“In a Matter of Hours We Could Corral the Whole City”: How a Women’s Group Used a Half-Page Leaflet to Mobilize the Montgomery Bus Boycott

On Friday morning, December 2, 1955, less than 18 hours after Rosa Parks’s arrest, copies of an anonymous, half-page leaflet began circulating in Black neighborhoods of Montgomery, Alabama. It called for a 1-day boycott of city buses on Monday, December 5. The leaflet was the work of the Women’s Political Council (WPC), namely, its president, Jo Ann Robinson. After drafting the text on the night of December 1, she drove to her office at Alabama State College (ASC) to copy it, then, the next day, with helpers, distributed those copies across the city. By evening, nearly everyone in Montgomery’s Black community knew of the boycott plan. This article offers the fullest examination yet of that leaflet, one of the most impactful texts of its kind in U.S. history. It analyzes its composition, which drew on years of activism by the WPC; its reproduction, using a mimeograph machine at ASC; and its distribution, by car, foot, and hand, across a divided urban landscape. Rhetoric and writing studies help us uncover the material resources, social context, and situated processes that enabled that text; history reminds us of its extraordinary mobilizing power.