Members included Mary Fair Burks, Jo Ann Robinson, Maude Ballou, Irene West, Thelma Glass, and Euretta Adair.
The WPC was a political organization composed of Alabama State College faculty members and the wives of black professional men throughout the city.
The organization targeted Montgomery's small population of black middle class women, encouraging their civic involvement and promoting voter registration.
Many African Americans were illiterate due to centuries of oppression and poverty; they would sometimes fail the literacy test they were forced to take in order to vote.
[8] 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.
[1] In 1949, Jo Ann Robinson, a newly hired English professor at Alabama State College, joined the council.
[6] 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.
[10] During the early 1950s WPC leaders met regularly with Mayor W. A. Gayle and the city commission to lobby for bus reforms.
[11] Although they succeeded in pressuring the city to hire its first Black police officers, they made no progress in their effort to ameliorate bus segregation.
[12] In May 1954, shortly after the Brown v. Board of Education United States Supreme Court decision was announced, Robinson wrote a letter to Mayor W. A. Gayle saying that there was growing support among local black organizations for a bus boycott.
When Claudette Colvin, a fifteen-year-old high school student was arrested in March 1955, for refusing to give up her seat, the WPC and other local civil rights organizations began to discuss a boycott.
At a meeting of about fifty people in the basement of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, a part of the 1965 historic route of the Selma to Montgomery trial, on December 2, 1955, Parks first told the story of her arrest and the group decided to mount a bus boycott.
[16] A few years earlier, the minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church had tried to prompt a group of blacks to walk off a bus in protest.
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.
The night of Parks' arrest, Robinson called the other WPC leaders, and they agreed that this was the right time for a bus boycott.
They established the Montgomery Improvement Association to organize the boycott and elected the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. as president.
On February 1, 1956, associated lawyers filed a civil suit, Browder v. Gayle, in the United States District Court, on behalf of five women who had each been arrested for defying bus segregation (one dropped out that month.)
Robinson and Burks left Montgomery in 1960, after several Alabama State College professors were fired for civil rights activities.