Dear Progressive Reader,

As more news continues to emerge about Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s cynical ploy to send two planes loaded with immigrants north to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, to create a burden for “sanctuary states,” it brings back memories of the similar action, almost exactly sixty years ago, by Southern segregationist officials to send Black people to the North on Greyhound buses. In April 1962, a front-page story in The New York Times announced “furor” over the plan. New York Senator Jacob Javits called it “shocking and shameful.” Senator Kenneth Keating called it “cruel and callous.” Both men were Republicans.

As NPR’s Code Switch podcast documented in an extensive February 2020 report, one woman from Little Rock, Arkansas, was taken to Hyannis, Massachussetts, in 1962. “She had been promised the Kennedy family would be waiting for her,” the story explained. “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.” This story was also chronicled in a 2004 academic article, published by Cambridge University, which called it “cheap trafficking in human misery.”

DeSantis is notably the most likely 2024 Republican presidential nominee if Donald Trump does not choose to run (and maybe even if he does, according to some polls). But in many ways, DeSantis, rather than ploughing new ground, is seeking to “out-Trump” Donald Trump himself. In April 2019, Trump had suggested the idea of sending immigrants on buses to sanctuary cities, but in September of 2022, Ron DeSantis has done it with airplanes. As Mathew Foresta reported in the August/September issue of The Progressive, DeSantis has taken similar action on the non-existent threats of “communism” and “woke” education in Florida’s schools. “In Florida, it seems, history is repeating itself. In the 1950s, anti-communist rhetoric was an important element of opposition to the civil rights movement,” Foresta writes. And as Mark Fiore illustrated last May, DeSantis waged a similar campaign against sexuality with his “Don’t Say Gay” bill, even targeting the notoriously rightwing Walt Disney Company (see Ed Rampell’s new film review). It is unclear whether DeSantis, and Texas governor Greg Abbott, have violated any laws in transporting people to other cities with lies and coercion. Some have even suggested possible violations by the two governors of “human trafficking and smuggling” prohibitions.

On our website this week, Mike Ervin writes about a Florida mother whose newborn child was taken from her due to her disability. The child was later returned to her after a long court battle and lawyers are now seeking to create policy changes to make sure that Florida does not violate the ADA and other federal laws in the future. Jeff Abbott looks at a rising “religious-narco state” in Guatemala. Abe Asher reports on the battle for self-determination that is the backdrop of the water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi. And Nick Gallagher describes the efforts of peace activists to counter the U.S. military’s use of video games as a recruitment tool.

Finally, in two important glimpses into history, Sheriffer Chisanga explains the complex reactions to the death of Queen Elizabeth II in Britain’s former colonies, such as her own country of Zambia, plus Ed Rampell conducts an exclusive interview with filmmaker Ken Burns about the making of his new three-part documentary on the Holocaust, which premieres on Public Television tomorrow night. “The time to stop the Holocaust is before it happens,” Burns tells him.

Also, today marks the twenty-first anniversary of the beginning of “Occupy Wall Street” in New York City. Arun Gupta provided this look back in 2014, called “How we surprised ourselves.” As Ruth Conniff wrote at the time, “We know the difference between a just society that believes in opportunity for everyone and an oligarchy that enforces a caste system where the rich get richer and the poor are stuck. These are fundamental American values. The banks have been allowed to abandon them. But the citizens have not.”

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,

Norman Stockwell
Publisher

P.S. - In case you missed it, the video of our annual Fighting Bob Fest is available for viewing online via our YouTube channel. As one viewer wrote, the “program was not only well put together but inspiring.”

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