wrong date. One goal of the WPC was to teach adults to read and write well enough to fulfill the literacy requirements for voting. One of its most successful programs was an annual event called Youth City, which taught Black high school students about politics and government and "what democracy could and should mean". During election campaigns the WPC worked with the white-only League of Women Voters to inform Black citizens about political candidates. In 1949, Jo Ann Robinson, a newly hired English professor at Alabama State College, joined the council. Her firsthand experiences with segregated seating on buses prompted Robinson to succeed Burks as WPC president in 1950 and to shift the council's primary focus to challenging the seating policy. She organized the Women's Political Council and within a month's time they had over a hundred members. They organized a second chapter and a third, and soon they had more than 300 members. They had members in every elementary, junior high, and senior high school. They had them organized from federal and state and local jobs; Wherever there were more than 10 blacks employed, they had a member there. Under her leadership the council grew to over 200 members and expanded to three chapters in different areas of the city. Eventually, there were around three hundred members and all of them were registered to vote. As president, she began to study the issue of bus segregation, which affected the many blacks who were the majority of riders on the city system. First, members appeared before the City Commission to report abuses on the buses, such as blacks who were first on the bus being required later to give up seats for whites as buses became crowded. The commission acted surprised but did nothing. Bus boycott In Montgomery, black women especially were regularly humiliated by the bus service. Jo Ann Robinson sat down in the white section of a city bus one day without thinking. She was brought to tears by the bus driver who cursed her out for sitting there. The Women's political council was formed because of these indignities. During the early 1950s WPC leaders met regularly with Mayor W. A. Gayle and the city commission to lobby for bus reforms. They complained that the city did not hire any black bus drivers, said that segregation of seating was unjust, and that bus stops in black neighborhoods were