[In the 1960s, Southern organizations tried sending African
Americans to Northern states in a “cheap” PR stunt designed to
embarrass and expose Northern liberals. It didn’t work.]
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A LESSON FROM THE PAST FOR RON DESANTIS  
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Joshua Zeitz
September 18, 2022
Politico
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_ In the 1960s, Southern organizations tried sending African
Americans to Northern states in a “cheap” PR stunt designed to
embarrass and expose Northern liberals. It didn’t work. _

Victoria Bell of Little Rock, Ark., leaves a bus with her 11 children
after a trip from Little Rock to Hyannis, Mass., sponsored by a white
segregationist group, May 22, 1962. , Frank C. Curtin/AP Photo

 

In the spring of 1962, David Harris, a short-order cook from Little
Rock, Ark., arrived in Hyannis, Mass., a small but tony vacation
village located on Cape Cod, best known then and now as the location
of the Kennedy family’s summer compound.

Harris, who was Black, traveled to Hyannis in search of work, with
funding and encouragement from Little Rock’s White Citizens’
Council, one of many local organizations comprised of middle-class
white professionals who, while dedicated to the preservation of
segregation, styled themselves as the respectable, moderate
alternative to the Ku Klux Klan.

Earlier that year, council members in New Orleans and Little Rock
dreamed up a public relations stunt: They would offer Black
Southerners bus fare and relocation costs to undertake “Reverse
Freedom Rides” to Northern cities, where, they told their victims,
good jobs and housing awaited them. The idea was to embarrass and
expose the hypocrisy of Northern liberals who cheered
the _real_ Freedom Rides, but whom, they suspected, would blanch at
receiving thousands of Black transplants in their own communities.
Harris was just the first of roughly 100 Black Southerners whom the
councils shipped to Hyannis.

In this particular case, the Citizens’ Council had a specific target
in mind: Edward M. Kennedy, the president’s younger brother, who was
campaigning for a seat in the United States Senate. “President
Kennedy’s brother assured you a grand reception to Massachusetts,”
the council’s leadership assured them. “Good jobs, housing, etc.
are promised.”

Kennedy, a summer resident of Hyannis, called the segregationists’
bluff: He organized a reception for Harris, comprised of local
residents who extended a warm welcome.

The story of the Reverse Freedom Rides assumed new meaning this week
when persons seemingly associated with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis
promised [[link removed]] a group
of Venezuelan asylum seekers that good jobs and housing, as well as
expedited work permits, awaited them in Boston. The migrants were
transported instead, without their knowledge, to Martha’s Vineyard,
in an attempt to surprise and expose the hypocrisy of liberals who
oppose the Republican Party’s hard-line immigration stance.

A woman, who is part of a group of immigrants that had just arrived,
holds a child as they are fed outside St. Andrews Episcopal Church,
Wednesday Sept. 14, 2022, in Edgartown, Mass., on Martha's Vineyard. |
Ray Ewing/Vineyard Gazette via AP

The ploy didn’t work out exactly as planned. Residents of the small
island warmly embraced the asylum seekers, much as the citizens of
Hyannis welcomed David Harris some 60 years earlier.

The two stories share some similar characteristics. In both cases,
elected officials attempted to to pin their critics in a corner. In
neither case did the ploy immediately succeed, though today’s story
has yet to play out.

IN MID-1961, THE CONGRESS OF RACIAL EQUALITY organized a series of
Freedom Rides in which interracial groups rode Greyhound buses through
Southern states in an effort to test the efficacy of the Supreme
Court’s ban on segregated facilities serving interstate travel. The
Freedom Riders famously encountered frequent and brutal backlash from
local residents and law enforcement officials, who deployed terrorism
and illegal arrests and imprisonment. The Freedom Rides, still in
force a year later, proved a costly embarrassment to Southern elected
officials and business leaders, who saw the region’s violent
lawlessness splashed across papers around the world.

The Freedom Rides came at a moment when Southern violence, generally,
threatened to become a drag on the region’s economic prospects and
posed a political conundrum for the administration in Washington,
which competed with the Soviet Union for the loyalty of former
colonial subjects in Asia and Africa, most of them non-white. When an
angry mob held a group of Black worshipers hostage inside the First
Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala., the columnist Murray Kempton
captured popular opinion in the North and beyond when he caustically
remarked, “These are proud, brave and faithful people and some of
them even found time to worry about the wives of pillars of the White
Citizens’ Councils who were in danger of having to cook their own
breakfasts in the morning.”

The white South had a PR problem.

Enter George Singlemann, a member of the Greater New Orleans
Citizens’ Council and aide to Leander Perez, the city’s leading
segregationist — a man so extreme in his anti-Black and antisemitic
prejudices that the local Catholic bishop excommunicated him.
Singlemann’s idea was simple: White liberals in the North, he
maintained, were hypocrites, and their hypocrisy should be exposed.
Safe in their white urban and suburban enclaves, they could look down
their noses at Southern segregationists because they didn’t have to
live, work and go to school with African Americans.

By busing thousands of Black Southerners to Northern communities, the
Citizens’ Council could bring the civil rights movement home to the
North. Northern whites, he surmised, were no more interested in
sharing their towns and suburbs with Black people than were Southern
whites. It was with this sentiment in mind that the Mississippi House
of Representatives passed a nonbinding resolution that proposed to
“redistribute dissatisfied Negro population to other areas where the
political leadership constantly clamors for equal rights for all
persons without regard to the constitution, judicial precedent and
rights of the states.”

Throughout the South, Citizens’ Councils as far and wide as Macon,
Ga., and Selma, Ala., Shreveport, La., and Jackson, Miss., lied with
impunity, assuring Black residents that jobs and housing awaited them
in their new home states. This was never the case, particularly on
Cape Cod, where the off-season unemployment rate normally hovered near
20 percent. One man whom the Citizens’ Council had explicitly
promised a job and home on the Cape told reporters that he felt
hoodwinked. “I’d like to get my hands on those two men who shot me
full of baloney about coming up here,” he fumed.

David Harris, the first "Reverse Freedom Rider" from Little Rock,
Ark., to arrive in Hyannis, Mass., prepares spareribs in little
restaurant he opened in Hyannis, July 14, 1962. | Frank C. Curtin/AP
Photo

In the end analysis, the plan proved too clever by half. White
political and business leaders never fully committed to funding it and
were divided on the question of its efficacy. In a decade when
approximately 400 Black Southerners migrated _daily_ to the North,
voluntarily and on their own steam, in search of a more hospitable
political and economic environment, the Reverse Freedom Rides
ultimately resettled about 200 people over the course of one year.

Some white mayors in the North complained that their communities
already suffered high unemployment and a housing crunch, perhaps
proving Singlemann’s point. But for the most part, Northerners
pointed to the Reverse Freedom Rides as yet another example of the
South’s deplorability. It was “a cheap trafficking in human misery
on the part of Southern racists,” the _New
York_ _Times_ editorialized. The governor of Ohio likened it to
“Hitler and his Nazis forcing Jews out of Germany.” Northern
senators denounced the White Citizens’ Councils as “cruel and
callous,” and demonstrating a “shameful lack of judgement.” When
asked to weigh in, President John F. Kennedy, normally restrained in
his condemnation of the white South, responded that “it’s a rather
cheap exercise.”

Even many white Southern civic leaders joined the chorus of criticism.
The _Richmond Times-Dispatch_ rued that “we shall be open to the
imputation that we are not concerned with human problems, but rather
with propaganda.” In Little Rock, the _Arkansas Gazette_ argued
that the scheme had “never been condoned by the better thinking
people here” and argued that “these people” — Black community
members — “are our responsibility, unless they choose to leave on
their own initiative.” In New Orleans, a popular radio program
denounced the campaign as “sick sensationalism bordering on
moronic.”

Short-lived and ultimately a failure, the Reverse Freedom Rides did
little to boost the South’s reputation and, at least on the
margins, probably caused it more harm.

THE IRONY, OF COURSE, was that the White Citizens’ Council didn’t
really need to pull a cheap stunt. The North already had a large Black
population, one that had been growing in leaps and bounds since the
start of World War II. To be sure, in the North, Black people could
vote and build political power. But a complex thicket of
discrimination in housing, jobs, credit, banking and policing — and
in the provision of public services such as education and
infrastructure — rendered Black people second-class citizens in most
Northern localities. By the mid-1960s, urban unrest and contests over
school and housing desegregation would lay bare these inequalities.

Singlemann wasn’t wrong, per se, when he observed a certain
comfortable hypocrisy on the part of Northern liberals. He was just
“moronic” in the way he went about trying to expose it.

As was the case 60 years ago, last week, politicians used a group of
vulnerable people to change the subject — to shift the political
debate to more comfortable ground.

Are many people who reside far from the border hypocrites on the
question of immigration? Probably, in some ways. Large numbers of
immigrants live in blue cities and states, many of them undocumented,
and the citizens who live in these places benefit from cheap labor and
services. Whether in Massachusetts or Florida, undocumented residents
face profound challenges and disadvantages, even as they constitute a
critical part of the regional economy.

But that’s not quite the point. Neither was it the point in 1962.
The Reverse Freedom Rides were not a constructive attempt to address a
broad political and social problem. They were, as President Kennedy
said, “a rather cheap exercise.”

_JOSHUA ZEITZ, a _Politico Magazine_ contributing editor, is the
author of _Building the Great Society: Inside Lyndon Johnson's White
House
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Follow him __@joshuamzeitz_ [[link removed]]_._

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* bussing
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* Immigrants
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* Racism
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* civil rights movement
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* White citizen councils
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* Ron DeSantis
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* Politics
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* CORE
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* Freedom Rides
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* Propaganda
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