The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson
Robinson. By Jo Ann Gibson Robinson. Edited, with a foreword, by David J. Garrow.
(Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press. C.1987, 2011. 190 pp. $22.95.)
In 1776 our founding fathers willfully declared in the second paragraph of Declaration of
Independence “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable Rights”. However, 176 years after this statement was signed and sealed, equality was
not a reality for African American citizens. African Americans in 1955 were extremely
discriminated against; in the South by law and in the North implicit. Black people were
permanent second-class citizens, they received less pay than their white counterparts, they
received subpar housing and schooling and were forced to tolerate humiliation from white
people. In Montgomery, Alabama, one of these humiliations for African Americans was being
