African American Women Leaders of the Montgomery Bus Boycott

Yesterday’s Martin Luther King day got me thinking that it’s a good time for me to put online my undergraduate thesis, telling the story of the women leaders of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. I know many of my regular readers are probably not interested in reading a 95+ page thesis written by a college senior. The introduction is below just to give you a taste.

My main purpose in posting this is to make it available to students and researchers starting to discover the history of the women of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and looking for further leads. I remember researching online for this paper (five years ago) and being so frustrated to find references to unpublished papers about the Montgomery Bus Boycott, but not the text or sources for the papers themselves.

So hopefully other students like me looking into the same history I did will find this paper through Google and save a little time reinventing the wheel. Here are links to download the full thesis (African American Women Leaders of the Montgomery Bus Boycott), acknowledgements, table of contents, and bibliography.

Introduction:

The relationships between local male ministers and grassroots women leaders in Montgomery defined the leadership structure of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The gender dynamics within the leadership of the Montgomery Bus Boycott shaped the interactions between male and female leaders of the modern Civil Rights Movement. To study the interactions of ministers and female activists in Montgomery provides insight into how religious institutions shaped gender roles during the Civil Rights movement, raising questions about the historic impact of African American Christianity on the cultivation of male and female leadership in the black community.

It may be fairly said that the gender roles of the black Montgomery churches carried over into the Montgomery Bus Boycott and that the gender roles of the Montgomery Bus Boycott transferred to the national, modern Civil Rights Movement that the bus boycott sparked. This statement in based on the works of Lynne Olson and Belinda Robnett, two historians who have focused on women’s leadership in the boycott. Olson writes:

The relationship between male and female leaders of the Montgomery bus boycott would set a pattern that would continue into the civil rights movement of the 1960’s: Women would operate behind the scenes, acting as organizers, strategists, fund-raisers, and footsoldiers, while the men would be in the public eye, dealing with the white power structure and the press.

Olson accurately describes the fate of the female activists in Montgomery during the boycott. Many of the women were allotted roles in the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), the organization that led the boycott. Examining the positions allotted to women, Robnett writes, “As an organization, the Montgomery Improvement Association’s gender patterns strongly followed those of the church. Officers were generally men.” Robnett notes very specific ways in which churches segmented female activities and in which these gender roles were re-established in the MIA:

On committees, men generally outnumbered women…Women did chair certain committees, such as the Welfare Committee and the Membership Committee, however. Both areas were the responsibilities of women in the church and illustrate the extent to which bridging community members to the movement was women’s work.

Robnett’s theory that the religious institutions strongly influenced the gender roles in the Montgomery Improvement Association, which controlled the boycott, provides deep background for Olson’s belief that gender relations in the MIA then set the tone for the gender roles of the civil rights movement into the following decade.

Understanding the gender relationships shaped by Montgomery’s black churches is crucial to understanding the possible influence of black Christianity on the women in the Civil Rights Movement that took shape all over the South in the years after the Montgomery boycott. It is commonly argued that the black churches have historically been democratic institutions that provided both men (and women, when they are mentioned at all in scholarship) an opportunity to exercise their political leadership skills. However, the example of Montgomery proves that a renewed focus on the effect of local black churches on local black female leadership complicates the theory of a strongly democratic church that adequately prepared both men and women for leadership.

In Montgomery, local leaders like Jo Ann Robinson and Rosa Parks were constrained by male dominated church hierarchies. These women often sought opportunities outside the church to exercise leadership. Churches linked them to religious motifs that they found relevant to their emotional lives, and many of the women spoke of their struggles for courage and strength during the boycott in religious language. The churches, however, did not realize their potential as practical leadership training grounds for crucial women leaders. It was rare that a woman leader met an important contact for the first time in church, although churches did reinforce the social connections that women made in outside world. Secular institutions instead served as training grounds where women met other leaders concerned with civil rights and began building relationships that would make the organization of the boycott possible.

Female activists remained outwardly loyal to both the church institutions and the forms and traditions of Christianity, but their ability to take on leadership positions in the church and fully exercise their skills were limited. Rosa Parks was a key female leader in Montgomery. Her relationship with the local ministers, marked by tensions over Parks’ accomplishments and her high profile, was not unique. The minister-led MIA reinforced a rigid gender hierarchy that constricted women’s leadership opportunities.

Literature on the Montgomery Bus Boycott abounds with descriptions of Parks’ deep personal religiosity. Parks’ relationship with her church seems indeed to have been strong, but her relationship with the cadre of ministers running the boycott’s public face became outright contentious during the boycott. Rather than helping Parks to balance the demands of the boycott with her financial and health concerns, the ministers treated her with resentment and failed to give her proper status or compensation. Parks’ difficult experience was due in large part to her gender and economic class, which set her apart from the elite male ministers. Her treatment demonstrates of how the church often failed to serve as a vehicle of leadership for the women activists of Montgomery and at times even put obstacles in the way of their successful exercise of their talents.

My chapter on Parks is indebted to Douglas Brinkley’s work on Rosa Parks. Brinkley’s biography, Rosa Parks, is possibly the most extensive and revealing description of Parks, following her from her childhood to nearly the end of the 20th century. He hints at the contradictions in how Parks was observed, and in how she presented herself. He follows how many of these contradictions played out into Parks’ elderly years when she became a nationally known figure exemplifying the glory of the Civil Rights Movement.

He writes:

Everybody wanted to shake Rosa Parks’s hand, but nobody wanted to delve into her lifetime commitment to political and economic justice for black Americans. The myth around Rosa Parks had so usurped her reality as a radical activist that most Americans believed she really was just a good-hearted middle-aged seamstress who was simply so tired one day that she refused to give up her seat…

Through passages such as these, Brinkley makes an invaluable contribution to the literature on Rosa Parks, illuminating the attributes of Parks’s personality that have been overmagnified and the ways in which her work has been underacknowledged. This thesis uses Brinkley’s work to open the door to Parks’s complex personality and public treatment, and aims to expand on these themes by examining how power dynamics and image-making played into Parks’s relationship with the ministers of Montgomery. By focusing on her relationship with the ministers, this thesis aims to draw out some of the tensions that faced African American women throughout Montgomery as they tried to carve roles for themselves outside the male-dominated hierarchy of the local churches.

Jo Ann Robinson is another women whose passion for leadership found outlets outside the church in Montgomery. The history of her work leading the secular Women’s Political Council (WPC) and her subsequent integration into the minister-led Montgomery Improvement Association follows the same pattern found in Parks’ experience. Both Parks and Robinson found strategies for assuming leadership outside the church. Since neither were afforded the routes to power given to the male ministers, both had to form relationships with individuals in the community based on both personal trust and affection as well as secular organizational leadership.

Robinson, Parks and other women did not repudiate the church or Christian forms in their search for power outside the church. They did not openly criticize the ministers, and they remained loyal to Christian traditions. Both Robinson and Parks were publicly affiliated with churches; it seems to have been a well-known fact among Robinson’s friends that she was a member of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, and the Dexter pastor Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was aware enough of her membership to suggest that she lead one of Dexter’s committees. Robinson was not only publicly affiliated with a church, but uses the language of the religious faith to describe her own experiences. During one harrowing episode of preparation for the boycott, Robinson was concerned about losing her job, but describes her inner calm as the product of prayer. She writes, “I breathed a silent prayer for guidance and felt a wave of peace inundate me.” Her comments illustrate how she remained loyal to religious language, incorporating such themes as faith and “prayer” in describing her experiences to herself and to others.

Parks demonstrated a similar loyalty to her church, though the subtle confrontations between her and individual ministers or ministers’ groups clearly upset her. Parks was an active volunteer at St. Paul AME in Montgomery, working in the Sunday school, helping in setting up before services and participating in other projects. Parks also loves the traditions of Christianity. She communicates to the public in her book Quiet Strength that the Bible is a source of strength, writing, “As a child, I learned from the Bible to trust in God and not to be afraid. I have always felt comforted by reading the Psalms…” Her words resonate with those of Robinson (who also described faith as a source of courage), and themes in the lives of several women boycott leaders. The women leaders tried to circumvent the patriarchy of the church and sometimes had confrontations with the ministers, but they maintained their connections with churches and with the language or the traditions of Christianity.

Robnett is a key author to help us understand how black women leaders in Montgomery operated. She has studied the Montgomery Bus Boycott as well as other aspects of the Civil Rights Movement to develop a theory of how African American women leaders have been effective despite constraints on their activity. In her article, “African American Women in the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1965: Gender, Leadership and Mobilization,” Robnett describes how through “institutional and/or interpersonal networks” women gained power. Robnett also shows how “The gendered organization of the civil rights movement defined the social location of African-American women in the movement context and created a particular substructure of leadership, which became a critical recruitment and mobilizing force for the movement.” Robnett’s concepts of a specific level or type of leadership that African American women activists typified, in which relationships were a powerful tool, helps to shape a closer examination of women’s roles in the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Through personal networks and secular organizations, Jo Ann Robinson and Rosa Parks took Montgomery by storm, each in her own way mobilizing black Montgomery for large-scale civil rights activism. The strategies that Parks and Robinson employed to gain leadership in the Civil Rights Movement, and the constraints the church placed on their leadership, suggest a new way of studying the impact of the black churches on the Civil Rights Movement: while the black churches lent strong support to the Civil Rights Movement, they did not always allow for the strongest possible exercise of grassroots leadership, particularly as pertained to women leaders. Instead, these women often found the church to be a double edged sword that helped the community move forward on civil rights, while it promoted strict, undemocratic gender roles and put clearly defined and impassible limits on the exercise of their leadership abilities.

Notes:

I haven’t yet mastered the art of footnotes on Wordpress, so please open the thesis above to see the citations for this introduction.

Other African American women leaders discussed in the thesis include Mary Fair Burks, Johnnie Carr, and Claudette Colvin. Virginia Durr is also mentioned.