"THE BACKBONE OF THE BOYCOTT"

 “THE BACKBONE OF THE BOYCOTT”

On May 17, 1954, SCOTUS delivered a hard blow to the deep racist vein in American history, deciding in a unanimous decision that “separate but equal” was no longer constitutional.  Less than a week later, white mayor William “Tacky” Gayle of Montgomery, Alabama received a letter from the Women’s Political Council, a letter written and signed by Joann Robinson, who was president of the Council.  The letter demanded that the city stop the bus drivers from humiliating and harassing the Black passengers on the buses.  If no remedy was forthcoming, the letter indicated that a bus boycott would soon follow.  Mayor Gayle dismissed the demand, knowing that the Black people of Montgomery would not stand up to white power in such a way, SCOTUS or no SCOTUS.

Though the boycott would take a while to materialize, the mayor had badly miscalculated the level of determination of Joann Robinson and other Black women and men.  Robinson had been the youngest of 12 children born in rural Georgia, and she had gone on to be valedictorian of her high school class, get a college degree and a master’s degree.  After a teaching stint in Texas, she took a position on the faculty of Alabama State University in Montgomery.  She herself had been humiliated on a Montgomery city bus in 1949 because she refused to move to the Black section of the bus.  She vowed never to ride a segregated bus again, and she kept her vow.

She was a member of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King, Jr., would later become pastor.  She also joined the Women’s Political Council (WPC) founded as an activist Black women’s group by Mary Fair Burks.  She helped to turn it into a powerful political force, and she became its president in 1954.  In early 1955, she felt that the time for the bus boycott had come, when teenager Claudette Colvin was arrested for refusing to give up her seat in the white section of the bus in March, 1955.   She and the women of the WPC went into action to get ready, getting fliers ready for distribution to the Black community.  Black male leaders like ED Nixon, however, did not think that Colvin was the right case, so Robinson held the fliers back.  On October 21, Mary Louise Smith was harassed on the bus for refusing to give up her seat in the white section.  Robinson was ready to go again, but again, the Black male leaders refused to endorse a boycott.

Robinson was now frustrated with both the Black male leadership and the intransigent white supremacy.  Then, the right person presented herself.  Spurred on by her work at Highlander Folk School the previous summer and by the blatant lynching of Emmett Till in late summer, on December 1, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in the white section of the bus.  As the song by John Legend and Common put it, “Rosa sat down, and we stood up.”  One of those standing up was Joann Robinson.

This time she would not wait on the men.  She went to work the night of Rosa Parks’ arrest.  She consulted with attorney Fred Gray about taking action, and he urged her to do it.  She drafted a short statement for the WPC and a longer statement for wider public distribution.  She gathered women colleagues and students at Alabama State at about midnight to begin the arduous process of running off the flyers on the mimeograph machine. (Those of you in my age bracket will remember those things – necessary but messy!)  Here she was, sneaking into the building, using state facilities to reproduce fliers calling for the first step in a revolt against the white supremacist structures, supported and upheld by that very state system.  She took a deep breath – let the copying begin in the all night process.  They copied 35,000 fliers that night, and the WPC made sure that they were distributed on Friday to churches, schools, stores, beauty parlors, barbershops, and pool halls. They called for a Black boycott of the Montgomery city buses beginning that Monday, December 5.

Some of the Black ministers were distressed that the fliers showed up at their churches without their input or consent, but the word had been spoken, and there was no going back.  Would the boycott happen?  Would it last?  No Black people rode the buses on Monday, and the white community was shocked.  Robinson was at the center of organizing car pools, meals, money in order to sustain the boycott, which ended up lasting over a year, until SCOTUS ruled that segregation on public transportation was unconstitutional. That decision came in response to a suit filed by Fred Gray on behalf of Rosa Parks, Claudette Colvin, Mary Louise Smith, and Aurelia Browder in Browder v. Gayle.  No males stepped forward to join in the suit.

The Montgomery bus boycott was one of 4 actions in the 1950’s that led to the Civil Rights Movement.  At its backbone and its heart was a woman named Joann Robinson.  She would eventually lose her job over her leadership, and she had to leave the state of Alabama, moving to California, where she continued to teach and to work for justice.  She died in LA (that’s Los Angeles, not Lower Alabama) in 1992.  

If you don’t know her story, go learn about her – I’ve barely scratched the surface here.  And, let us find our paths in her story and in her witness.