May 27, 2005

MS. JO ANN GIBSON ROBINSON SELECTED AS TROY UNIVERSITY'S 2005 WOMAN OF COURAGE

Montgomery , AL – The fourth annual Troy University Rosa Parks Woman of Courage Awards and Lecture Series will honor Ms. Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, who played a key role in the Montgomery Bus Boycott.  This event will be held on June 16, at 7 p.m. in the Gold Room of Whitley Hall in Montgomery, Al.  The event is free and open to the public.              

Ms. Robinson was born near Culloden , GA and was the youngest of 12 children.  Educated in the segregated schools of Macon and then at Fort Valley State College, she became a public school teacher in Macon .  After five years of teaching she then went to Atlanta , where she earned a M.A. in English at Atlanta University .  In the fall of 1949, she accepted a position at Alabama State College.              

Robinson was a professor of English at Alabama State throughout the bus boycott.  In Montgomery , she joined both the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and the Women’s Political Council (WPC).  In 1949, she was humiliated by a Montgomery City lines bus driver, and she set out to use the WPC to target racial seating practices on Montgomery buses.              

In 1954, more than 18 months before the arrest of Rosa Parks but just several days after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, Robinson wrote to Montgomery ’s mayor as WPC president, gently threatening a boycott of city buses if abuses were not curtailed.  Following Rosa Park’s arrest in December 1955, Robinson played a central role in the start of the protest by producing the leaflets that spread word of the boycott among the black citizens of Montgomery .              

Robinson became one of the most active board members of the Montgomery Improvement Association, but she remained out of the limelight.  In 1960, she left Alabama State and Montgomery , as did other activist faculty members.  In 1976 Robinson retired from teaching from the public school system in Los Angeles where she was also active in a number of women’s community groups.  Her health suffered a serous decline just as her memoir, “The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women who Started It” was published in 1987.  

           
For more information, contact Ms. Julia Wilson, Campus Director for Advancement, by telephone (334) 241-9502 or by E-mail jhwilson@troy.edu.