Although not as well-known as Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King, Jr., Jo Ann Robinson was largely responsible for the organization and success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Jo Ann Gibson was born on April 17, 1912, in Culloden, Georgia, as the youngest of twelve children in Culloden, Georgia. Gibson was valedictorian of her high school graduating class. She became the first person in her family to graduate from college, earning a bachelor's degree from Fort Valley State College (now Fort Valley State University) in Fort Valley, Georgia.
After graduating from Fort Valley State College in 1934, she became a public school teacher in Macon, Georgia and married Wilbur Robinson for a brief time. She later earned an M.A. in English at Atlanta University. After teaching for five years in the Macon public school system, Robinson earned a master's degree in English from Atlanta University (now Clark-Atlanta University) and later completed a year of doctoral study in English at Columbia University in New York City. In 1949, Robinson accepted a teaching position in the English Department at Alabama State College, and moved to Montgomery
Upon her arrival in Montgomery, Robinson became involved with social justice activism. She joined Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, later pastored by Martin Luther King Jr. At Alabama State College, Robinson befriended professor Mary Fair Burks, who had founded the Women's Political Council (WPC) in 1946 to inspire African American women to become more politically active. Early in her membership at WPC, she was elected to the Presidency of the Women’s Political Council. Later, she served as an Executive Board member, as well as the newsletter editor for the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA).
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 1950, she became president of the WPC and led the group’s efforts to focus attention on the abuses of White bus drivers toward Black passengers. When she became WPC president, Robinson made the city’s segregated bus seating one of the top priorities of the organization. She met with attorney Fred Gray, who was also eager to challenge the city's segregated bus system.
In the early 1950s, Robinson and other members of the WPC met with Montgomery mayor William A. Gayle and several of his staff. The WPC members found the mayor and his staff responsive to their request for dialogue on various issues affecting African Americans in Montgomery until the subject of integrating the buses arose. Robinson and others wanted drivers to be more courteous, to stop more frequently in Black neighborhoods. They wanted to allow Blacks to pay and board the bus at the front, and to reserve more seats for Black patrons.
In May 1954, Robinson wrote to Montgomery's mayor as WPC president, gently threatening a Black boycott of city buses if abuses were not curtailed. This was 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. When Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to move to the back of the bus on December 1, 1955, Robinson and two of her students, spent the entire night printing out 35,000 handbills calling for a boycott of the Montgomery bus system.
Recognizing the success of the boycott, local civil rights leaders decided to establish the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), an organization that oversaw the boycott and worked to keep it going until conditions improved. They elected Martin Luther King, Jr., a new minister in town at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, to serve as the president of the MIA. The MIA now planned a longer more extensive boycott to protest racial segregation and discrimination on city buses. She served on its executive board and edited their newsletter, at King's request. Behind the scenes, Robinson also helped in carpooling African Americans to work.
In effect, King became the public face of the movement and its spokesperson. Jo Ann Robinson and other WPC members helped sustain the year long boycott by providing transportation for numerous Black residents. Moreover the boycott, the first successful protest of segregation in the Deep South, inspired other civil rights demonstrations in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s. Despite Robinson’s efforts to work behind the scenes, she was the target of several acts of intimidation. In early 1956, a police officer threw a rock through her window, and shortly afterwards, acid was poured on her car.
In the late 1950s, Robinson and other instructors at Alabama State College who were rumored to have participated in the boycott were reportedly investigated by a special state committee. Eventually, the governor ordered state police to guard the homes of boycott leaders. Robinson took great pride in the eventual success of the boycott. The boycott lasted over a year because the bus company would not give in to the demands of the protesters. On December 20, 1956, the boycotts finally ended after the federal district court deemed segregated seating was unconstitutional. The boycott also established King as a figure of national prominence and ushered in an era of nonviolent civil rights protests.
Following the student sit-ins at Alabama State in early 1960, Robinson and other supporters of the students resigned their faculty position rather than face the continued tensions at the institution. In 1960, Robinson moved to Louisiana where she taught at Grambling College for one year. After teaching there for a year, she then moved to Los Angeles in 1961 to teach English in the city’s public schools until her retirement in 1976. Throughout the height of the Civil Rights Movement, she remained a faithful supporter of Dr. Martin Luther King. She passionately lauded the accomplishments of many Christian ministers and religious leaders involved.