The Reverse Freedom Ride

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Segregationists planned to keep the reverse freedom ride going. They said they would send an initial wave of a thousand black southerners. It did not last ten years, or five years, or two years. In the end, it lasted barely a few months. The operation sputtered out for a couple of reasons.

As conservative governors try to score political points by depositing busloads and planeloads of migrants in liberal cities, it can seem like an unprecedented exercise in cruelty. But it’s a page ripped from an earlier playbook in U.S. politics, one that was forgotten for decades for a very good reason. Rachel Maddow and Isaac-Davy Aronson revisit the racist Reverse Freedom Rides of the 1960s.

Featuring:

Dr. Kellie Carter Jackson, Michael and Denise ‘68 Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley College, author of Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence, and co-host of the podcast This Day in Esoteric Political History.

WBUR reporter Gabrielle Emanuel, who has done groundbreaking reporting on the Reverse Freedom Rides.

Rev. Juan Carlos Ruiz, pastor of Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.