English’s David Fleming Publishes Article on Neglected Aspect of Montgomery Bus Boycott

David Fleming, professor of English, has published a new article about a neglected aspect of the Montgomery bus boycott to mark the 70th anniversary of the start of the famous civil rights campaign.

Fleming's article, "'In a matter of hours we could corral the whole city': How a Women's Group Used a Half-Page Leaflet to Mobilize the Montgomery Bus Boycott," which will be published in the journal Written Communication in early 2026 and is available online now for users with a UMass login, tells the story of the half-page leaflet that began appearing in Black neighborhoods of Montgomery within 18 hours of Rosa Parks' arrest on Thursday, Dec. 1, 1955, for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated city bus.

The leaflet, which called for a one-day boycott of city buses the following Monday, Dec. 5, was the work of Jo Ann Robinson, an English professor at Alabama State College (ASC) and president of the local Women's Political Council. During the night following Parks' arrest, Robinson drafted the leaflet and drove to her office at ASC where, with another professor's help, she used a college mimeograph machine to make approximately 30,000 copies of it. Later that morning, she and two students drove across the city distributing the leaflets to Black businesses, schools, churches and homes - by that evening, nearly everyone in the city's Black community knew of the boycott plan.

Ultimately, the Monday action was so successful that it was extended indefinitely until, in December, 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Alabama's bus segregation laws were unconstitutional.

For all the fame of the boycott, the story of the leaflet has never fully been told, and Fleming says it may be the most impactful written text of its kind in U.S. history.

More information about Fleming's research and scholarship can be found on his faculty and personal websites.