The Montgomery bus boycott was a planned act, not spontaneous

Evidence

When police arrested Rosa Parks on December 1, 1955, for not giving up her seat on the bus, the Black community in Montgomery was ready; they had been planning this act of civil disobedience. A group of local ministers and community leaders met at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church to prepare a boycott of the city’s buses. They called themselves the Montgomery Improvement Association and elected as the organization’s leader the new pastor of the church, a twenty-six-year-old graduate of Boston University’s doctoral program in systematic theology named Martin Luther King, Jr. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1041

Categorization

• XREF: Reverses the common Rosa-Parks-as-spontaneous-martyr narrative; connects to the reader’s interest in origin stories and what counts as a starting point in historical narratives.