“We Were Prepared”

Background: Jo Ann Robinson, president of the Women’s Political Council (WPC) and an English teacher at the all-Black Alabama State College, describes what her organization did to help organize the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott. The WPC, an organization of Black working-class and middle-class women formed in 1946, had vigorously protested Montgomery’s segregated bus system for many years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus.

Fred Gray told me Rosa Parks was arrested. Her case would be on Monday. He said to me, “Jo Ann, if you have ever planned to do anything with the council, now is your time.” I called all the officers of the three chapters, I called as many of the men who had supported us as I could reach, and I told them that Rosa Parks had been arrested and she would be tried. They said, “You have the plans, put them into operation.” We had worked for at least three years getting that thing organized.

The Women’s Political Council had begun in 1946, after just dozens of black people had been arrested on the buses for segregation purposes. By 1955, we had members in every elementary, junior high, and senior high school, and in federal, state, and local jobs. Wherever there were more than ten blacks employed, we had a member there. We were prepared to the point that we knew that in a matter of hours, we could corral the whole city.

I didn’t go to bed that night. I cut stencils and took them to the college. . . . We ran off thirty-five thousand copies. After I had talked with every WPC member in the elementary, junior high, and senior high schools to have somebody on the campus during the day so I could deliver them, I took them to school with me in my car.

Monday morning, December the fifth, 1955, I shall never forget because many of us had not gone to bed that night. It was the day of the boycott. We had been up waiting for the first buses to pass to see if any riders were on them. It was a cold morning, cloudy, there was a threat of rain, and we were afraid that if it rained the people would get on the bus. But as the buses began to roll, and there were one or two on some of them, none on some of them, then we began to realize that the people were cooperating and that they were going to stay off the bus that first day.

Source: Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer, with Sarah Flynn, Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement (1990).