White Supremacist Pleads Guilty to Burning Down the Tennessee Center Where Rosa Parks Trained Before the Montgomery Bus Boycott
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A white supremacist who burned down the main office of the Highlander Research and Education Center — the Tennessee institution where Rosa Parks trained six months before she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus — pleaded guilty on Monday to federal arson charges. Regan Prater admitted to setting the March 2019 fire that caused more than $1.2 million in damage and destroyed decades of irreplaceable civil rights archives at the New Market, Tennessee center. Under a plea agreement, he faces up to 20 years in federal prison, with sentencing scheduled for September in Knoxville.
Prater did not just attack a building. He attacked a cornerstone of the Black Freedom Struggle. The Highlander Center trained generations of organizers, including Rosa Parks, John Lewis, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Parks attended a workshop there on integration in 1955, and she always credited Highlander with strengthening her resolve as an activist. Two years later, she returned with Dr. King for the center's 25th anniversary, where King delivered a keynote address on achieving freedom through nonviolence. The fire that Prater set destroyed artifacts, speeches, and documents spanning the entire arc of the civil rights era — materials that can never be recovered.
Federal investigators linked Prater to the crime through his own posts in white supremacist group chats. Using the screen name "Rooster," Prater described in private messages exactly how he started the blaze — with what he called "a sparkler bomb and some Napalm." A white-power symbol, identified by authorities as a "triple cross," was spray-painted on the pavement near the fire. That same symbol was found on a firearm used in the Christchurch, New Zealand mosque massacre that killed 51 people just two weeks before the Highlander arson.
The arson was not the only charge Prater faced. He also pleaded guilty to attempting to aid Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, by trying to provide them with personal information about individuals he believed were connected to the Israeli government. This additional charge expanded the case well beyond domestic white supremacist violence into the territory of international terrorism support.
Prater already had a federal arson conviction on his record. In June 2019 — just three months after he burned the Highlander Center — he set fire to an adult novelty store in East Tennessee. At the scene, investigators recovered his cellphone, which contained video footage of him inside the store lighting an accelerant. He served five years in federal prison for that crime and was ordered to pay $106,000 in restitution. He was arrested in connection with the Highlander arson in April 2025, more than six years after the attack.
The pattern here is not complicated. A known white supremacist with a documented history of setting fires walked free long enough to rack up another arson before authorities connected him to the Highlander attack. It took six years and an FBI review of encrypted chat screenshots to charge a man who spray-painted a hate symbol at the scene and bragged about the method in group messages. Black institutions and Black history remain targets, and the lag between the crime and the consequence tells its own story about how seriously these attacks are prioritized.
The Highlander Center still stands and still operates. But the archives that burned — the speeches, the organizing documents, the physical record of a movement that changed this country — are gone. What Prater destroyed cannot be rebuilt or reprinted. It was the living memory of a people's fight for freedom, and a white supremacist turned it to ash on purpose.