re: Was Rosa Parks was selected for her role after Claudette Colvin deemed not a good icon?

I wouldn’t call this common knowledge, but that’s more of an indictment of the average person’s education than it is reflective of an attempt at obfuscating the truth. For anyone whose education about the civil rights movement spent more than a paragraph on the bus boycott, it’s widely known that Rosa Parks’ arrest wasn’t an accident. Claudette’s arrest planted the seed for the idea, leaders in the movement developed a plan, Baton Rouge was chosen for a test run for a bus boycott, and when the variables were right, they set their trap with a trained member of the movement as bait. And as soon as the bait was taken, all the planning snapped into action.

If the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice, it’s rarely by accident.