Almost a decade before the arrest of Rosa Parks in 1955 sparked the Montgomery bus boycott and helped catapult civil rights to the political forefront, a group of teachers at the historically black Alabama State College in Montgomery formed the Women’s Political Council to campaign against the abuses and indignities of segregation.

Their activism – notably on the inequalities of the Montgomery bus system – set the groundwork for the rise of an obscure Montgomery preacher, Martin Luther King Jr., who eventually took the lead in the successful boycott.

Many of the women remained historical footnotes, which did not sit well with Thelma Glass, who was secretary of the Women’s Political Council and helped champion the boycott long before it happened. “The men talked about it, you know, but we were ready to take action,” Glass told an Alabama State publication last year.

One of the last surviving core members of the women’s council, Glass died July 24 at 96. The death, at a Montgomery hospital, was confirmed by a great-niece, Marcia Ivery Young. She did not provide a cause of death.

The women’s council, formed at Alabama State in 1946, included at its peak as many as 300 public school teachers, social workers, nurses and wives of black professionals in Montgomery.

The key focus of the council was to end the humiliations inflicted on the tens of thousands of blacks who rode the public buses.

Blacks were forced to stand even when seats were empty, and the buses stopped much less frequently in black neighborhoods than in white areas. Glass later testified in court that drivers would often speed away between the time blacks paid their fare at the front door and were forced to enter through the rear door.

Within days of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling against “separate but equal” public schools in 1954, the women’s council threatened city commissioners with a bus boycott and said it had the support of a consortium of black community leaders.

The women’s council was absorbed into the newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association with the charismatic 26-year-old King as its leader.

Initially intended to last a day, the boycott continued for nearly 13 months and roiled the city’s leaders by its display of sustained sacrifice.

Glass and her husband helped to form carpools, which the city tried to ban by saying they were unlicensed taxis. They allowed their own car to be used for public transport, braving Ku Klux Klan attempts to vandalize the vehicle with acid.

“When I looked at that bus as it passed my house and nobody was on it, it was a feeling of joy that will be with me forever,” Glass told the Montgomery Advertiser in 2004, reflecting on the first day of the boycott. “I had the idea that maybe we were finally going to be successful in getting everybody to cooperate.”