"Jo Ann Robinson"(1912-1992).

The Youngest of twelve children in Culloden,Georgia,she would become a successful educator and famous civil rights activist.After graduating from Fort Valley State

College in 1934,Jo Ann became a public school teacher in Macon, Georgia and married Wilbur Robinson for brief time. She later earned an M.A. in English at Atlanta University.She accepted a position a Alabama State College in Montgomery and joined the women's Political Council(WPC) then headed by Mary Fair Burks.Jo Ann was verbally attacked by a bus driver in 1949.That incident persuaded her that the city's racial structure had to change.In 1950,she became president of the WPC and led the group's effort to focus attention on the abuses of white bus drivers toward black passengers.When Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to move to the back of the bus of the bus on December 1,1955,Jo Ann spent the entire night printing out 35,000 handbills calling for a boycott of the Montgomery bus system.She and supporters passed the flyers out on Friday afternoon which called for a one day boycott to begin the following Monday.After the successful one-day boycott,other local leaders including Reverends Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King and labor union activist E.D. nixion joined her in establishing the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA)with Reverend Martin Luther King as president.The MIA now planned a longer more extensive boycott to protest racial segregation and discrimination on city buses.She became the MIA newslater editor and served on its executive board.Jo Ann and other WPC members helped sustain the year long boycott by providing transportation for numerous black residents.Eventually a court ruling forced Montgomery to desegregate its busses.Moreover the boycott,the first successful protest of segregation in the Deep South,inspired other civil rights demonstrations in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s.In 1960 she moved to Louisiana where she taught at Grambling College for one year.She then moved to Los Angeles in 1961 to teach english in the city's public schools until retirement in 1976.Throughout this time she continued to participate in local women's organizations but she was never again a civil right activist.She died in Los Angeles.