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Thelma McWilliams was born in Mobile, Alabama in 1916, where she spent her early years. She moved to Montgomery to attend Alabama State Teachers College and, after graduating in 1941, she went on to get an MA degree from Columbia University in 1947. She returned to teach Geography at her
alma mater soon after, and became secretary to the Women’s Political Council, an organization founded by a group of teachers at Alabama State University in 1947 to fight racial injustices and oppression in Montgomery. Though the best-known accounts of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, focus on the organizing actions of Martin Luther King Jr., and the resistance of Rosa Parks, the boycott had its genesis in work begun earlier, work in which the Women’s Political Council played key strategic and tactical roles. In Mrs. Glass’ own words to an interviewer years later, “The men talked about it, you know, but we were ready to take action.”