The NAACP not only staged events, it scripted them. The plaintiffs it hand-picked to carry them out were chosen for their sympathy and skill. One example is Rosa Parks. Over decades, Black History Month has taught millions of schoolchildren to think of her as a “tired seamstress,” whose need to rest her weary legs in the white section of a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus unleashed a storm of spontaneous protest. But she was considerably more than that. Five months before the Montgomery bus boycott began, she had attended the Highlander Folk School in New Market, Tennessee, an academy that the
...more
