Women's Political Council

Organization that formed in 1946
The Women's Political Council (WPC), founded in Montgomery, Alabama, was an organization that formed in 1946 that was an early force active in the civil rights movement that was formed to address the racial issues in the city. Members included Mary Fair Burks, Jo Ann Robinson, Maude Ballou, Irene West, Thelma Glass, and Euretta Adair. The WPC was the first group to officially call for a boycott of the bus system during the Montgomery bus boycott, beginning in December 1955. The group led efforts in the early 1950s to secure better treatment for Black bus passengers, and in December 1955 it initiated the thirteen month bus boycott. They helped organize communications to get it started, as well as to support it, including giving people rides who were boycotting the buses. The African Americans of Montgomery upheld the boycott for more than a year. It ended in late December 1956, after the United States Supreme Court ruled in Browder v. Gayle that the state and local laws for bus segregation were unconstitutional, and ordered the state to desegregate public transportation. It was inspired by the Atlanta Neighborhood Union. Many of its middle class women were active in education; most of WPC's members were educators at Alabama State College or Montgomery's public schools. The organization targeted Montgomery's small population of black middle class women, encouraging their civic involvement and promoting voter registration. About forty women attended the first organizational meeting. Burks was the group's first president. Burks decided to form the organization after she was arrested after a traffic dispute with a white woman. The group's initial purposes were to foster women's involvement in civic affairs, to promote voter registration through citizenship education, and to aid women who were victims of rape or assault. Many African Americans were illiterate due to centuries of oppression and poverty; they would sometimes fail the literacy test they were forced to take in order to vote. Other times, they were told they had come to the wrong location for registration or come on the wrong date. One goal of the WPC was to teach adults to read and write well enough to fulfill the literacy requirements for voting. One of its most successful programs was an annual event called Youth City, which taught Black high school students about politics and government and "what democracy could and should mean". During election campaigns the WPC worked with the white only League of Women Voters to inform Black citizens about political candidates. They had them organized from federal and state and local jobs; Wherever there were more than 10 blacks employed, they had a member there. Under her leadership the council grew to over 200 members and expanded to three chapters in different areas of the city. During the early 1950s WPC leaders met regularly with Mayor W. A. Gayle and the city commission to lobby for bus reforms. Although they succeeded in pressuring the city to hire its first Black police officers, they made no progress in their effort to ameliorate bus segregation. In May 1954, shortly after the Brown v. Board of Education United States Supreme Court decision was announced, Robinson wrote a letter to Mayor W. A. Gayle saying that there was growing support among local black organizations for a bus boycott. By 1955, there was growing dissatisfaction with the segregated bus system. The WPC decided that when the right person got arrested, they would initiate a boycott. When Claudette Colvin, a fifteen year old high school student was arrested in March 1955, for refusing to give up her seat, the WPC and other local civil rights organizations began to discuss a boycott. Colvin's arrest and conviction angered and unified the Black community, but when they discovered that the unmarried Colvin was pregnant, they did not want to use her as the point person, as she would not have commanded support among the religious and conservative blacks. Rosa Parks, the secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, was arrested in December 1955; she, the NAACP, and the WPC agreed that she could be the lead for a boycott. At a meeting of about fifty people in the basement of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, a part of the 1965 historic route of the Selma to Montgomery trial, on December 2, 1955, Parks first told the story of her arrest and the group decided to mount a bus boycott. Participants initially decided was to have a one day boycott on Monday, December 5, but because the boycott that day was so successful, discussion of continuing it began at a meeting afterward at the church due to the fact that roughly 70 percent of Montgomery's bus passengers were black and most stayed off the buses. A few years earlier, the minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church had tried to prompt a group of blacks to walk off a bus in protest. The driver had ordered Reverend Vernon Johns to get up and let a white man sit down. Johns stood up and challenged the other blacks to march off the bus with him. Asking blacks to protest was asking a lot. They could expect to be fired from their jobs and harassed on the streets, ad could possibly become victims of an economic boycott on the part of the white segregationists. A successful bus boycott would need to be mapped out carefully and executed with discipline. Robinson was consulted by E. D. Nixon, president of the NAACP. The night of Parks' arrest, Robinson called the other WPC leaders, and they agreed that this was the right time for a bus boycott. Parks was a longtime NAACP activist who was deeply respected and seemed like the ideal community symbol around which to mobilize a mass protest. The handbills asked blacks to boycott the buses the following Monday, December 5, in support of Parks. Thelma Glass and her students helped distribute fliers. By Friday night, word of a boycott had spread all over the city. That same night, local ministers and civil rights leaders held a meeting and announced the boycott for Monday. With some ministers hesitant to engage their congregations in a boycott, about half left the meeting in frustration. They decided to hold a mass meeting Monday night to decide if the boycott should continue. The one day boycott was so successful that the organizers met on Monday night and decided to continue. They established the Montgomery Improvement Association to organize the boycott and elected the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. as president. Jo Ann Robinson served on the group's executive board and edited their newsletter. In order to protect her position at Alabama State College and her colleagues, she stayed out of the limelight. The boycott had demonstrated African American organizing power and highlighted civil rights issues in the city. Its success helped further steps in the drive for civil rights.

Robinson and Burks left Montgomery in 1960, after several Alabama State College professors were fired for civil rights activities. In 1960, Burks resigned from Alabama State College after several professors were fired for their involvement in civil rights issues. She then taught literature at the University of Maryland until her retirement in 1986. Burks was appointed to a National Endowment for the Humanities reviewing panel in 1979.

The success of the boycott and the rise of the Montgomery Improvement Association contributed to the organization's decline. The MIA was created to direct the boycott, as a result the WPC leadership role in the black community was diminished. Younger women reinvigorated the council, guided by older members serving as role models. Robinson stated in her memoir that "Members felt that young, concerned women, with their futures ahead, would benefit by the WPC and that we would help them to organize and select goals and directions for their future." Information is not available on the extent to which the younger women became involved in the later civil rights movement in Montgomery and elsewhere.