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These things are always orchestrated. Tammy Bruce (and she should know being a former big player in the liberal world) says not even the Rosa Parks/bus incident was happenstance.

"Most Americans believe that the civil-rights struggle was full of serendipity. that it was a spontaneous grassroots movement of average people who wanted to make a difference and improve their lives. Rosa Parks, for example, has been portrayed as an Everywoman who happened to take the bus one day in 1955 and somehow crashed through the barriers of her ordinary, run-of-the-mill life by deciding not to relinquish her seat to a white man.

In truth, the Montgomery, Alabama, chapter of the NAACP had been looking for months for a test case to challenge bus segregation. For this, they needed a bus rider to be arrested so their challenge could move through the courts but it had to be the right sort of bus rider. In fact, Parks wasn’t the first black to refuse to relinquish a seat to a white person. The first to personally challenge bus segregation earlier in 1955 had been 15-year-old Claudette Colvin, followed by another teenager named Mary Louise Smith. The NAACP leaders, however, didn’t think that either of the girls would cut the right kind of figure in court.

Parks was a veteran activist and an officer of the Montgomery NAACP. In actuality, she wielded great power in the chapter; she was the one who had noticed Martin Luther King Jr. and asked him to join the executive committee. She was at the meeting where the Montgomery NAACP leaders considered the possibility of using Colvin or Smith as the test case.

In December of 1955, six weeks after the NAACP’s rejection of the teenagers, Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat. Parks told Time magazine, “I did not get on the bus to get anested. I got on the bus to go home” That may have been true for Colvin and Smith but certainly not for Parks, Rosa Parks was a “bus rider" the way Betty Friedan was a 'housewife'."

The bus ride disputes had been a staple of the civil rights movement since the 1940s. My grandmother and I participated in such a dispute in about 1947 in Indianapolis.

The Indiana legislature desegregated EVERYTHING about 1952, but the buses were opened up earlier.

I like to think I had something to do with that.

Now, about the bus rides in the South ~ there were two classes. All were planned or orchestrated, and with good reason. You could get killed by people. No one went alone.

Northern cities were busted fairly easy since they had less of a tradition of murdering blacks. Southern cities were considered very hostile so ALL efforts were very highly organized, and as time demonstrated again and again, if your group was too small, or not well planned when engaged in an event, Southern power structures would arrange for injury and/or death.

Carefully setting up a test case is not uncommon. Rosa Parks is a good example. Homer Plessy is another; Plessy vs. Ferguson was stage managed all the way, although those that picked the fight did not get the decision they wanted. (Plessy was 7/8 white, a polished and successful businessman, and the railroads wanted to be rid of idiotic southern racial rules that complicated business.) The Scopes Monkey Trial is another great example.

I've always wondered about the Dred Scott case. Irene Emerson, his owner, may have been a hard case ... but by 1850 she had moved to Massachusetts and had remarried ... to an abolitionist(!!!) She also seems to have permitted Dred Scott and his family to travel freely and move and mix in some pretty high powered abolitionist circles. Scott's case was partially financed by the son of his first owner, the son having by now become anti-slavery. Irene transferred Scott's ownership to him after the Supreme Court ruling; Scott was then freed. Smells like a setup job to me but I've never researched it closely and have not seen the suspicion confirmed.