TheLoop21.com

By: Susan Anderson (follow this member)
Wed, 03/11/2009 - 00:00

It’s International Women’s Month. During this time, we often hear and celebrate the name Rosa Parks.

Thoughts about Parks bring to mind the famous photograph in which the civil rights icon is sitting on a bus, gazing out the window. Alone.

But in her heroic refusal to give up her seat for a white passenger, she was not alone. Sure, we honor the young preacher, Martin Luther King Jr., who was selected in 1955 to lead the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott. But few people know the Montgomery bus boycott was organized, led and inspired by women.

It was women — primarily through the Women’s Political Council — who planned the bus boycott, and perceived it as a mass movement to bring social change. And it was women who organized and coordinated the daily operations of the movement.

These women were already organized by the time Parks took her stand. According to the King Encyclopedia, Mary Fair Burks, head of Alabama State's English department, served as WPC president until 1950. JoAnn Robinson, an English professor at Alabama State College, followed. By 1955, the WPC counted more than 200 members.

Historically, the WPC mobilized the African American community to lobby politicians in Montgomery to include blacks within the city’s police force, fire department, school board, and other civic offices. They also lobbied on issues from street improvements in black neighborhoods to discrimination on the city’s buses. 

As early as May 1954, Robinson wrote to the Montgomery mayor describing growing black support for a bus boycott. In March 1955, a high school student, Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat to a white passenger. Organizers scuttled plans for a boycott when they found the unwed teenager was pregnant. They knew white racists and segregationists would use all the ammunition they could against the black protest.

In December 1955, Parks took her stand on a Montgomery city bus, and was sent to jail. It’s important to remember that, at the time of her arrest, she was a youth leader of the Montgomery NAACP. Five months before her arrest, she had attended the famous Highlander Folk School in Tennessee to train as a civil rights organizer.

After Parks’ arrest, Robinson drafted a boycott notice: “Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown in jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus. ... If we do not do something to stop these arrests, they will continue. The next time it may be you, or your daughter, or mother.”

A network of women distributed fliers with the message, which also called for a one-day boycott. It was a huge success. After the protest, African American leaders from several organizations held a mass meeting and selected King as their spokesman. They worked under the banner of the Montgomery Improvement Association.

The boycott lasted nearly a year, and led to the court case that successfully ended segregation on the Montgomery municipal bus line.

This International Women’s Month, we should remember the unsung, local women who propelled King and Parks into the international spotlight, sparking the flame that grew into the Southern Civil Rights Movement.

Susan D. Anderson teaches, speaks and writes about African American history, politics and culture. She is the author of Nostalgia for a Trumpet: Poems of Memory and History, published by Northwestern University Press. She has been a Visiting Professor at Pitzer College, a contributor to the Los Angeles Times Sunday Opinion since 1999, and currently manages an archival program at the USC Libraries.

(Photo from Shavar at flickr.)