On May 21, 1954, Jo Ann Robinson wrote to Montgomery Mayor W. A. Gayle on behalf of the Women’s Political Council. Professor Robinson, a native of Cleveland, Ohio, taught at Alabama State, and was president of the WPC, one of Montgomery’s largest and most active civil rights organizations.
After thanking the mayor for listening to the WPC and its concerns about Montgomery’s buses, and reviewing the WPC’s requests for changes in the treatment of Negroes by the bus company and its drivers, and restating both the importance of Negro riders for the bus system and the ongoing anger at the city’s refusal to adopt policies similar to other Southern cities, Professor Robinson wrote:
“There has been talk from twenty-five or more local organizations of planning a city-wide boycott of busses.”
Or put another way, over 18 months before Rosa Parks’ arrest on December 1, 1955, over two dozen organizations within Montgomery’s African-American community had already talked about and begun imagining what it would require of themselves to organize and sustain a bus boycott.
When Claudette Colvin was arrested on March 2, 1955 for refusing to give up her seat on the bus, Mrs. Parks was part of a delegation—along with Professor Robinson, Mr. E. D. Nixon, Rev. King and others—who met with city officials to try to negotiate changes in the bus company’s policies.
Mrs. Parks notes that “her name was familiar to me, and it turned out that Claudette Colvin was the great-granddaughter of Mr. Gus Vaughn, the unmixed black man with all the children back in Pine Level who refused to work for the white man. His great-granddaughter must have inherited his sense of pride. I took a particular interest in the girl and her case.”
Mrs. Parks chose not to be part of a later delegation that delivered a petition about bus company policies to city officials. “I had decided that I would not go anywhere with a piece of paper in my hand asking white folks for any favors.”
Mrs. Parks was also part of talks with Miss Colvin, Mr. Nixon and Professor Robinson about taking Colvin’s case to the federal courts—talks that ended when Nixon found out that the unmarried Colvin was pregnant.
There were other bus “incidents” throughout 1955. By the afternoon of December 1, 1955, all the ingredients necessary for an organized assault—not against segregation, but for an end to the bus company’s existing hiring and seating policies—by the African-American community were in place in Montgomery. All that was needed was, as Mrs. Parks wrote, “the right plaintiff and a strong case”.
She added, “The best plaintiff would be a woman, because a woman would get more sympathy than a man. And the woman would have to be above reproach, have a good reputation, and have done nothing wrong but refuse to give up her seat.”