BURKS, MARY FAIR (d. 1991)

Mary Fair Burks, an English professor and scholar of African-American literature, was the founder and first president of the Women's Political Council, the grass-roots organization that initiated and helped lead the year-long Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott (1955-56).

As an adolescent growing up in Montgomery during the 1930s, she defied the Jim Crow system by insisting on using white-only elevators, rest rooms, and other facilities in what she later called "my own private guerrilla warfare" (Burks 1990). At eighteen she earned her B.A. in English literature at Alabama State College in Montgomery. A year later, after receiving an M.A. in the same field from the University of Michigan, she returned to Montgomery to teach English at the Alabama State Laboratory High School and then taught at the college. She married the high school principal, a former professor of hers. In the late 1940s Burks became head of the Alabama State College English Department. She later earned her doctorate in education at Columbia University.

In 1949, Burks created the Women's Political Council, an organization of Black professional women, to address racial problems in Montgomery. The council was "the outgrowth of scars I suffered as a result of racism," she recalled, the immediate impetus having been a personal experience of racist treatment by city police (Burks 1990). Although it focused initially on voter registration and citizenship education programs, in the early 1950s the council began to lobby city officials about the mistreatment of Black passengers on city buses. In December 1955, after the arrest of Rosa Parks, the council launched the bus boycott that it had long discussed. Burks, Jo Ann Robinson, and other council leaders played a crucial role in sustain ng the boycott until segregated seating was abolished by Federal Court decisions a year later.

In 1960, Burks resigned from Alabama State College after several professors were fired for civil rights activity. She accepted a position at the University of Maryland, Eastern Shore, where she taught literature until her retirement in 1986. Her wide-ranging literary scholarship included articles on contemporary Black writers such as Toni Morrison. She won teaching awards and numerous professional honors and fellowships, and she did postgraduate study at Harvard University, Oxford University, the Sorbonne, and other leading universities. A longtime resident of Salisbury, Maryland, she continued her civic activism in such areas as coordinating hospital volunteers, serving on the Maryland Arts Council, and founding two African-American historical societies.

Burks died on July 21, 1991. Her only child, Nathaniel W. Burks, is a physician in San Diego, California.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Burks, Mary Fair. "Trailblazers: Women in the Montgomery Bus Boycott," in Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941-1965, ed. Vicki L. Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara Woods (1990); Daily Times, Obituary (July 25, 1991).

STEWART BURNS

SOURCE

Black Women in America. An Historical Encyclopedia, ed. Darlene Clark Hine (New York: Carlson Publishing Inc., 1993), p. 196.