Jo Ann Robinson | Legendary Black Woman Unhidden

The fIfth episode of the Black Moon Podcast honors the life of Jo Ann Robinson. Without Jo Ann Robinson, we might have never known the names of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., and we, Black people that is, may still be sitting in the back of the bus. This episode is a little bit different in that I actually do not know how Jo Ann Robinson died. I know the magnificence of how she lived, and I know that she is often forgotten in the story of how we’ve always fought to get free. Jo Ann Robinson was a beacon to all freedom fighters who do their work in the background, join me in seeing her in her deserved place - in the light.

Topics touched on in include: Montgomery Bus Boycott, the south, the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King Jr. racism, racial abuse.

Referenced in this episode:

The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It

https://aaregistry.org/story/jo-ann-gibson-robinson-was-an-unsung-activist/

Original music by: Siddy Beats

Welcome to the fifth episode of the Black Moon Podcast, I’m your host Olka Baldeh and I’m so honored that you’re joining me today.

Before we dive into today’s episode, I want to offer my deep gratitude to everyone who supports this work financially, with affirmations, with advice, and all those who continue to remind me that my voice and perspective is needed. At the end of this episode I will name a few of the folks who have contributed to making this podcast possible.

The material covered in this podcast does speak on death and dying specifically as it relates to Black peoples, trauma, and other subjects that may be hard to hear. This podcast is aimed towards collective healing so I won’t say that it’s not suitable for everyone, I believe we all deserve to be free and well. But I will ask that you exercise discretion, particularly for anyone who may not consent to hearing these materials, children included.

In today’s episode I’m going to tell you about the life of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, a beacon to all freedom fighters who do their work in the background. Without Jo Ann Robinson, we might have never known the names of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., and we, Black people that is, may still be sitting in the back of the bus. This episode is a little bit different in that I actually do not know how Jo Ann Robinson died. I know the magnificence of how she lived, and I know that she is often forgotten in the story of how we’ve always fought to get free.

There is a quote attributed to Banksy that says “You die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time.” When I first discovered the life and work of Jo Ann Robinson, it felt like an urgent call, like she had almost died for that second time in our collective memory and like I needed to tell everyone I could about her. I desired immediately to complicate and reawaken a simplified history that stops at Rosa being tired and refusing to rise for that white man and Martin appearing out of nowhere to lead. I was upset that Jo Ann had been so thoroughly hidden from me, erased, almost, from the story of the civil rights movement.

Born April 17, 1912, in Culloden, Georgia, Jo Ann Robinson was the last of twelve children. Her parents, Owen Gibson and Dollie Webb Gibson, were both farmers who owned their own land. When Jo Ann was 6 years old, her father Owen died and her mother moved Jo Ann and her 11 siblings to Macon, Georgia. There, Jo Ann, intelligent and ambitious, became the valedictorian of her segregated all-Black school. She then became the first person in her family to graduate from college, earning a bachelor’s degree from Fort Valley State College in 1934.

After graduating, she became a public school teacher in Macon and eventually earned her masters in English at Atlanta University. She doesn’t mention it in her memoir, but several sources say that Jo Ann also went on to complete a year of doctoral study in English at Columbia University. Suffice it to say, she was a well educated woman. During that time Jo Ann met her first and only husband Wilbur Robinson. They conceived a child but unfortunately the baby died as an infant and her marriage did not survive that trauma. She left Georgia and moved to Texas where she taught at Mary Allen College for 1year. After that year she was offered a teaching job at Alabama State College in Montgomery, Alabama. Jo Ann Robinson accepted the offer and went ahead to meet her fate. Like all Black women daughters of the South, Jo Ann is one thing, remarkable and she is about to find out exactly how far that goes.

As Jo Ann Robinson settled in Montgomery as a professor of English, she joined several communities. First, the community of Alabama State College, a college town where Black folks cultivated philosophic depth and defiance against discrimination. Second, the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church where Martin Luther King Jr would later be a pastor. Third, the Women's Political Council or WPC. And lastly, the negros of Montgomery, Alabama who she was now inextricably bound with, weaved together by the creation of race, the capturing of people, and the attempt to second-class us.

In December 1949, Jo Ann Robinson had just finished up her first semester as a professor at Alabama State. When she tells this story even years later, the emotion of it is apparent. As she boarded the city bus, Jo Ann was lost in thought about her Christmas vacation and heading to family in Cleveland. She chose a seat and vaguely noticed that there were two other passengers on-board, both white. Jo Ann describes sitting down, closing her eyes, and feeling free. She then remembers coming-to in confusion. The bus was not moving and the driver was standing over her screaming “Get up from there!” He’d been admonishing her from his seat but she hadn't heard and now he was standing over her like he was going to hit her.

Jo Ann ran to the front of the bus and cowered, now even more frightened that she had run to the front and not the back where Black people supposedly belonged. Not understanding what was happening and fearing that he would strike her as he raged and frothed, she ran off the bus and remembers “I felt like a dog”. Jo Ann had accidentally sat in the bus section reserved for white people. Despite knowing that she’d really done nothing wrong, Jo Ann, feeling the shame and hurt of what had happened, cried all the way to Cleveland.

When Jo Ann Robinson returned to Montgomery Alabama in the new year of 1950, she sought out other women who had also experienced abuse on the busses. She began to go to the Women's Political Council meetings in earnest. Her friend and fellow English Professor Dr. Mary Fair Burks had started the WPC in 1946. Dr. Burks, or Frankie to her friends, has started the WPC to inspire Black women towards political action, and because the local league of women voters refused to integrate.

Dr. Mary Fair “Frankie” Burks was a “profound scholar. [She was] highly intelligent and fearless, and a native alabamian.” Looking at one of the few pictures I could find of her, she looks good humored, good humored and no nonsense. My friend Kristina says she looks like she smells like vanilla and a hot comb and she definitely does not like just anybody running through her kitchen. Dr. Burks is another woman who worked in the background who definitely deserves recognition and celebration.

In 1935, 10 years before starting the WPC, Frankie Burks had cussed out a white motorist after a minor traffic incident. Despite not being the perpetrator of the accident, it was she who was beaten by police and then arrested. Dr. Burks would later write that she created the Women’s Political Council “as an outgrowth of scars [she] suffered as a result of racism.” Frankie Burkes was undeniably awake to the fact that neither education nor affluence would shield her from the desire, callousness, or uncaring when white people wanted to humiliate her. In 1946, she’d called 50 black women - from church, her circle of friends, and her colleagues - she told them she wanted to start an organization. They had all been mistreated, they had all been harmed, and at the WPC’s first meeting, 40 women desiring to better themselves and their community met to form a foundational pillar of the civil rights movement. With Mary Fair Burks as president, the group decided to tackle Montgomery’s racial issues with a three-tiered approach

“...first, political action, including voter registration and interviewing candidate for office; second, protest about abuses on city buses and use of taxpayers' money to operate segregated parks; and third, education, which involved teaching young high school students about democracy and how it was intended to operate as well as teaching adults to read and write well enough to fulfill the literacy requirements for voting.”

“Their first course of action was to get everyone in the group registered to vote. The literacy tests had blocked many of the women from getting registered in the past; even several of the women who had Ph.Ds had failed the test, which was not about literacy at all, but filled with ever-changing minor details designed to block registration. It took multiple attempts, but all of the WPC finally got registered.”

In Montgomery, Alabama the first capital of the confederacy Black women organized to lay waste to segregation and degradation. WPC women were public school teachers, nurses, social workers, and other professional women. The council grew so rapidly that soon the first group was capped at a 100 members, then they started a second chapter, then a third each with a president, secretary, treasurer, and telephone coordinator. The presidents spoke regularly and during the boycott, the WPC formed one of the best communications systems in all of Alabama.

In 1950, Frankie Burks asked Jo Ann Robinson to take over leadership of the WPC, she stepped down as president, saying that “the position was demanding and she’d been in office longer than intended.” Jo Ann Robinson, now president of the Women’s Political Council went to work immediately on the abuse she and so many others had experienced on Montgomery city busses.

That year Jo Ann and other members of the WPC reached out to Montgomery's Mayor and his staff. In her memoir Jo Ann reflects how she found the mayor to be pleasant, likeable, and sincere. She also says that after hearing complaints from black patrons about the bus drivers, he would tell them that they had to conform to segregation laws and that if they weren’t satisfied, they could drive their own cars. I often found this curious when reading her words. Jo Ann Robinson gives exceeding grace to the people who prop up white supremacy. I'm not saying that in a shady way either. Jo Ann’s genuine grace towards people who would see in chains and probably accept it as the law of the land is…. Intriguing, moving, triggering. She tells us that #notalldrivers were rude and abusive. She describes some would wait for Black passengers to get on properly, how others were kindly disposed, and how it was only some that took delight in brutality and humiliating Black customers. She tells us how when she was arrested for participating in the boycott, she in the moment forgave and prayed for the officer who arrested her and had verbally abused her for wanting to wait to help the 80 yr old woman (Ms Irene West) who had been arrested with her. She says how she felt pity that his racial hatred was eating him up and she prayed for him to find peace. Then she apologized for giving him a hard time and wished him a good day so sincerely that he assuaged. And it’s not just some naive or stockholm syndrome kill them with kindness no, Jo Ann Robinson truly believed in the power of prayer and understanding and I can not sit here and say she was wrong, when she was so damn effective.

Anyway...She says the mayor amicable and describes their several years of working together on issues affecting Black Americans as friendly. That is, until the fight for integration on the busses began. By 1953, the WPC had collected hundreds of testimonies of abuse on the city buses. Their work in the community training high school seniors and getting adults to become qualified voters had earned them popularity and trust in Black Montgomery. People began to come to the wpc for advice around abuse experienced in all walks of life, especially the busses.

In May 1954, that's a year and a half before Rosa Parks would sit on that bus by the way, Jo Ann Robinson wrote a letter to the mayor of Montgomery once again detailing the abuse happening on city busses, insisting on action to improve conditions, and threatening a boycott. The demands outlined in that letter were as follows:

That drivers should be courteous of all passengers equally, including Black riders.
Change the bus company's practice of only stopping at every other block in Black neighborhoods, while they stopped at every block in white neighborhoods.
Stop the practice of having to give up one's seat after already being seated.
Stop the practice of having Blacks stand over empty seats simply because they were designated as white seats.
Stop the practice of forcing Black people to pay up front, get off the bus then enter through the back door.

In response, the city agreed to make busses stop at every block in Black areas but denied the rest of the demands, saying that the bus company was beholden to the segregation laws in Alabama and that they could not and would not intervene.

In all of Jo Ann’s memoir she gives credit to other people. While many recount Jo Ann being shy about telling her story, it is evident in HER telling her shyness is partly because she believes that the story of the movement belongs to many more people than just her. She recounts that the boycott was not a 1 man show but a show of 52k montgomeryans and all of Black America. I imagine them all alive and the tapestry of those who got us free becomes so much more vibrant. In one instance, Jo Ann exhalts the story of Mr. Rufus Lewis, an activist, mentor, and community elder who was not satisfied with the so-called progress even after the boycott was won. Even after integration of busses he was unhappy that there were still so many unregistered black voters. Rufus Lewis believed and evangelized to every person that he met that “a voteless people is a hopeless people.” Mr Rufus Lewis believed if all Black people who could vote, did vote, that they would never have the segregationist decision makers they had in power. He would tell the young men coming of age that they were not full men until they had their voter registration card.

Jo Ann Robinson knew that equal access to voting was a long way off and she asked herself what to do to stop the abuse once and for all. Yes, She worried about people getting hurt but she still felt the shame of her own experience on the bus. She was inundated by anger knowing that 6 yrs had gone by and nothing had changed for black folks saying “Black Americans were still being treated like animals.” In September 1955 she prayed and asked herself out loud “how long will this go on?” She asked out and from all corners of the room she heard “as long as black Americans will allow it” and then heard louder still “boycott boycott boycott!”

As the complaints coming to the WPC multiplied, Jo Ann Robinson and the women of the Montgomery Women’s Political Council prepared to stage a bus boycott when time was right. They were waiting for one of them raggedy ass bus drivers to find the right one — someone who would agree to test the segregation laws in court, and who was "above reproach.” Here, Jo Ann lets us in on a little secret, the WPC knew they were working for integration even though they never said it. They hid their hand knowing that the frame for “better seating” was really, ultimately, a demand for dignity and equal treatment. Jo Ann Robinson was PRESCIENT, she either saw the future or just had big faith. Either way, that lady changed the world.

Before Jo Ann Robinson:

Bus drivers would cuss out, name call, and use other obscene language when addressing Black patrons
Bus drivers would require black passengers to pay at the front of the bus, get off the bus then walk to the back door to get back on. While Black people followed this asinine protocol sometimes the driver would drive off, stealing their bus fare and leaving them. Sometimes, especially when Black people were blocking the aisle because they were forced to stand over empty seats reserved for white people, sometimes the driver could miss seeing a person and close the door on them as when they were part of the way in. Stories of Black people being dragged along concrete before someone alerts the driver and they stop.
Drivers would pass by Black people when it was raining - said they were wet and smelly,
They would refuse to make change, refuse transfers, throw coins at people, and put people off the bus if they didn't have exact change.
They would abuse Black elders, old black men and women would be forced to get up for white school children.
Black people would be jammed in the aisles holding huge packages, babies, heartbreaks and sorrows and still made to stand over empty seats reserved for the shadows of white people.
And when sheer exhaustion or hunger, or just “I dont give a fuck” overcame them and they sat, they would be attacked with verbal, physical, and carceral violence.

Before Rosa Parks sat on that bus, Jo Ann Robinson was organizing to stop this abuse. She was there in March 1955, again before Rosa Parks, when Claudette Colvin, a 15 yr old Black child, was abused and arrested on a city bus for refusing to give up her seat.

Claudette was a smart, pretty, and deeply religious girl. She’d sat two seats from the back of the bus before it had gotten full. Eventually when no more seats were available, a few white people had to stand. The horror! The driver stopped the bus and demanded that Claudette get up out of the seat that was actually reserved for Black people. When she argued that she was entitled to her seat because there was an empty one next to her that a black person had just vacated, the enraged driver drove to town and got police to drag and push Claudette off the bus, handcuff her, and take her to jail. For daring to say that a white person could sit next to her, the high schooler was charged with misconduct, resisting arrest, and breaking segregation laws.

When Claudette was arrested, the WPC and the new Montgomery Improvement Association (the MIA) created by Mr Rufus Lewis, mr. ED Nixon, and Martin Luther King Jr. met with the police, the bus company manager, the mayor, and Montgomery's commissioners. They gave a presentation of written and signed reports of incidents on busses and asked that Claudette be exonerated of the charges and reiterated their previous demands. It was agreed upon by all parties that Claudette Colvin would be allowed to give her side of her story at a hearing and that if it was found that her story had merit, her record would be cleared. The commissioners also promised an immediate investigation and the Mayor requested drivers be more courteous to Black patrons.

After that incident, the white bus drivers acted right for a few days before devolving worse than ever. Stories poured in - one bus driver had seen a Black mama gingerly place her two babies on a seat reserved for white people, he purposely braked hard, lurching the bus so babies went flying out of the seats. Another driver beat up a mentally ill black man and said he’d provoked him, another told a bus full of Black riders that if it wasn’t for the two white passengers onboard he would wreck the bus and kill all of them. As these stories rolled in, Claudette Colvin’s hearing with the city was cancelled and she was instead tried and found guilty under state law for refusing to give up her seat. While people from all over the country did send encouragement and money to help pay her legal fees, she was still dismayed at being labeled a “law violator”.

Conditions on the bus got so bad that of their own accord many black ppl just started walking everywhere. As a result, the bus company raised fares citing the lower passengership. The WPC protested the fare hike and especially objected that higher fare came with no change to the quality of service and the inhumane abuses.

Then came the fateful day. On Thursday, Dec. 1, 1955, Rosa Parks boarded a city bus and sat in the first row that Black people were allowed to occupy. After a while, the front rows filled with white people and one white man was left standing. According to law, Blacks and whites could not sit in the same row, so the bus driver asked all the Black people seated in her row to move so the white man could sit there alone. Three of the Black folks moved, but Rosa Parks refused and was arrested.

Jo Ann Robinson knew that Rosa Parks was the right person to start their boycott. She lowkey hilariously described Rosa parks as a “cultured mulatto woman”. Rosa was a pillar of the Black community and had a strong network from her church and civil rights activities. That’s right -- Rosa Parks was also not a meek seamstress as popular history portrays her. She had long been an activist, serving as the local NAACP chapter secretary and director of the youth group. Refusing to give up her seat wasn’t even her first act of civil disobedience on a bus. She had been ejected from the bus a year earlier by that same driver for refusing to pay her fare at the front of the bus and then exit and enter at the back.

When Black Attorney and minister Fred Gray called to tell Jo Ann that Rosa Parks had been arrested, she knew it was time. The night Rosa was arrested, Professor Jo Ann Robinson met with her colleague John Cannon, the chairman of the business dept at Alabama state. John Cannon had also suffered embarrassment on the city busses AND had access to the college’s mimeograph, which is an old school copier. Jo Ann Robinson, John Cannon, and two Alabama State seniors stayed up all night - they wrote a notice announcing a 1-day boycott set for the Monday Rosa Parks was due to be in court. They got 3 messages on each page and then copied, cut, and bundled 52,500 leaflets. By 4am, finally finished with the notices, Robinson and crew mapped out a distribution route, packed the flyers in cars in sequence, and then she went to her 8am class. After teaching her class, Robinson and a few students helped drop off leaflets at schools, churches, civic groups, beauty parlors, barber shops, and workplaces. Black teachers told students to take the leaflets home to parents, Black ministers used their Sunday sermons to spread the word, and the call to boycott was spread throughout Black Montgomery.

The notices read:

This is for Monday, December 5, 1955

Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown into jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down. It is the second time since the Claudette Colbert (sic) case that a Negro woman has been arrested for the same thing This has to be stopped.

Negroes have rights too, for if Negroes did not ride the buses, they could not operate. Three fourths of the riders are Negroes, yet we are arrested, or have to stand over empty seats. 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.

This woman 's case will come up on Monday. We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial. Don 't ride the buses to work, to town, to school, or anywhere on Monday. You can afford to stay out of school for one day if you have no other way to go except by bus. You can also afford to stay out of town for one day. If you work, take a cab, or walk. But please, children and grown-ups, don't ride the bus at all on Monday. Please stay off of all buses Monday.

No one knew where the noticies came from nor did they care. Most acted casually and passed them along. However, one domestic worker gave the leaflet to her boss, a white lady who subsequently alerted the newspaper, bus company, and the chief of police. When the media got a hold of the notice, the Montgomery Advertiser, published a front-page article on the planned action. It was announced by the Alabama journal, and tv and radio stations far and wide reported that the negros were organizing.

Jo Ann’s grace comes through even in the case of the Black people who betrayed their race to give white people a warning. She wondered if it was divine intervention that made the Black domestic worker carry the notice to the attention of the authorities and the media. Yes, the widespread news did mean whites were now on notice, but it also meant that all the southern blacks, even in the far flung corners, now all knew the plan, and were all on the spot.

That day after distributing the notices, Jo Ann Robinson returned to campus to teach her 2pm class only to discover that another teacher had taken over her class and she was being summoned to the office of the president. Another tattletale had carried one of the notices to the Alabama State President Dr. Trinholm. At first Dr. Trinholm was angry that Jo Ann had used university resources to initiate the boycott. She recounts feeling fear that he might fire her but silently prayed and felt a peace come over her. She explained to Dr. Trinholm assuaged when she explained that they were organizing to stop the humiliation of black folks and were choosing to fight with reason not violence. While Jo Ann describes Trinholm as supportive, saying that he eventually would come to contribute to fundraisers for the boycott as well as give her advice and guidance, he insisted to her that the school not be involved. Due to this directive, Jo Ann would reimburse the Alabama State for the nearly 20,000 sheets of paper she had used to create the boycott leaflets.

Rosa Parks had been arrested on a Thursday. By the next morning Jo Ann Robinson had successfully orchestrated the call to boycott, and by that Friday night the WPC and MIA met to set up a transportation committee. The committee, headed by Alfonso Campbell and mr. Voter registration Rufus Lewis, mapped out routes, organized taxis, and worked all night to make sure that every Black person in the city could access free transportation. About the legendary taxi service, Jo Ann would say "the pickup service was so effectively planned that many writers described it as comparable in precision to a military operation."

At first, city taxis worked with Black people, agreeing to charge riders only a dime per ride and billing the MIA for the rest of the fare. From donations, the MIA could pay fares and pay for gas for the few Blacks who owned private cars and could give rides. However, being against the boycott, the city intervened and forced taxi drivers to collect regular fees from every rider. Out of necessity, the MIA transportation system grew to 325 private cars. Dispatch stations were designated places where workers could congregate from 5am-10am and catch a free car to work every 10 minutes. Pick up stations started from 1pm and went til 8 at night, when maids and domestic workers typically got off work. The Montgomery carpool system of 1955 was the best planned mass transportation system in the united states and White people in Montgomery got big mad. But I’ll tell you about a whole lot of that in just a second.

Finally Monday came. The day of Rosa Parks’ court appearance and the first day of the Montgomery bus boycott looked like rain. The papers had reported that negro goon squads were planning to imimidate and stop other black people from riding the bus. Thus, the chief of police sent two cops on motorcycles to follow each bus through town. He stated that he was committed to protecting any Black person who chose to ride the bus. Most Black folks scoffed at the reporting of negro goon squads and the few indoctrinated Black folks who might have ridden the bus saw the police and decided instead to take a taxi. That day 75-85% of riders, mostly Black and a few white supporters, stayed off the busses.

That night a meeting was called. It was decided that the MIA, the Montgomery Improvement Association was to oversee the boycott and a reluctant pastor named Dr. Martin Luther King Jr was elected to be their president and spokesperson. After that first day of boycott, at their first of many Monday night meetings, the people were asked if they should end the boycott. Every single person said NO. They would no longer back down from their claim to dignity.

Once it was decided that the boycott would continue, Dr. King and other Black leaders, including Jo Ann Robinson, met with bus company officials and local political leaders to once again make their demands. Back and forth they went. Black leaders would propose that white bus drivers be courteous to all riders and the whites would agree. They wouldn’t concede that drivers were abusing people and insisted that it was Black people starting the fights but yes they could agree to kindness and courtesy because everyone needed to be nicer to one another. This of course being orated by a pro-segregation White Minister who was a part of the white leadership team. Then Black leaders would ask that the company please hire Black drivers and they would say absolutely not and further “black people had no authority to tell the bus company who to hire.” As the meetings dragged on and stalled month after month, White leaders continued to reject any proposals on seating, citing segregation laws, and at one point attempted to include the founder of Montgomery white citizens council on their leadership team. The White Citizens Council or WCC was a loud and proud group dedicated to keeping segregation by economically, physically and otherwise abusing Black people. Eventually it became clear that white leadership did not want a solution and the meetings were just a front for publicity. Finally, the MIA voted to let the courts duke it out. They employed lawyers and filed a federal lawsuit against Montgomery's segregation laws.

The boycott ushered in a whole new energy. From all corners of Montgomery Black people expressed sentiments like “You wanted your busses, have your busses,” and “Who will you kick now.” One 72 yr old man who’d ridden the bus for 40 years sat on his porch and laughed and laughed as the city busses drove by. Bus drivers complained that little colored children were ridiculing them, gathering on corners and sticking out tongues, sometimes throwing rocks before they ran away full speed.

Despite the Christmas shopping season, boycotters had also decided not to buy from any downtown businesses that didn't support the boycott. Many also decided to shop only with other Black businesses. Others still bought only essentials and decided to spend the season in prayer and meditation. People forgoed gifts, kids made ragdolls or played with old taped up balls, and everyone made do with what they had. It was reported that that christmas season, Montgomery stores took in $42 million less than normal. Hmph.

On the 6th day of the boycott the bus company began cutting lines going to predominantly black neighborhoods, then they discontinued the busses altogether from dec 22nd til the new year. When 1956 finally came, that bus company was forced lay off 39 drivers, cut even more bus routes, and started renting out some of the dozens of unused busses to private companies. Many Whites who relied on busses also couldn't get downtown to buy things. Merchants began to feel the squeeze, and stores started closing down and going bankrupt. Shame.

White people at first ignored the boycott, then many were intrigued, handfuls were supportive and sent money, some even wrote letters & newspaper op-eds asking how it made any sense that Black people could make your food and watch your kids but sitting next to them would somehow dirty u up? Good questions. And of course others still seethed and raged at the audacity of Black people.

All the while, Black Montgomeryans deepened in their shared mission. Black community activists raised money for car repairs, churches collected to buy fuel from black owned filling stations, and people donated cars new and old. At their weekly meetings, organizers held “Monday night contests,” where people would sell sweet potato pies, in a competition to raise money. Every Monday night the finance committee gave a report about the money coming in and how it was being used. Later when white agitators tried to seed stories of MIA officials stealing money, no one believed them because they’d been consistently transparent and because they were trusted.

Black people all over Montgomery had committed to one another deeper than ever before. Some folks vowed never to ride the busses again even after desegregation, petty arguments disappeared, and the WPC found something curious - a link between that humiliation happening on city busses and intra-communal violence. Jo Ann and the women of the WPC found that domestic violence in Black homes went down significantly during the boycott. She asks us to imagine being humiliated on a regular basis and the impact of these attacks on the human nervous system even days, weeks, and years later. Grown men thrown off busses would walk miles home, seething from embarrassment or injury and pick fights with their wives. They would drink more, beat their kids - anything to release the anger. Then the kids beat other kids trying to release their anger. Or they stole, played hooky. The bus boycott allowed people to release all that bitter, pent up emotion. They could now respond directly to those causing them harm and Black relationships were better off for it.

And of course, like I mentioned before, there was no way that White Montgomeryians in 1955 were going to let Black people just be joyful, dignified, demanding, and unburdened without a violent response.

White people and the state were livid. The official responses looked like: the city colluding with the newspaper to fake an announcement that the boycott was over, the mayor gave press conferences urging white people not to give rides to Black people, and asking that white folks not give their Black domestic workers taxi money because it was “blackmail fare”, the police started stalking, harassing, fining and arresting black riders and MIA drivers for trumped up charges, the city refused to let Black organizers start their own transportation franchise, and the police began alleging that Black people were shooting at busses. The WPC decided to investigate the reports of shootings for themselves and discovered that the apartment complex which the first shot was supposed to have come from was occupied by all white people and where the second shot was alleged to have come from was a shack where two old black women lived with no radio, no newspapers, no tv, no gun, and no knowledge of the boycott. Suffice it to say, Blacks believed that the reports of violence were staged to make them look bad. Like the police, the papers were also not sympathetic - they published editorials about how Black people were ungrateful because whites had supplied us with education and civilization, and they ran claims that the boycott was a sociological experiment being financed by political radicals jealous of the south’s peaceful way of life.

And while the state was doing every bit of funny business it could think of, thousands of white men and women swelled into the ranks of the White Citizens Council. Even the chief of police joined the white citizens council and said that “he had no negro cudstomers.”

The White Citizens Council sent out notices asking all white people to join them to keep segregation in place. White people began accosting Black folks in cars and on the street. White teenagers drove through black neighborhoods squirting walking Black people first with water and then with urine. They threw eggs, potatoes, apples, and rocks at peoples windows and their bodies, they used the telephone as a weapon, calling with threats all hours of the night so people couldn't sleep, they even shit on peoples porches. One Reverend who was active in the boycott had prowlers shit on his front door, break his windows, and threatened his 8month pregnant wife and two children. White people displayed confederate flags stickers on cars and coat lapels, wherever they could make their hatred loud and visible. The policemen were the worst of all - they burned crosses on Black lawns, threw paint on Black homes, and to Jo Ann herself, a squad car rolled up to her home, two officers got out and poured acid on the hood of her car. When her neighbors, who’d seen this happen, wrote down the squad car number and tried to report it, police told them to go home and keep their mouths shut if they wanted to live. In her book Jo Ann remembers that she was never afraid - she was angry. When an officer threw a stone through her front window she was mad about having to pay the bill. When the acid attack happened to her car she said that she kept that car until 1969 because she thought it was beautiful. Other boycott leaders were also targeted, the white backlash got so bad that on the night of the court filing, Ed Nixon’s house was bombed. Before that, a white man was seen dropping off a bomb on Dr. King’s front porch. The blast was so strong it tore apart the front of his house but thankfully didn't injure his wife, children, and another church member who was visiting. When Dr. King’s home was bombed 300-500 Black people went to his house. They went and stood there and stared at the cops in silence. They stayed so long that the cops got scared and soon the mayor and one of montgomery’s commissioners came and asked the crowd disperse. One person responded “we will when you tell us which one of you did it.” Despite promises from the mayor to catch the perpetrators, no one was ever caught for the crime. Eventually, Alabama's governor had to order state police to watch the homes of boycott leaders in order to stop the ongoing violence.

I want to reiterate this. Because Black people dared to have the audacity to walk rather than take busses where they faced constant abuse, white people shit on their porches and squirted Black children with piss. As I finish this episode it turns out that the Trump mob that just desecrated the United States capitol also left piss and shit all over the halls of congress. Par the course. The chickens coming home to roost. Like I said in a previous episode, if they do it to black people they are eventually going to do it to you. Anyway...

For her part Jo Ann tried to stay out of the limelight. She chose not to accept an official MIA position but instead served on the executive board, volunteered for the carpool system, and wrote and edited the MIA newsletter. Despite this she was still arrested for her role in the boycott. City officials convened a grand jury on the basis of Montgomery’s anti-boycott laws. The grand jury judged that the boycott was illegal and 115 boycott leaders were ordered to be arrested. The grand jury, anticipating a Black backlash that of course never came, also recommended that the city temporarily ban the sale of knives, guns, and ammunition. Instead of backlash, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. provided police with a full list of all the boycott leaders and contacted them all to turn themselves in. In that orderly and dignified way, 115 boycott leaders and their lawyers went to the police station to be fingerprinted, photographed, and immediately bonded out. Of all those charged, MLK would be the only one to go to court and to be found guilty.

While the city of Montgomery threw everything it could at the boycott, Attorney and Pastor Fred Grey helped 5 Black women file a lawsuit that called in the Mayor, Commissioners, the Police Chief, and the bus company. The suit asked for the court to order injunctions to stop the defendants from forcing Black people to use the city busses via threat, violence, intimidation, or harassment AND to declare city segregation code of laws unconstitutional, null and void.

After the filing, the intimidation did stop for a little while but of course not for long. Soon, one of the plaintiffs, Ms. Jeanetta Reese had been harassed and threatened so bad that she withdrew from the case saying that she had signed paperwork without knowing what it was about. On that basis, another grand jury was convened against the MIA Attorney Fred Grey and he was charged for representing clients without authority. Something that , if found guilty, he could have been disbarred for. This attempt didn’t go too far and on May 11 two out of three local judges ruled in favor of the boycotters, deeming Montgomery’s segregation laws to be unconstitutional. For that decision, the two judges also got hate mail and threats and city officials declared that they would appeal to the supreme court.

On Dec. 20, 1956, 381 days after the start of the boycott, US Marshals served city officials with the Supreme Court ruling that the segregated bus system was unconstitutional. The next day, Jo Ann Robinson, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and Rev Abernathy rode a Montgomery City bus sitting in the whites only section. Jo Ann Robinson remembers that when she rode that first integrated bus and posed for the cameras, she noticed that one of the drivers was the one who’d had her arrested. He said nothing and neither did she.

Jo Ann Robinson believed in meekness, humility, and service. She was profoundly kind, friendly, and believed that love was redemptive. At the end of the boycott she got quiet and still and prayerful rather than rejoicing in public. In fact, I found it interesting that she remembers no one at all rejoicing at the end of the boycott - too many people had suffered, white violence was once again on the rise to discourage patronage of integrated busses, and many Black people chose to pray and feel silent pity for white people. In his memoir of the boycott, Stride Toward Freedom, Dr. King said about Jo Ann, "She, perhaps more than any other person, was active on every level of the protest."

After the boycott, Jo Ann and other ASC professors were investigated by a special state committee. State evaluators started attending her classes and observed instructors, in what many considered to be an act of retribution for their part in the Black liberation struggle. In 1960, when Alabama State students staged a sit-in at a segregated snack bar downtown, Jo Ann resigned having done her part. She accepted a position at Grambling College in Louisiana and after a year in Grambling, she moved to Los Angeles, where she taught English until her retirement in 1976.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott was the first big event of the civil rights movement and Jo Ann Robinson took great pride in it. In her book, she wrote: “The boycott was the most beautiful memory that all of us who participated will carry to our final resting place.” She remained active in community service until her death on August 29, 1992.

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The Black Moon Podcast

Jo Ann Robinson | Legendary Black Woman Unhidden

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