The Reverse Freedom Rides

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"Everything was peaceable. We were getting along well together in a spirit of harmony," he says. "But then these outsiders came in and did so much provoking with their peaceable bus riding and their waiting room sitting." It made the segregationists in the South so mad they decided they were going to get even. They called it the reverse freedom rides. Right Southerners would recruit black riders for these buses through bribery, deceit, and threats. And then they would drive these people North right to the Kennedys doorstep.

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.