Negotiations were attempted and failed. City commissioners and bus company representatives met with boycott leaders at various points and proposed minor modifications to the segregation rules that fell well short of what the community was demanding. The gap between what the city was willing to offer — marginal improvements in how the existing segregation system operated — and what the community was demanding — an end to forced segregation — was too large to bridge through negotiation.
The bombings were the most direct form of pressure. The King house bombing and subsequent attacks on other leaders’ homes were intended to create fear, to raise the personal cost of leadership, and to demonstrate that the white community’s willingness to use violence in defense of the existing order was real. The community absorbed these attacks and continued.
## Alabama State College and Jo Ann Robinson’s Costs
Jo Ann Robinson’s use of Alabama State College’s mimeograph machines and facilities to produce the boycott flyers in the early hours of December 2, 1955, came at a personal cost that illustrates the risks that individual organizers took.
Alabama State College was a state-funded institution. Its president, H. Councill Trenholm, was in a difficult position: the college depended on state funding, and the state government was hostile to the boycott. When state officials learned that college facilities had been used to produce boycott materials, they pressured Trenholm to act against Robinson.
Robinson resigned from Alabama State College in 1960. The pressure on her had been building throughout the boycott years. Her departure was the personal professional cost of her organizational leadership — a cost that the historical record documents but that the public narrative of the boycott has not always foregrounded.