Jo Ann Robinson

Jo Ann Gibson Robinson
Booking photograph of Robinson
Born	(1912-04-17)April 17, 1912 near Culloden, Georgia,
Died	August 29, 1992(1992-08-29) (aged 80) Los Angeles, California
Alma mater	Atlanta University (M.A.)
Known for	Montgomery bus boycott
Home town	Pennsylvania

Jo Ann Gibson Robinson (April 17, 1912 – August 29, 1992) was an activist during the Civil Rights Movement and educator in Montgomery, Alabama.

Born Jo Ann Gibson, near Culloden, Georgia on April 17, 1912, she was the youngest of twelve children. Her parents were Owen Boston and Dollie Webb Gibson who had owned a farm. She attended Fort Valley State College and then became a public school teacher in Macon, where she was married to Wilbur Robinson for a short time. Five years later, she went to Atlanta, where she earned an M.A. in English at Atlanta University. After teaching in Texas she then accepted a position at Alabama State College in Montgomery. It was there she joined the Women's Political Council, which Mary Fair Burks had founded three years earlier. In part the WPC was an organization dedicated to increasing voter registration in the African American community. In 1949, Robinson was verbally attacked by a bus driver for sitting in the front "Whites only" section of the bus. Her response to the incident was to attempt to start a protest boycott. But, when she approached her fellow members of the Women’s Political Council with her story and proposal, she was told that it was “a fact of life in Montgomery.” In late 1950, she succeeded Burks as president of the WPC and helped focus the group's efforts on bus abuses. Robinson was an outspoken critic of the treatment of African-Americans on public transportation. She was also active in the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

The Women's Political Council had made complaints about the bus seating to the Montgomery City Commission and about abusive drivers, and achieved some concessions, including an undertaking that drivers would be courteous and having buses stopping at every corner in black neighborhoods, as they did in white areas.

After Brown vs. Board of Education (1954), Robinson had informed the mayor of the city that a boycott would come, and then after Rosa Parks' arrest, they seized the moment to plan the Montgomery bus boycott.

On Thursday, December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to move from her seat in the black area of the bus she was traveling on to make way for a white passenger who was standing. Mrs. Parks, a civil rights organizer, had intended to instigate a reaction from white citizens and authorities. That night, with Mrs. Parks' permission, Mrs. Robinson stayed up mimeographing 52,500 handbills calling for a boycott of the Montgomery bus system. The boycott was initially planned to be for just the following Monday. She passed out the leaflets at a Friday afternoon meeting of AME Zionist clergy, among other places, and Reverend L. Roy Bennett requested other ministers attend a meeting that Friday night and to urge their congregations to take part in the boycott. Robinson, Reverend Ralph David Abernathy, two of her senior students and other Women's Council members then passed out the handbills to high school students leaving school that afternoon.