It’s actually a little of both.
The shooting wasn’t planned in the false flag sense.
But there was certainly advanced planning by the Left on how to exploit such a situation once it happened.
The 1950s and 60s Civil Rights Movement was great with this. The Bus Boycott was planned long before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. In fact, there was a previous candidate, a young girl who did the same before Parks. Unfortunately for her she was pregnant out of wedlock, so the Civil Rights leaders dropped her and waited for a better candidate. Who they got in Parks.
This is all laid out in “Eyes on the Prize”. And yes, what Parks did was courageous and the boycott against a great evil completely justified. But any discussion of it should also include the excellent organizational advance planning involved.
“The 1950s and 60s Civil Rights Movement was great with this. The Bus Boycott was planned long before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. In fact, there was a previous candidate, a young girl who did the same before Parks. Unfortunately for her she was pregnant out of wedlock, so the Civil Rights leaders dropped her and waited for a better candidate. Who they got in Parks.”
I read a book about the 50s. There were several chapters about the civil rights movement that mentioned what you described. MLK and the other leaders knew that if they just waited that eventually somebody would do something so horrific that it made staying neutral impossible.
The book also mentioned that the civil rights leaders looked for situations that had an easy to hate villain, like Bull Conner or Lawrence Rainey.