By sending immigrant refugees to northern states on false claims of work and housing, Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott are mirroring the 1962 playbook of the southern White Citizens’ Council who conducted “Reverse Freedom Rides” protesting desegregation by sending Black citizens to northern cities, with false claims of work and housing.
This is why the GQP is so determined to forbid schools from teaching anything more than a whitewashed American history.
If one does not know the repeating patterns of history, it is hard to know how to combat what is happening in the present--or how present day actions might be a part of a larger, more threatening movement.
Alex Wagner looks back at the "Reverse Freedom Rides" of 1962 in which segregationists tricked Black people in the South into being bused to northern cities, and draws parallels to the latest cruel political stunt by Republican governors sending migrants to northern cities with the intention of creating chaos.
In 1962, KKK Concerned Citizens' Councils in the southern US launched a campaign to erode northern support for the Civil Rights Movement. "Reverse Freedom Rides" bused poor Black families, often single mothers with children, to northern cities with false promises of jobs, housing, aid.
This campaign was a backlash (there were many, some violent) against Black Freedom Riders challenging segregation on interstate buses.
Southern segregationists resented the Freedom Riders who came by bus to protest Jim Crow laws. So in 1962, they tricked black Southerners in
The JFK Library just tweeted a few clippings "Reverse Freedom Rides" :
Note the two-pronged strategy of pressuring Black Louisianans to leave by slashing state aid programs, on the assumption that only Black people were poor.* This impacts residents to this day.
*(Of course, many were poor due to the exploitation of sharecroppers, Jim Crow laws, and the now-forgotten Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, a Katrina x10 event made infinitely worse for Black victims by the abuses of plantation owners, white politicians, the police and National Guard, and even the Red Cross. But that's another post.)
TL;DR: white supremacists got called out for "traffic in human lives" 60 years ago when they invented the "Reverse Freedom Rides" as a plot to expose northerners' supposed hypocrisy in supporting Civil Rights.
Abbot and DeSantis have added one new twist to this strategy:
Texas county sheriff says it seems evident that asylum seekers had been ‘lured’ to travel to Martha’s Vineyard ‘under false pretenses’
A criminal investigation has been launched in Texas into whether dozens of asylum seekers were illegally flown from the state to Martha’s Vineyard, as new evidence continues to emerge suggesting they were misled.
The Bexar county sheriff, Javier Salazar, said on Monday that his office was investigating the flights, chartered on behalf of the Florida Governor, Ron DeSantis, which brought dozens of migrants to the island in Massachusetts.
While Salazar did not name possible subjects in the inquiry, he said: “Everybody on this call knows who those names are already,” according to NBC News.
Salazar did not discuss what specific laws might have been broken, but said it seemed evident that asylum seekers had been “lured under false pretenses”, with a recruiter given a “bird dog fee” to gather dozens of people who were outside a San Antonio migrant resource center.
“They were promised work,” said Salazar. “They were promised the solution to several of their problems.”
Many of the asylum seekers were given pamphlets advertising cash assistance, help with housing, job training and other resources if they came to Massachusetts.
But the promised benefits are only available for refugees, a specific categorization under US immigration law that the asylum seekers do not currently fall under.
Lawyers for Civil Rights, a Boston-based group representing 30 of the recent arrivals, shared links and images of the brochures on Twitter.
“This is additional evidence that shows in writing that those false representations were made in order to induce our clients to travel,” said Oren Sellstrom, the group’s litigation director, to NBC News.
The group has also called for a federal and state criminal investigation into the chartered flights.
A spokesperson from DeSantis’s office defended the flights and the brochures, saying that migrants were sent to “greener pastures” and to places that had more resources than Bexar county.
The flights are just one instance of a broader pattern of Republican officials sending thousands of asylum seekers to predominantly Democratic-voting areas, a stunt that Democrats have slammed as illegal and wrong.
“There is a process that is in place. And what they are doing is an illegal stunt, is a political stunt,” said the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre.
Southern segregationists resented the Freedom Riders who came by bus to protest Jim Crow laws. So in 1962, they tricked black Southerners into migrating north and transformed families' lives forever.
[Thanks to Steven Jennings]
WHERE DID ABBOTT AND DESANTIS GET THE IDEA TO USE ASYLEES AS POLITICAL PAWNS IN THEIR STUNTS?
Come on. You ought to know. Trumpublicans Abbott and DeSantis are using the old Dixie playbook their segregationist predecessors wrote back during era of the Freedom Rides.Cruelty is the point! Use poor folk seeking a better life as political pawns to entertain their own bigoted supporters.The old segs of the Citizens' Councils (Kluxers without the hoods) sent unwitting and hopeful Blacks right to the Kennedys in Massachusetts. The cruelty was the point, just to give a high to their supporters.
The “reverse freedom rides” of 1962 were meant to provoke Northern politicians, and have drawn comparisons to the recent flights of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard.
