“People know about Rosa Parks. People know about Martin Luther King Jr. — and they should. And they know that it was the Montgomery bus boycott that ignited a certain kind of Southern civil rights movement,” says Ula Taylor, a professor in the Department of African American Studies at UC Berkeley. But, what they might not know, she says, is that it was actually the behind-the-scenes organizing effort by the Women’s Political Council, led by Jo Ann Robinson, that made the boycott successful.
“Even though these women were not in the limelight, they were engaging in a form of leadership,” says Taylor. “But because we live in a country in a culture where we oftentimes identify leadership as a talking head, we don’t understand all of the thinking that goes behind a lot of the ideas that the talking head is even articulating.”
(A podcast episode featuring this interview with Taylor was originally published on Berkeley News in 2018….
