Rosa Parks was not a tired seamstress who spontaneously refused to give up her seat. She was a trained activist with years of experience in the NAACP, a graduate of the Highlander Folk School's civil disobedience workshops, and a strategic choice by Montgomery's civil rights leadership to be the face of a carefully planned legal challenge to segregation.

This episode recovers the radical Parks from the sanitized myth, tracing her decades of activism before the bus, the strategic planning behind the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the fifty years of continued organizing that the popular story leaves out.

• Parks's years of NAACP activism and her training at the Highlander Folk School before the arrest
• The strategic decision to use her case — and not earlier cases — as the test for segregation law
• The Montgomery Bus Boyco ...