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What's good, y'all, you're listening to Co switch, I'm Jean Dembe. The Montgomery Bus Boy boycott. It's one of those big bullet point

moments from the civil rights movement that almost all of us learned about in school.

You probably remember the broad details. It was late 1950s, and Rosa Parks refused to give a receipt

on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama to a white passenger.

You know, that was the law at the time.

Rosa Parks was, of course, arrested and that sparked a boycott by black folks that lasted more than a year in that city and it became national news and it raised the profile of a young Baptist preacher from Atlanta who helped lead that boycott.

His name was Martin Luther King Jr.

You might have heard of him.

But like all these bullet point treatments of history,

there's all kinds of important context and texture and people who get left out because, you know, they weren't going to be on the history quiz.

The bus boycott, for example, had all kinds of complex logistics. The city's black residents had to set up a whole

alternate system to get around, to carpool, to help folks get to where they needed to be.

They had to put pressure on anybody who threatened to break the boycott.

So it was a lot of organizing, a lot of planning,

and it's probably fair to say that most of that planning

was being done by women,

women who were vital and well known to all the people who were there

in the trenches at the time, but usually don't even get footnote status in our retellings of it.

Last year, Code Switch O.gee, Karen Grigsby Bates helped put together an episode that put many of those

women front and center, and as it also happens, KGB was recently named the winner of the

...