The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It

Histories of the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955–1956 typically focus on Rose Parks, who refused to yield her bus seat to a White man, and on a young Martin Luther King Jr., who became the spokesman for the Black community organization set up to pursue a boycott of Montgomery's segregated city buses. In an important revision of the traditional account, this extraordinary personal memoir reveals an earlier and more important role played by a group of middle-class Black Montgomery women in creating