One year later, on behalf of the WPC, Robinson wrote a letter to the mayor of Montgomery. She made three forceful demands and threatened a boycott of the city bus system. First, she called for the creation of a law that would end segregated seating on city buses. Robinson also called for an end to the humiliating practice of asking black people to pay at the front of the bus and then proceed to enter at the back. Third, she requested that, “buses stop at every corner in residential sections occupied by Negroes as they do in communities where whites reside.” “Mayor Gayle,” Robinson wrote, “three-fourths of the riders of these public conveyances are Negroes. If Negroes did not patronize them, they could not possibly operate.”
Her words fell on deaf ears. Not surprisingly, the mistreatment of black people on city buses continued. When Rosa Parks was arrested in 1955 — for refusing to move to the back of the bus — Robinson “went into high gear,” seizing the opportunity to launch a boycott she and the other members of the WPC had been planning. The night of the Parks’s arrest, Robinson printed out 35,000 fliers announcing the beginning of a citywide bus boycott on December 5, 1955. The next afternoon she and other members of the WPC handed out the fliers to black residents in Montgomery, and even volunteered to participate in the carpool system to help those who needed a ride to work. On December 5, 1955, as Robinson and the WPC had planned, local black residents in Montgomery stopped riding city buses.
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. In effect, King became the public face of the movement and its spokesperson. The Montgomery bus boycott lasted 381 days, and the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ordered the city to integrate the bus system.
It represented one of the most significant developments in the modern Civil Rights Movement. A direct challenge to segregation in the South, the Montgomery bus boycott stood as the first successful example of mass nonviolent resistance in the United States. Significantly, it underscored the crucial, if hidden, role that Black women played in the modern Civil Rights Movement — as organizers, participants, and leaders.