walk off a bus in protest. The driver had ordered Reverend Vernon Johns to get up and let a white man sit down. Johns stood up and challenged the other blacks to march off the bus with him. Asking blacks to protest was asking a lot. They could expect to be fired from their jobs and harassed on the streets, ad could possibly become victims of an economic boycott on the part of the white segregationists. A successful bus boycott would need to be mapped out carefully and executed with discipline. Robinson was consulted by E.D. Nixon, president of the NAACP. The night of Parks' arrest, Robinson called the other WPC leaders, and they agreed that this was the right time for a bus boycott. Parks was a longtime NAACP activist who was deeply respected and seemed like the ideal community symbol around which to mobilize a mass protest. Robinson stayed up all night copying 35,000 handbills by a mimeograph machine at Alabama State College to distribute the next day. She called students and arranged to meet them at elementary and high schools in the morning. She drove to the various schools to drop the handbills off to the students who would distribute them in the schools and ask students to take them home for their parents. Robinson did not put her name or that of the Women's Political Council on the handbills. She feared the city and state officials would realize she had used the mimeograph machine at Alabama State and, in revenge, cut off funds for the all-black school. The handbills asked blacks to boycott the buses the following Monday, December 5, in support of Parks. Thelma Glass and her students helped distribute fliers. By Friday night, word of a boycott had spread all over the city. That same night, local ministers and civil rights leaders held a meeting and announced the boycott for Monday. With some ministers hesitant to engage their congregations in a boycott, about half left the meeting in frustration. They decided to hold a mass meeting Monday night to decide if the boycott should continue. The one-day boycott was so successful that the organizers met on Monday night and decided to continue. They established the Montgomery Improvement Association to organize the boycott and elected the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. as president. Jo Ann Robinson served on the group's executive board and edited their