Seeds of Change: Black women’s organising, Rosa Parks and the gendered memory of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1946–1956

The Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 to 1956 is remembered as a protest that a single woman’s refusal set in motion. This article argues that the boycott is better understood as the culmination of a decade of organised political work by Black women in Montgomery, and that the compression of that work into the story of one seated woman was itself a gendered process with identifiable causes. Drawing on the memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, the testimony of boycott participants, the litigation record of Browder v. Gayle and the scholarship on Black women’s activism, the article reconstructs three arenas in which women made the protest possible. The first is the Women’s Political Council, founded in 1946, which proposed a bus boycott eighteen months before Rosa Parks was arrested. The second is the fundraising, catering, driving and walking that sustained a 381-day withdrawal of custom. The third is the federal suit brought by four Black women whose testimony, rather than Parks’s arrest, ended bus segregation in Alabama. The article then asks why the ministerial leadership of the Montgomery Improvement Association and later commemorative practice preserved Parks as a symbol while displacing the organisation around her.