DeSantis using the 1960s Segregationists "playbook" ? Sure looks like it…

(by Gabrielle Emanuel, NPR)

(Lela Mae Williams and seven of her nine children on arrival in Hyannis.)

After three days on a Greyhound bus, Lela Mae Williams was just an hour from her destination—Hyannis, Mass.—when she asked the bus driver to pull over. She needed to change into her finest clothes. She had been promised the Kennedy family would be waiting for her.

It was late on a Wednesday afternoon, nearly 60 years ago, when that Greyhound bus from Little Rock, Ark., pulled into Hyannis. It slowed to a stop near the summer home of President John F. Kennedy and his family. When the doors opened, Lela Mae and her nine youngest children stepped onto the pavement.

The Martha's Vineyard migrant flight has echoes of a dark past:
Reporters' microphones pointed at her, their cameras trained on her family. The photographs in the next day's newspaper show Lela Mae looking immaculate. In an elegant black dress, a triple string of pearls and a white hat, she was dressed to start a new life.

"She was going to have a job, and she was going to be able to support her family," one of Lela Mae's daughters, Betty Williams, remembered in a recent interview. Before coming north to Massachusetts, Lela Mae had been promised a good job, good housing and a presidential welcome.

But President Kennedy was not there to meet her. And there was no job or permanent housing waiting for her in Hyannis. Instead, Lela Mae and the others were unwitting pawns in a segregationist game.

"It was one of the most inhuman things I have ever seen," recalled Margaret Moseley, a longtime civil rights activist in Hyannis, in a televised interview a few years before her death.

Fuming over the civil rights movement, Southern segregationists had concocted a way to retaliate against Northern liberals. In 1962, they tricked about 200 African Americans from the South into moving north. The idea was simple: When large numbers of African Americans showed up on Northern doorsteps, Northerners would not be able to accommodate them. They would not want them, and their hypocrisy would be exposed.

The Reverse Freedom Rides have largely disappeared from the country's collective memory. The scheme almost never appears in history books and is little-known even in Hyannis, the primary target of the ploy. But some hear echoes of that segregationist past in America's present. And for the families that came to the North based on a lie, the journey has cast an enduring shadow on their lives.

The segregationists' game

In the summer of 1961, black and white activists, who became known as the Freedom Riders, boarded Greyhound buses and crisscrossed the South with the goal of integrating interstate buses and bus terminals. When the buses pulled into Southern cities, they were greeted by mobs armed with bats and firebombs.

(Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., civil rights leader, shakes hands with Paul Dietrich just before a bus of Freedom Riders left Montgomery, Ala., May 24, 1961.
AP)

Southern segregationists, who were still furious over the school desegregation fights that dominated the 1950s, saw the Freedom Riders as sanctimonious provocateurs. In a television interview from the time, Ned Touchstone of Louisiana—a spokesperson for a local segregationist group—said the North was "sending down busloads of people here with the express purpose of violating our laws, fomenting confusion, trying to destroy 100 years of workable tradition and good relations between the races."

Touchstone and other segregationists thought there was no way the Freedom Riders or their fellow Northern liberals actually cared about integrating interstate transit or advancing civil rights. Instead, they were convinced it was a strategy to embarrass the South and capture black votes for the Democratic party.

The segregationists decided to answer the Freedom Rides with the "Reverse Freedom Rides." They would use the same weapon—Greyhound buses—and send African Americans to Northern cities.

"For many years, certain politicians, educators and certain religious leaders have used the white people of the South as a whipping boy, to put it mildly, to further their own ends and their political campaigns," said Amis Guthridge, a lawyer from Arkansas who helped spearhead the Reverse Freedom Rides. "We're going to find out if people like Ted Kennedy ... and the Kennedys, all of them, really do have an interest in the Negro people, really do have a love for the Negro."

The segregationists tapped into a network of local groups called Citizens' Councils. Despite the sanitized name, the councils were essentially "the Ku Klux Klan without the hoods and the masks," said historian Clive Webb.

Webb, a professor at the University of Sussex in England, specializes in studying racists. Fifteen years ago, he published the first—and still the only—major academic article on the Reverse Freedom Riders.

The Citizens' Councils attempted to cloak their racism in respectability, Webb said. They held meetings in fancy downtown hotels and wore suits and ties."They could be members of the police force," said Webb. "They could be bankers, businessmen and the like."

These men masterminded an advertising effort, with flyers and radio commercials, to attract African Americans to accept bus tickets, bought with money the councils had raised. Their ideal recruits were single mothers with many children, and men who had gotten entangled in the criminal justice system.

"They targeted people who were either welfare recipients or prison inmates," said Webb. "People who were placing a burden, as they saw it, on public resources."

Then, they sought media attention. George Singelmann of Louisiana, who claimed credit for the original idea, had once worked in a newsroom. He made sure to alert the press.

"Negro 'Ride' Plan Stirs New Furor" read a front-page headline in The New York Times. The Boston Herald added, "14 More Jobless Negroes Sent North." As spring rolled into summer and then fall, nearly daily articles chronicled the scheme as it unfolded.

Relishing the coverage, Guthridge said in an interview, "If it takes two weeks, two months, two years, five or 10 years, we will continue it until the white people up there ... tell those politicians we are tired of using the American Negro for a pawn just for their votes."

(The Reverse Freedom Riders Eddie Rose, Almer Payton and Willie Ramsey are shown with Citizens Council director George Singlemann.
Jim Bourdier/AP)

But when talking to reporters, the segregationists were not always so transparent about their motives. They offered ever-changing justifications for the scheme.

Ned Touchstone said his primary motivation was "to bring about a more equitable distribution of the colored population." He added that African Americans were begging for assistance."Is it a crime to help people who come to you and say, 'Boss man, I want to go to the North'?" he said.

Singelmann cited American tradition as the rationale for the Reverse Freedom Rides."Our forefathers put everything in their possession into covered wagons and went out across the plains. In those days, it was rugged Americanism. Now today, for some reason or other, it's being frowned upon. I don't understand it," he said.

The Citizens Councils' plan didn't quite work how they had wanted; they'd envisioned sending thousands north, but the reality amounted to a couple hundred. Those folks boarded buses to New York, New Hampshire, Indiana, Idaho, Minnesota, California and elsewhere. Lela Mae Williams and her children were part of the 96 unwitting Reverse Freedom Riders who arrived at a makeshift bus stop closest to the Kennedys' "summer White House" on Cape Cod. They were far, far away from their rural Arkansas home.

The Sunday after the school year was finished, two cars came to pick up Lela Mae and her nine youngest children—ages two to 14—and take them 150 miles to Little Rock's bus terminal. (Betty would follow on a different bus later that summer.) Amis Guthridge himself drove them, and bought the children ice cream and root beer.

The segregationist lawyer had alerted the local news outlets that he'd be holding a press conference when they arrived. At the bus terminal, he stood at the center of a small crew of journalists. Ernie Dumas, a young reporter for The Arkansas Gazette, was there.

"He made a little grinning speech," Dumas, now 81, recalled. Guthridge, pointed to the family and said, "These fine, fine people. This wonderful woman and her fine little children," Dumas remembered. He thinks he saw Guthridge wink at his fellow segregationists, who sat off to the side.

As the Reverse Freedom Riders adjusted to their new lives, the country around them debated whether to intervene.

Illinois' governor compared the Reverse Freedom Rides to Nazis deporting Jews. A Mississippi congressman delighted in watching the North squirm, saying, "They want to 'free' the Negro in the South, but want to shun responsibility for him once he has been 'freed.'" Gov. John Volpe of Massachusetts pledged to help, but worried his welfare budget would be depleted. He asked the federal government to step in.

President Kennedy largely tried to avoid the topic. When worried and enraged citizens wrote letters to the White House, the standard reply was that the situation was "deplorable" but "there is no violation of law." When Kennedy was asked about it at a news conference, he paused before saying, "Well I think it's, uh, a rather cheap exercise in ...." He hesitated, stumbled and tried to dodge the question for more than a minute.

Conversely, there were those who wrote hate mail to the Refugee Relief Committee about how the Bible calls for segregation, and even sending gag gifts—including a live opossum and a goat to Hyannis for the Reverse Freedom Riders to eat.

But the prevailing sentiment was that the Reverse Freedom Rides exposed the callousness of the Southern segregationists, not the hypocrisy of Northern liberals. Private citizens from across the country wrote to offer their support. Some suggested housing the Reverse Freedom Riders in their own towns and homes; others wrote checks. The first donation arrived from Little Rock, where many of the Reverse Freedom Rides originated.

By the late fall, the scheme fizzled out unceremoniously. Funds that the Citizens' Councils had raised were drying up, and riders were hard to recruit. Betty Williams was the very last Reverse Freedom Rider to arrive in Hyannis, disembarking from her Greyhound Bus on October 17.

Echoes of the past in America's present

In April 2019, historian Clive Webb was cooking in his kitchen with the radio playing when a news story came on. He paused as he heard President Donald Trump explain his idea of putting undocumented immigrants on buses and dropping them off in so-called "sanctuary cities."

"They want more people in the sanctuary cites. Well, we'll give them more people. We can give them a lot. We can give them an unlimited supply," Trump declared at a news conference. "And let's see if they're so happy. They're always saying, 'We have open arms.' Let's see if they have open arms."

At the kitchen counter, Webb said, he thought back to segregationists like Amis Guthridge who had said the same of the Kennedy family and black people. "In 1962, what was happening was the actions of a political fringe group," said Webb, "And in 2019, it's the federal government." (There is no evidence that the Trump administration has enacted the policy, and the White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

According to Webb, the story of the Reverse Freedom Rides is not a tale of how the United States is battling the same foes forever. Instead, he said, it is a reminder of how bystanders can foil a racist plot. "The white conservatives, who were behind that campaign then, actually underestimated the decency of many ordinary people," Webb said.

bookerdana · M

@bijouxbroussard Moot question....from the KKK to John Birch to The Know Nothing party,George Wallace And Nixons "Southern Strategy " they are rotten to the core

bijouxbroussard · F

@bookerdana They are. And the sad part is, they’re not trying to improve. They attempt to justify—or hide. Their only regret is being exposed.

bookerdana · M

@bijouxbroussard They could hardly not be exposed in this caper...they evidently feel it appeals to voters as they ramp up their inevitable bid for the Republican nomination