Rosa Parks 1955 Arrest

As taught to children in school and repeated endlessly in civil rights articles it was in 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, sparking the 381-day Montgomery Bus Boycott and becoming a pivotal moment in the American Civil Rights Movement.

• On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old seamstress, refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus, violating local law.
• She was arrested, fingerprinted, and fined $14.
• The boycott that followed was organized rapidly afterward by local leaders including E.D. Nixon and Jo Ann Robinson.

Rosa Parks had been a long time secretary for the NAACP trained at communist Highlander Folk School to set up an incident on public transportation in order to generate a media story for the cause of civil rights. E.D. Nixon bailed her out instantly, prepped lawyers, and flyers were printed overnight by Jo Ann Robinson.

Sourced from The Amistad Research Center (Tulane University archive), credible as the digital arm of the Amistad Research Center, an independent academic archive at Tulane University specializing in African American history, with primary sources from 1785–present. In fact, this is a leftist source, and yet it exposes a myth taught to children in schools for man years now.

The source confirms Parks as a seasoned NAACP youth leader trained at Highlander, her arrest as part of a long-planned test case against bus segregation (orchestrated by Nixon and WPC for broader impact), and Nixon's immediate post-arrest actions urging a boycott and organizing a mass meeting. Also, left leaning Wikipeda exposes the myth to a great degree by citing primary sources like Parks' autobiography and Jo Ann Robinson's memoir, details how NAACP and WPC leaders sought a "good legal test case" against bus segregation; prior arrests (Colvin, Smith) were passed over, but Parks, NAACP secretary, trained at Highlander, was selected as ideal. WPC pre-planned boycott mechanics, printing 35,000+ flyers overnight using college resources, with bail/lawyers ready via E.D. Nixon, evidencing orchestration around her as the trigger.