Robinson, Jo Ann (1912-1992)
As president of the Women’s Political Council (WPC) and a board member of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), Jo Ann Robinson was instrumental in creating and sustaining the Montgomery bus boycott, the nonviolent protest that brought national attention to Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights struggle. In addition to being an active participant in MIA strategy sessions, Robinson edited the organization’s newsletter and volunteered as a carpool driver throughout the boycott. “Apparently indefatigable,” King wrote of Robinson, “she, perhaps more than any other person, was active on every level of the protest.”
Born in 1912 near Culloden, Georgia, Robinson was the youngest of twelve children. After graduating as valedictorian of her high school class in Macon, she went to Fort Valley State College and was the first in her family to graduate from college. Robinson then earned a master’s degree in English from Atlanta University; and following a year of study at Columbia University, she became chairman of the English department at Mary Allen College in Crockett, Texas. In 1949, Robinson moved to Montgomery to become an English professor at Alabama State College.
In Montgomery, Robinson joined Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where she was a member of the Social and Political Action Committee. She also joined the Women’s Political Council (WPC) , an organization for African American professional women. It was at the end of her first term at Alabama State when Robinson suffered a humiliating experience on a city bus. Sitting in the fifth row on an almost empty bus, she was accosted by an angry driver and ordered onto the street. Robinson soon learned that similar abuses were a common experience among the black citizens of Montgomery; and when she became president of the WPC in early 1950s, she decided to make the city’s segregated bus seating one of the council’s top priorities. Repeatedly, she and other WPC delegates brought complaints about seating practices and the conduct of drivers before the Montgomery City Commission, which maintained that the city’s rules for buses could not be amended under Alabama segregation laws.
In 1954, four days after the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education invalidated the doctrine of “separate but equal,” Robinson sent a letter to Mayor W. A. Gayle threatening a boycott of the Montgomery City Lines if the commission did not act to improve bus service for black citizens. But by late 1955, negotiations with city and bus company officials had yielded little success. When Rosa Parks was arrested on 1 December 1955 for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus to a white passenger, Robinson seized the opportunity to put the long-considered protest into motion. Late that evening, Robinson composed a notice calling for a boycott of city buses on 5 December, the day of Parks’s trial. She and two students mimeographed tens of thousands of flyers for distribution by WPC members the following morning.
Black civic and religious leaders joined in the call. After the success of the one-day boycott, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) was established to continue the campaign and Martin Luther King, Jr. was chosen as its president. Robinson, whose position as a state employee precluded a more visible leadership role, served on the MIA executive board and actively worked behind the scenes to sustain the boycott.
Following student sit-ins in 1960, Robinson and other civil rights activists were forced to leave their faculty positions at Alabama State. After teaching for a year at Grambling College in Louisiana, Robinson moved to Los Angeles and was a public school teacher until her retirement in 1976. Her memoir, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, was published in 1987. Robinson died in 1992.