"Rosa Parks was a plant"

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In another thread -- post # 175 of "Michael Moore in trouble?" , over in politics -- an assertion was made that Rosa Parks was selected in advance by activists in the civil rights movement, as part of a well-planned operation, to refuse to give up her seat on a Montgomery Alabama bus and thus provide a test case for challenging the city's segregation laws.

As conspiracy theories go, this is reasonably plausible. At the time that Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat, she had been a very active member of the NAACP for more than a decade. She was well aware that there had already been instances around the south in which blacks had refused to give up bus seats; and she was familiar with discussions within the Montgomery NAACP chapter about how, if a case were to arise in Montgomery, it might be a good idea to organise around it and use it as a way to challenge Montgomery's segregation laws in the courts. I see no good reason why, in some alternate universe very similar to our own, the Montgomery bus boycott could not have been the product of careful advance planning such as qayak alleges took place. But in the world we actually live in, that does not appear to be the way the Montgomery bus boycott happened.

Not, at least, according to the accounts I have heard and read about the events in Montgomery, as recalled by the participants in those events.

But I am by no means an expert on this subject. It is quite possible that I am mistaken, and that events really did occur in the way qayak alleges. If so, it would be an interesting thing to know, and something I would enjoy learning more about.

The post in which qayak makes his assertion that "Rosa Parks was a plant" is vague, and the only piece of evidence he offers is an alarmingly ambiguous statement by Parks. It is possible to construe Parks' statement as saying that her actions were undertaken in accordance with plans she had made in advance with others in the Civil Rights Movement. But the quoted passage doesn't actually say that. The only reason so far to believe it means that is because qayak says it means that.

Therefore I am opening this thread in order to give qayak -- or anyone else who believes that Rosa Parks was selected in advance to refuse to give up her seat on the bus -- an opportunity to present the evidence that this was so.

Too often when a thread spins off from a post in another one, the opening post begins right in the thick of things. That makes it hard (for me at least) to figure out just what is going on. That's why I've used this OP to outline what this thread is about, rather than starting right in with the text of qayak's post. I hope the origin and purpose of this thread is now clear, so in the next post I'll present qayak's post about Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott, and I'll go into a little more detail about the questions his claim raises.
 
Here is the post in which qayak makes his assertion:

qayak said:
... Rosa Parks was a plant. She was a long time member of the civil rights movement and knew all the leaders personally, including MLK. There was another woman selected to be the person on the bus but that woman was not married and she became pregnant. The leaders knew there would be no sympathy for an unwed mother in such a religiously intolerant time and area. They scraped the idea.

From her own memoirs: “I kept thinking about my mother and my grandparents and how strong they were. I knew that there was a possibility of being mistreated, but an opportunity was being given me to do what I had asked of others.” (Bolding mine)

I'm not saying what she did wasn't great, but it was a well planned operation.
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One of qayak's statements is correct and well-established: Rosa Parks was a long-time member of the civil rights movement. But the rest of what qayak claims does not appear to be supported by evidence.

I can recall hearing this claim -- that Parks was chosen in advance to challenge Montgomery's segregation laws, in the same way that John Scopes was chosen to challenge Tennessee's law against the teaching of evolution -- several times. But the people I've heard making it generally have not been people with any great knowledge of, or familiarity with, the civil rights movement of the 1950s, so I've never given much weight to their assertions.

Another reason I haven't given much credence to these claims when I've heard them in the past is that the people making the claims did it in the same way qayak has done -- flat assertion, as if the confidence of their utterance were sufficient in itself to make the statement true. I believe in weighing evidence, and when people use confident assertion as a substitute for substantial evidence, I tend to assign very little weight to what is being said.

Qayak says that "There was another woman selected to be the person on the bus but that woman was not married and she became pregnant." He doesn't say who this woman was, or what evidence he is relying on for the assertion that she was selected in advance to refuse to give up her seat. Right away, that raises a red flag for me.

From the meager details qayak provides in the post, this sounds like a garbled version of Claudette Colvin. Colvin was a 15-year-old girl who refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus in March 1955. She was not (as far as I know) selected in advance to do this; in all the accounts I have read, she explains that she did it on her own. (Here is a link to the Wikipedia entry on Colvin. There are better sources available at libraries, but the Wikipedia entry is handy and it looks like a reasonably good summary. This brief write-up at Tolerance.org also looks adequate in conveying the gist of the matter.)

Colvin was active in civil rights youth groups, and as a result she had heard of, and been inspired by, stories about people like Irene Morgan -- civil rights activists of the '40s and '50s who had chosen to take daring and courageous actions against racism. Colvin wanted to be like them.

There had been discussions in the civil rights community about how, if someone were to refuse to give up their bus seat (as had happened several times already in various places around the south) it would be a good idea use that to mount a legal challenge to the segregation laws. And there were discussions -- in the days following Colvin's arrest -- about organizing such a campaign around Colvin's case. But for several reasons (Colvin's tendency to swear and to throw temper tantrums for one, and Colvin becoming pregnant out of wedlock, from an affair with a married man, for another) it was decided not to attempt to mount a campaign centering around her, and to wait for a better case to come along.

I do not know of any credible historian who claims that Colvin was selected to refuse to give up her seat on the bus as part of an organized plan. So if Colvin is who qayak has in mind when he says there was "another woman" who had been "selected to be the person" (to refuse to give up her seat and be arrested) then I would like to see a listing of sources -- people who were involved in the Montgomery civil rights movement and who took part in the meetings at which this was discussed and decided -- so that I can look this up for myself.

(Same thing if qayak is referring to someone other than Colvin. If this was something that was discussed and decided, I would like to know who is supposed to have discussed and decided it, and I'd like to be shown some credible evidence that this actually occurred.)

That's my problem with qayak's assertion that "There was another woman selected to be the person on the bus"". In the next post, I'll explain my problem with qayak's assertion that Rosa Parks was "selected" as part of a "well-planned operation"
 
qayak said:
... Rosa Parks was a plant...

... From her own memoirs: “I kept thinking about my mother and my grandparents and how strong they were. I knew that there was a possibility of being mistreated, but an opportunity was being given me to do what I had asked of others.” (Bolding mine)

I'm not saying what she did wasn't great, but it was a well planned operation.
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Qayak didn't provide any supporting evidence for his claim that there was a woman who was initially selected to refuse to give up her bus seat as part of this "well-planned operation". But he does provide a source for his claim that Parks was selected to be a test case -- Rosa Parks' memoirs. The problem is that the passage he offers as evidence is ambiguous, and does not clearly say that which qayak tells us it says.

This is the kind of thing which sets off loud skeptical alarm signals for me. At present, there is only qayak's word that the passage in the memoir means what qayak says it means. If the memoirs actually say that there were planning meetings Parks attended at which this was discussed, why not quote one of these? It makes little sense to quote a passage which doesn't clearly say that she was picked in advance to break the law -- unless, of course, there aren't any clear passages. In that case an ambiguous passage which, quoted out of context, can be made to look as if it says the action was planned in advance, may be the best which proponents of this claim can offer.

If qayak has read the memoirs, he presumably knows whether the Parks does indeed claim in her memoirs to have been selected in advance to refuse to give up her bus seat and thus create a test case. Which raises an important question: has qayak actually read her memoirs? I can't help noting that he doesn't actually say that he has.

It has become distressingly common nowadays for people to pass along excerpts from works which they have not actually read for themselves and to boldly proclaim to the rest of us what these works really mean. DOC, in the Thomas Jefferson thread, is a prime example of someone who does this. It is a profoundly non-skeptical practice -- as well as being, in my eyes, dishonest. But a lot of people on this forum do it.

My feeling is that if one has not actually read something one should make it clear that one is simply passing along something which someone else found and excerpted, and that they really have no idea how fairly or accurately the excerpt they are passing along represents the original source.

If someone says they are quoting something, it should mean that they have read the actual passage, in it's original context, and are vouching for the fact that what they are presenting is a fair excerpting of the material which accurately reflects what the material means when read in context. If one has not actually read the source material, and is simply passing on an excerpt that someone else provided them, then the honest thing to say when presenting the excerpt is I have not read the source material so do not know for myself what this means if read in context, but so-and-so, from whom I got this, claims it means such-and-such.

That gives the rest of us a better idea of who it is who is vouching for the accuracy of the excerpt, and thus gives us a better idea of how much weight to accord the material. I don't think qayak would deliberately misrepresent what Rosa Parks wrote (or that DOC would deliberately misrepresent what Thomas Jefferson wrote). So if qayak were to say, Yes, I read Rosa Parks' memoirs, and she does indeed say that she took part in meetings at which it was decided she would deliberately choose not to give up her seat on a bus, the next time an opportunity arose, in order to create a test case for challenging the segregation laws in court, I take that seriously into account as good evidence for his assertions regarding Parks. But if qayak were to say, No, I've never read Parks' memoirs myself, but I saw an op-ed piece in which someone claimed she admitted she was a plant, and this is the passage they quoted to prove it, then I would assign very little weight to the claim. Direct lying is a rather unusual event, especially in a forum such as this where it is so easily detected. Being duped by one's sources, however, is not at all unusual for posters here.

The passage qayak quotes is extremely ambiguous. There are two obvious interpretations of the sentence qayak bolded. One is that, when Parks says she has been given an opportunity, she means that leaders in the civil rights community chose her to be a test case. The other is that, when she was riding the bus that day, an unexpected event occurred and this is the opportunity she was referring to.

On the day Parks refused to surrender her seat, Parks was sitting in the black section of the bus. But the bus had filled up, and several additional white passengers got on. The driver of the bus then told Parks and several other black people to vacate their seats so that the white passengers could sit. This is not something Parks could have planned on in advance; but when it did occur that day, she felt fully within her rights to refuse to move and saw this as an opportunity to challenge laws and customs which she deeply opposed.

I strongly suspect that a reading of Parks' memoirs will not include anything about her being part of meetings in which it was planned in advance for her to refuse to give up her seat in order for her to be a test case. I also strongly suspect that a reading of her memoirs will show that the opportunity she refers to in the passage you bolded is a reference to her being unexpectedly asked to vacate her seat in the black section of the bus.

But I do not have her memoirs at hand, and am not even sure if I have ever read them. So if qayak, or anyone else here, has read them, they are in a better position than I am to state what quoted passage means. Is there anyone here who has read the book and is able to speak to this?
 
Is it just me or is this one of the dumbest conspiracy theories ever? Well, just after Lyte Trip's flyover...
 
Pardalis said:
Is it just me or is this one of the dumbest conspiracy theories ever?
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Not necessarily. The same basic situation occurred at the Scopes Trial. The ACLU was looking for a test case to overturn the Butler Act. John Scopes volunteered to violate the act.

Steve S.
 
Pardalis said:
Is it just me or is this one of the dumbest conspiracy theories ever? Well, just after Lyte Trip's flyover...
Click to expand...

steve s said:
Not necessarily. The same basic situation occurred at the Scopes Trial. The ACLU was looking for a test case to overturn the Butler Act. John Scopes volunteered to violate the act.

Steve S.
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I don't think either situation qualifies as a conspiracy. Simply planning an event is NOT a conspiracy.
 
SezMe said:
I don't think either situation qualifies as a conspiracy. Simply planning an event is NOT a conspiracy.
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The Rosa Parks incident was misleading. The myth is that she was fed up, the last straw and all that, and she, a random black citizen, spontaniously protested. Actually, the more I think about it, the more it does have the odor of conspiracy.

Let's be honest. It is uncomfortable to question this historic incident, and the agenda of those behind it, as segragation was so ugly and we are fortunate someone stood up for equal rights.
 
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I don't believe it. Rosa Parks wan't a plant. She was a mammal. Black people have been called alot of things less than human but a PLANT! Come on.:)
 
SezMe said:
I don't think either situation qualifies as a conspiracy. Simply planning an event is NOT a conspiracy.
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I think you are getting distracted by a semantic tree, and thus missing the forest. Qayak (and others) have claimed that Rosa Parks action in refusing to relinquish her seat on a bus was a planned and deliberate action for which she had been chosen.

The key question is not whether you wish to label that a conspiracy or simply a planned event. The key question is whether such planning did indeed occur.

Such planning very likely could have occurred. It did, for instance, in the Scopes trial. We know that from the accounts of those events as told by those who were involved.

But in the case of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott, the claim that this was a planned event appears to be mistaken. Not only is there no testimony of which I am aware which says such planning did take place -- there are numerous accounts of the event (including, I believe, Rosa Parks own account) which say this was not a planned event.

Qayak offers as evidence a passage from Rosa Parks' memoirs. I suspect that the passage he has offered, if read in context, will not back up his claimed interpretation of it.

If my suspicion is wrong, and Parks says in her memoir that she acted as part of a calculated plan, then qayak (and steverino) are correct that many people are being taught a myth. If that is so, it is worth knowing about. Myths -- whether about paranormal phenomena or about historical events -- are worth exposing to the light of truth.

If, on the other hand, my suspicions are correct, and the passage from Parks' memoir which gayak quoted -- and even bolded, to emphasize what he passed on as the correct interpretation -- says something very different from qayak claimed, then qayak has committed a serious offense against rational discussion. That kind of deception is also worth exposing to the light of truth.

I'd call gayak's claim quite literally a conspiracy theory, which is why I posted this thread in this section. Conspiracy theory is not the same as utter rubbish. Many actions in history have been conspiracies. Both the plot to destroy the world trade center with bombs (in 1993) and by flying planes into them (in 2007) were conspiracies.

My objection to gayak's claim is not that it involves planning which was not known to the general public (i.e. a conspiracy). My objection is that he's claiming something happened which the evidence indicates to me did not happen.
 
steve s said:
Not necessarily. The same basic situation occurred at the Scopes Trial. The ACLU was looking for a test case to overturn the Butler Act. John Scopes volunteered to violate the act.

Steve S.
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It may have been even goofier than that. Apparently the Dayton town fathers were looking for some media event to help put their town on the map. So they hatched the idea of challenging the Tennessee anti-evolution law (which most people thought was unenforceable anyway). Scopes agreed to do it because he was young and didn't have a family, so his life could be disrupted without undue hardship. In the end, Dayton got what they wanted, a big media circus.
 
steverino said:
The Rosa Parks incident was misleading. The myth is that she was fed up...
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No. That is not a myth. On that day, on that bus, being told to move, she was. Or so Rosa Parks, the one person who should know, has always maintained (unless my memory is failing me badly).

... the last straw ...
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No. That is not a myth. On that day, on that bus, being told to move, that was the last straw for her. Or so Rosa Parks, the one person who should know, has always maintained (unless my memory is failing me badly).


... spontan[e]ously protested...
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That, too, is not a myth. All the evidence is that she spontaneously decided at that moment that she'd had enough and was not going to move.

If you believe otherwise, please feel free to present any evidence you are aware of which shows that Parks had talked with others and said, Next time a driver asks me to move, I'm not moving.

Perhaps you'd like to start by looking up the passage in Rosa Parks' memoir which qayak claims refers to. If qayak is right that there were meetings in which Rosa Parks was selected to do this action, and that the passage from her memoirs is referring to such planning, that would be sufficient to show you are correct.

But so far as I am aware, the myth is this notion that Rosa Parks actions were not a spontaneous protest against one injustice too many. And if that's so, it's you and qayak who are buying into a myth.


... she, a random black citizen ...
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No, she was not a "random" black citizen. If people have been taught that, then it is indeed a misconception, and one worth correcting.

Rosa Parks was committed to the cause of civil rights. Because of that, she was more familiar than the average person -- black or white -- with the actions that others had taken to resist racism and segregation. That made her more likely than the average person to take the action she did when she'd finally had enough.


... Actually, the more I think about it, the more it does have the odor of conspiracy.
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Then perhaps you should have your sense of smell checked. It seems to be smelling things for which so far neither you nor qayak have produced any good evidence.

Let's be honest. It is uncomfortable to question this historic incident...
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No, it's not. Not for me, anyway. I have no problem questioning what happened. My main motivation in life is curiosity. If it turns out that what I have believed about Rosa Parks' actions is incorrect, it won't offend me in the slightest. I will enjoy the experience of learning that something which I had assumed to be true for many years turns out to be incorrect. That's part of what makes life so much fun.

If you feel uncomfortable questioning it, that's up to you. Although your assertions that the story of those events, as Rosa Parks and others have recounted them, is a myth, sounds rather like questioning to me. Seems to me you're trying to have your cake and eat it too -- engaging in a bit of conspiratorial talk about what really happened, and then saying that those who disagree are just uncomfortable talking about it... I'm not uncomfortable in the least. If you can back up your claim that there's a conspiratorial odor to Rosa Parks' actions, please do.
 
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