I always say that people will tell me the news I need to know. Even when I’m minding my business (and drinking water – yes I really do be out here minding my business and staying hydrated. It’s why I look so good for my age.), the news people want me to know will be dropped right into my lap.
No less than 3 (and never forget three IS the magic number, kids) people mentioned the exact same news story to me.
Which is great, IF ONLY I DID CURRENT NEWS YOU GUYS.
But. Yannow. I don’t.
The thing about HISTORY repeating itself IS THAT IT HAPPENS IN THE PAST.
But, while I’m here, let’s talk about “Reverse Freedom Rides of 1962”
Lemme set the scene for y’all:
It’s 2022 1962 and the racists are BIG MAD. Black people had successfully desegregated schools in the 1950’s and were NOW trying to integrate interstate buses and bus terminals by boarding Greyhound buses and crisscrossing the South. To be met with baseball bats and firebombs, and yet segregationists saw these Freedom Riders as troublemakers. A spokesperson for the local KKK ahem, I mean, SEGREGATIONIST GROUP said that the North was sending down people causing confusion and trying to destroy 100 years of racism and racial terror “workable tradition and good relations between the races”
I… am just leaving space for y’all to think about what kinda “workable tradition and good relations” they had when a random white person could make you get up outcha seat because they want to sit down and you could be lynched for just looking at a white person and lawd help you if you told a white person no. :::hears Rosa Parks by Outkast playing faintly in the distance:::
Back to my story, with one correction. I ain’t fixin’ to use a fancy $5 word like “Segregationist” when racist is right here, and easier to type.
SO. THE RACISTS thought to themselves ain’t NO WAY these liberals really care about integrating interstate transit or civil rights. This is about making them look foolish and getting black votes.
[Narrator: They did NOT NEED liberal help looking stupid and getting black voters to vote for Democratic party. They were doing fine all by themselves.]
But the Republicans/Racists had an idea! They could do Freedom Rides too! But in reverse! And they would use the same “weapon”: they were gonna send migrants Black people to the North!
These republicans/racists (of yesterday AND today apparently) tapped into a network of local groups were called Citizens’ Councils. These councils were essentially the KKK without their hoods and masks. They held meetings in fancy hotels and wore suits and ties, yannow, for respectability. “They could be members of the police force (SO YOU’RE SAYING POLICE ARE RACIST*?)”. Or bankers, businessmen OR THE GOVENOR OF FUCKING FLORIDA, and the like.
So they advertised, with flyers and radio commercials to attract Black people to accept bus tickets, bought with the money from the state budget the councils had raised. Their ideal recruits were single mothers with many children and men who had been entangled in the criminal “justice” system. They targeted “people who were placing a burden, as they saw it, on public resources” [But I guess using welfare money to build a volleyball stadium is different]. They sought media coverage, saying that the primary motivation was to “bring a more equitable distribution of the colored population” which is WILD considering when they were trying to leave, y’all were stopping them. But I mean, WHO ARE ME TO SAY? I am simply the great grand-daughter of an enslaved woman, grand-daughter of a sharecropper and the daughter of a woman who was literally detained for trying to integrate her local separate but unequal high school.
ANYWAY. The Citizens Councils’ plan didn’t quite work how they wanted. They’d pictured thousands and it ended up being a few hundred that boarded buses to New York, New Hampshire, Indiana, Idaho, Minnesota, California and elsewhere. One of the elsewheres was Massachusetts, near VP Harris’ residence the Kennedys’ “summer White House”, talmbout the Kennedys and those fine folks will take care of them and give them a better life. And did.
Hearing media reports that Reverse Freedom Riders were on the way, religious leaders, the local NAACP chapter and concerned residents teamed up to help. They convinced the local community college to open its dorms to the new arrivals. The local jail provided the bedding. And when the summer semester started and students came back to the dorms, they got the governor to lobby for nearby Otis Air Force Base to open its barracks.
Turns out 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 trick into leaving their lives behind for racist BS recruit.
And. Scene.
OKAY. So now in your head I want you to make flashing forward to the present noises (or. if you need a little help, try this sound – you’re welcome). We are now back in Twenty thousand and Twenty-two. And I’m back in the Current Times that I don’t discuss because HISTORY is not about what happened Today. But if I *did* I would talk about how racists never learn which is why you should always look at what the racists do to black and indigenous folks because they’ll do the exact same thing to the next “undesirables” history always repeats itself.
BUT MY JOB (that I gave myself) is to talk about HISTORY. And I did. And know I’m going to go back to minding my business AND DRINKING WATER because water is life and that’s probably why all the places where the water supply is fucked belongs to places where the population is largely black and indigenous !
Anyway. I’m out. See you in February or whenever I feel like writing another fact OR somebody decides that I need to write something and I agree or I’m procrastinating or… you get the point.
BYEEEEE
*Because I like to show my work, please note this article is directly from National Law Enforcement Memorial and Museum.