The WPC and Black women’s leadership today
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From her now-iconic booking photo taken at the time of her arrest to President Bill Clinton presenting Parks with the 1996 Presidential Medal of Freedom, these photos are a testament to the ongoing fight for equality that continues today.
MONTGOMERY, Ala. – It was Dec. 1, 1955. Rosa Parks had been arrested for her defiance of Montgomery’s segregated bus seating law, and Jo Ann Robinson sat at home lost in thought.
Could the Black women of the Women’s Political Council, for which she now served as president, convince 50,000 Black people to stay off the city buses that so many depended on as their only means of transportation? She couldn’t be sure.
Her telephone rang. It was attorney Fred Gray.
He had received the Alabama State College professor’s urgent message about Parks’ arrest. Active since 1949, Robinson and the WPC had worked closely with the burgeoning Black lawyer to negotiate with city leadership and Montgomery bus company officials for better treatment of Black citizens on its buses to no avail.
Robinson writes in her 1987 memoir “The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It,” that she told the young lawyer of her thoughts to call all Black riders to stay off the buses on Dec. 5.
Jo Ann Robinson (Photo: Contributed by Alabama State University)
“’Are you ready?,’ Gray asked. Without hesitation, I assured him that we were,” Robinson later wrote.
They hung up and she quickly jotted some notes on the back of an envelope:
“The Women’s Political Council will not wait for Mrs. Parks’ consent to call for a boycott of city buses. On Friday, December 2, 1955, the women of Montgomery will call for a boycott.”
As far as historian Dorothy Autrey can tell, the WPC was the only group thinking about a bus boycott.
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“It’s most likely that had not the WPC conceived of this plan and worked toward it, the boycott may not have occurred,” said Autrey, program chair of Alabama State University’s National Center for the Study of Civil Rights and African-American Culture.
The 1950s political organization provides a blueprint of what Black female leadership can look like, and why Black women have long been on the frontlines as architects of change. Despite their success, few outside their city remember the courageous women of the WPC and their outsized contribution to American democracy. It’s a feeling many Black women in politics today understand well.
Uphill battle for Black female political leaders yesterday and today
Members of the Women’s Political Council. (Photo: Courtesy of the Levi Watkins Learning Center Archives, Alabama State University and the Beta Nu Omega Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.)
Despite years of commitment, successful organizing and grassroots work both in and outside of their communities, Black women continue to face an uphill battle when seeking to distinguish themselves as political leaders.
To date, less than 50 Black women have served in Congress. Only 15 have ever held statewide elected executive offices. And just two have become senators — Illinois’ Carol Moseley Braun in 1993 and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris in 2017, a span of more than two decades between them. A Black woman has never served as governor, although Stacey Abrams came close in Georgia during her hotly contested election.
More than 160 Black women ran new campaigns for office this year — an all-time high — though only three: Cori Bush, D-Missouri; Nikema Williams, D-Georgia; and Marilyn Strickland, D-Washington, will be seated as newly elected in January.
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“Going back to the Montgomery Bus Boycott and even before that, Black women have been major catalysts. Suffrage, abolition — we’ve always been there, and we’ve always been doing the work. But we have very rarely gotten the recognition that has been due,” said Kimberly Peeler-Allen, a visiting practitioner at the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) at Rutgers University and the co-founder of Higher Heights; an organization dedicated solely to encouraging Black women to grow their political power and leadership.
In Alabama, Black women have increased their political footprint since “Old Dixie.” Today, 11 of Alabama’s 104 House representatives are Black women; seven are white women. The Senate’s four female members are Black. Still, Black female leaders at the city and state level expressed that more could be done to empower and support Black women seeking office, who are often actively discouraged . Research from CAWP and others bears this out.
FILE – In this Feb. 22, 1956, file photo, Rosa Parks is fingerprinted by police Lt. D.H. Lackey in Montgomery, Ala., after refusing to give up her seat on a bus for a white passenger on Dec. 1, 1955. Yellowing court records from the arrests of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr. and others at the dawn of the modern civil rights era are being preserved and digitized after being discovered, folded and wrapped in rubber bands, in a courthouse box. (AP Photo/Gene Herrick, File) (Photo: Gene Herrick, AP)
There seems to be a societal expectation that “minority” politicians are male and female politicians are white. Women of color disrupt this notion.
In 2018, Audrey Graham became the first woman to serve on the Montgomery City Council since Martha Roby vacated her seat in 2010. Graham is only the sixth woman elected to the body in its 45-year history.
In a crowded field of candidates, Graham, who works for the domestic relations division of the county, soon learned some peers were less than thrilled to see her throw her hat in the ring, including one Black male candidate.
“He said to me, ‘Why are you running? You’re just going to split the vote. … You need to sit back. Nobody’s going to vote for you.’ He said that to me as plain faced as if he were ordering a Big Mac off a menu. Matter of fact. I said, ‘we’ll see.’ ”
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Graham may not have been deterred, still, she was troubled at how her gender was characterized as inferior.
“’People are not going to vote for you because you’re a woman. … I didn’t realize that, but that began that eye-opening for me,” Graham said.
Softening tone and look for ‘electability’
After state Rep. TaShina Morris, a Democrat who represents Montgomery, lost her 2015 bid for a City Council seat, she went back to the drawing board ahead of her 2017 run for the state House. Like it or not, Morris felt she had to make some changes, not to her platform but her appearance. During her first run she had received questions and complaints from some men about her marital status.
“I guess that was a lack of leadership for them, because I wasn’t married,” said Morris. She wore a ring on her wedding finger the second time around. That put all that to bed. “They never asked.”
Morris stopped wearing pants to campaign events in favor of skirt suits. “It was showing too much authority. They want to see you looking feminine,” she said.
Tashina Morris, a candidate running for state representative for House District 77, talks to a reporter Wednesday, July 25, 2018, at her home in Montgomery, Ala. (Photo: Julie Bennett / Advertiser)
Her tone had to change, too.
“I couldn’t talk about the issues and concerns in a forceful way. … Now, when I’m face to face with another Black female it’s a whole different story. I can just talk, and she understands and listens. But when I’m talking to a male, I had to soften it down a lot,” Morris said.
Closing the gap for black women in politics
Questions of electability have long plagued Black women candidates who must deal with the compounded scourges of racism and sexism, and typically face heightened scrutiny from the media and public. During Sen. Harris’ presidential run Newsweek invoked spurious birtherism claims to cast doubt on her eligibility for office. And when she was chosen as the vice-presidential nominee a Virginia mayor, in a racist comment, referred to her as Aunt Jemima.
Black women candidates also typically receive less financial support than their male and white female counterparts, a major snag for many who campaign for more expensive statewide office, according to research from CAWP and the Center for Responsive Politics.
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“When you start talking about electability or viability, that framing actually slows down the ability for people to raise money and create institutional support,” said Glynda Carr, co-founder and CEO of Higher Heights.
Groups like theirs are working to close the gap by training politically minded Black women for leadership and connecting them with the resources they need to mount successful campaigns. Carr sees the success of women like Morris and others across the U.S. who have run and won with less resources as a road map.
2020 Presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Ca.) gets a kiss from a supporter during the Alabama Democratic Conference convention at the Renaissance Hotel in Montgomery, Ala., on Saturday, June 8, 2019. (Photo: Jake Crandall/ Advertiser)
With Vice President elect Harris’ nomination “we have changed the historical face of leadership and that’s not just about gender or race but frankly the types of qualifications and lived experience that Black women bring as candidates and elected leaders,” Carr said.
Women’s Political Council changed the world with little recognition
When the Montgomery Improvement Association, the organization charged with managing the boycott, was formed in Dec. 5, 1955, it had only four paid employees: financial secretary Erna Dungee, its general overseer Hazel Gregory, secretary-clerk Martha Johnson and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s personal secretary, Maude Ballou. Each woman was a WPC member.
Although the men — King, E.D. Nixon, A.W. Williams and others — came to be known as the leaders of boycott, the women of the WPC were critically involved throughout. Robinson and other women met and negotiated with city commissioners, bus company officials and even the governor.
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By 4 a.m. on Dec. 2, the morning after Robinson had received Gray’s late night phone call, she and two Alabama State students had mimeographed what amounted to more than 52,000 leaflets. By 7 a.m. they had organized them into parcels and mapped out distribution routes brainstormed by the WPC months earlier.
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And by 2 p.m. the WPC had used its grassroots network of 300 women spread across three chapters on the city’s west, east and north sides to the effect that “practically every [B]lack man, woman, and child in Montgomery knew the plan and was passing the word along” about the boycott, Robinson wrote in her memoir.
Thirteen months later they had broken the bus company’s bottom line and shattered the city’s segregated seating law.
Their legacy is visible in the work of Black women leaders today. People like LaTosha Brown, who worked for years to increase Black civic participation and helped turn out Alabama’s Democratic women voters in record numbers to deliver Doug Jones a U.S. Senate seat in 2017’s special election. Black women like Deborah Scott, of Georgia Stand Up, and Abrams, whose decades-long efforts tipped the red state to Democrats in November’s general election.
By all evidence, the WPC was not malcontent that their effort, in some ways, had been “usurped” by the men of the M.I.A. Although the women were leaders, they were not necessarily seeking leadership.
It was a different time after all, with no concept of today’s modern feminism. Yet even as they took on ancillary roles, their intelligence, leadership and action were respected, sought after and encouraged.
They had seats at the table.
Follow Safiya Charles on Twitter: @imsafiyacharles
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