomery women decided no longer to play the role of contented black Southerners, they gave blacks everywhere renewed hope, and they helped to create a national leader who took them closer to the promised land."
--Jimmie L. Franklin, The Alabama Review

"In an absorbing, first-hand narrative, the dignified and unassuming Robinson focuses on the role of the Women's Political Council (WPC) and details the WPC's plans to engineer a boycott months before the heralded arrest of Rosa Parks. . . . The value of this primary source will endure long after many best-selling, secondary accounts of national politics during this period have disappeared."
--Keith D. Miller and Elizabeth Vander Lei, Explorations in Sight and Sound

About the Author

Jo Ann Gibson Robinson (1912-1992) was a crucial figure in the early civil rights movement. The youngest of twelve children, she was the first in her family to graduate college. Robinson was heavily involved in the Montgomery Bus Boycott (and, indeed, had been verbally attacked by a White bus driver for sitting at the front of a bus in 1949). She taught at Alabama State College, Grambling College, and in the Los Angeles public school system.

David J. Garrow was a longtime professor of history and author of numerous books on civil rights. His book Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987. He is also author of New York Times Bestseller Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama.