Correction: Rosa Parks was not only a trained activist, she and her activist buddies were specifically trying to recreate an incident that had happened earlier.

You see, the actual, spontaneous, unplanned incident was done nine months earlier by a black girl named Claudette Colvin. She was in the section designated for black people, however, the front became crowded and she was told to move to make way for a white woman (who was actually fine with standing as it turns out, to show how adamantly racist the bus driver was). She refused and was arrested.

Rosa Parks was a secretary at one of many chapters of NAACP and they had seen the incident but they had multiple reasons for not wanting to publicize it when it happened. One was that Claudette was a minor. Another possibility is that Claudette had some marks on her past that could have been considered questionable or immoral and they wanted someone that white people couldn’t pick apart as a villain or a thug for when it happened.

So they staged the incident all over again with Rosa Parks as the victim and when it played out just like they thought, they slammed it with as much attention and media as they could to publicize it.