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

By Jo Ann Gibson Robinson

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0870495275
• ISBN13: 9780870495274
• Release Date: May 1987
• Publisher: University of Tennessee Press
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.84 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

True life is in the details--this book is a treasure.

This little memoir by a highly educated black woman who lived in Montgomery before, during and after the boycott stands like a monument in my eyes. A mountain-top view where the reader will observe more slow-moving colors than the eye can understand, especially for someone like me who wasn't there. Yet the panorama is available in detail, more than you get when you read about Rosa Parks and the general information low-lighted in most history books. To name just two of the many individuals from her chronicle, Ms. Robinson details the ironic arrest of 15-year old Claudette Colvin who was the real Rosa Parks, and the influence of Mr. E.D. Nixon, a respected civic leader who was imprisoned despite his courteous connections with all highly-functioning organizations in Montgomery. Of course, the plodding, painfully slow struggle that was galvanized finally by Martin Luther King, Jr. is the real story. A story this memoir tells for a person interested in the close-up side of life--not glossed-over, sensationalized or generalized--but told intelligently. It is a book that bears emotional intensity and wisdom. I highly recommend it.

Interesting book.

This is a great first-hand account of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It gives great insight on the emotions of the boycotters, and the determination that kept them going. The book is a little slow at times, but it's well worth it in the end. It really shows the intricate details that made the boycott successful.