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ROBINSON, JO ANN GIBSON (1912-)
As president in the early 1950s of the Women's Political
Council (WPC) of Montgomery, Alabama, Jo Ann Robinson was
one of several crucial initiators of the Montgomery Bus
Boycott of 1955-56. Robinson was an influential and leading
figure both during the two years of Black civic activism
leading up to the boycott and as a major player in the significant
events that transformed the arrest of Rosa Parks into a
communitywide protest movement.
Jo Ann Gibson was born near Culloden, Georgia, on April
17, 1912, the youngest of twelve children. Educated in the
segregated public schools of Macon and then at Fort Valley
State College, she became a public school teacher in Macon,
where she was briefly married to Wilbur Robinson. After
their one child died in infancy, Robinson left Macon after
five years of teaching and went to Atlanta, where she earned
an M.A. in English at Atlanta University. In the fall of
1949, after teaching one year at Mary Allen College in Crockett,
Texas, Robinson accepted a position at Alabama State College.
She was a professor of English at Alabama State throughout
the boycott.
In Montgomery she joined both the Dexter Avenue Baptist
Church and the WPC, which had been founded three years earlier
by another Alabama State English professor, Mary Fair Burks.
At Christmastime in 1949, Robinson endured a deeply humiliating
experience at the hands of an abusive and racist Montgomery
City Lines bus driver, and she resolved then and there that
the WPC would target racial seating practices on Montgomery
buses. Many other Black citizens had
had similar experiences, and for the next several years
the WPC repeatedly asked city authorities to improve racial
seating practices and address the conduct of abusive bus
drivers. In May 1954, more than eighteen months before the
arrest of Rosa Parks but just several days after news of
the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education
decision began to sweep the country, Robinson wrote to Montgomery's
mayor as WPC president, gently threatening a Black boycott
of city buses if abuses were not curtailed.
Following Rosa Parks's arrest in December 1955, Robinson
played a central role in beginning the protest by immediately
producing the leaflets that spread word of the hoped-for
boycott among the Black citizens of Montgomery. She became
one of the most active board members of the Montgomery Improvement
Association, the new Black community group created to lead
the boycott, but she remained out of the limelight in order
to protect her teaching position at Alabama State as well
as those of her colleagues. In 1960, Robinson left Alabama
State (and Montgomery), as did other activist faculty members.
After teaching one year at Grambling College in Grambling,
Louisiana, Robinson moved to Los Angeles, where she taught
English in the public schools until her retirement in 1976
and where she was active in a number of women's community
groups. Robinson's health suffered a serious decline just
as her memoir, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women
Who Started It, was published in 1987. She was honored
by a 1989 publication prize given by the Southern Association
for Women Historians, but was unable to accept the award
in person.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Burks, Mary Fair. "Trailblazers: Women in the Montgomery
Bus Boycott." In Women in the Civil Rights Movement,
ed. Vicki L. Crawford et al. (1990); Garrow, David J., ed.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started
It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson (1987), and
The Walking City (1989).
DAVID J. GARROW
SOURCE
Black Women in America. An Historical Encyclopedia,
ed. Darlene Clark Hine (New York: Carlson Publishing Inc.,
1993), pp. 988-989.
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