Thread by @NPR

It was 1962.

Southern segregationists, fuming over the civil rights movement, hatched a plan to lash out at Northern liberals: They tricked some 200 Black Southerners into moving North with false promises of opportunity.

There are dark parallels today.
npr.org/2019/12/10/786…

The stunt became known as the Reverse Freedom Rides.

For the segregationists, the idea was simple: When large numbers of Black people showed up on Northerners’ doorsteps, they wouldn’t be able to accommodate them, wouldn’t want them, and their hypocrisy would be revealed.

Those machinations may sound strikingly familiar.

GOP governors have been sending migrants, with no warning, to Democrat-led cities to protest a rise in illegal immigration under President Biden.

Rarely are officials there to meet them. Many say they went under false pretenses.

The origins of the 1962 segregationists' plot began when Black and white activists — Freedom Riders — crisscrossed the South by Greyhound with a common goal: integrating buses.

The segregationists believed FRs only wanted to embarrass the South and win Black votes for Democrats.

The segregationists' plan? Weaponize the FRs bus strategy.

They recruited the help of local Citizens’ Councils — the KKK “without hoods and the masks” — who were ad masterminds: targeting single mothers, welfare recipients and prison inmates to accept bus tickets to the North.

The segregationists used the press to drum up buzz about the scheme.

But they weren’t transparent about their motives.

One segregationist leader, Ned Touchstone, said, "Is it a crime to help people who come to you and say, 'Boss man, I want to go to the North'?"

The language used by elected officials today has echoes of 1962.

Compare, for example, what Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said about paying to fly migrants to Martha’s Vineyard with the statements made in 1962 by George Singelmann, the architect behind the rides.

The Citizens’ Council plan didn’t quite work out as planned.

They’d envisioned sending thousands North — but the reality amounted to a couple hundred people.

They boarded buses to New York, New Hampshire, Indiana, Idaho, Minnesota and elsewhere.

Lela Mae Williams was one of those unwitting pawns.

She and her kids were among the 96 who got dropped off at a makeshift bus stop near Kennedys’ “summer White House” on Cape Cod.

She’d been promised a good job and housing — and a presidential welcome.

Those were all lies.

The country soon was engaged in debate over whether to intervene.

Illinois’ governor compared the Reverse Freedom Rides to Nazis deporting Jews, a Mississippi congressman delighted in watching the North squirm, and President Kennedy largely avoided the topic.

But the prevailing sentiment was that the rides exposed the callousness of the Southern segregationists, not the hypocrisy of Northern liberals.

Private citizens across the U.S. wrote to offer support. Some offered to house riders in their towns. Others wrote checks.

In Cape Cod, religious leaders, a local NAACP chapter and concerned residents rallied to help, convincing a community college to open its dorms to arrivals.

"We called them refugees. ... They were homeless, broke, tired and afraid. We had to help them," a local reverend said.

By the fall of 1962, the Reverse Freedom Rides fizzled out unceremoniously.

But riders remained 1,000 miles from home with "no money, knowing nobody.”

"It was one of the most inhuman things I have ever seen," recalled Margaret Moseley, a longtime civil rights activist.

The story of the Reverse Freedom Rides is a reminder of how bystanders can foil a racist plot, historian Clive Webb said: "The white conservatives ... actually underestimated the decency of many ordinary people."

Read more about the plot's legacy:
npr.org/2019/12/10/786…