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Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, Activist born

Jo Ann Robinson

Jo Ann Gibson Robinson was born on this date in 1912. She was a Black civil rights activist and educator.

From near Culloden, Georgia, she was the youngest of twelve children. Educated in the segregated public schools of Macon and then at Fort Valley State College, Gibson became a public school teacher in Macon, where she was briefly married to Wilbur Robinson. Their one child died in infancy. After five years of teaching, she left Macon 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 bus boycott. In Montgomery, she joined the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and the Woman’s Political Council (WPC), founded three years earlier by another Alabama State English professor, Mary Fair Burks.  Near the end of 1949, Robinson (while boarding a public bus) was humiliated by an abusive and racist Montgomery City Lines bus driver. She set out to use the WPC to target racial seating practices on Montgomery buses.

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 the start of the protest by producing the leaflets that spread the word of the boycott among the Black citizens of Montgomery.

She became one of the most active board members of the Montgomery Improvement Association. Still, she remained out of the limelight to protect her teaching position at Alabama State and her colleagues.  In 1960, Robinson left Alabama State (and Montgomery), as did other activist faculty members.  After teaching one year at Grambling College, Robinson moved to Los Angeles, where she taught English in public schools until her retirement in 1976 and was active in several women's community groups.  Robinson's health suffered a severe decline just as her memoir, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, was published in 1987.

She was honored with the 1989 Southern Association for Women Historians publication prize.  Jo Ann Gibson Robinson died in 1992.

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