The Purrrow of the Large Negro Vote

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Reverend Ruiz says people are arriving after an already harrowing journey in a place they didn't expect to be alone with nothing and no one to help them. Many of them, you look at the immigration paperwork and their final destination is Portland, Washington, Texas itself. So when they come here, they are at least baffled by ending up in a place where they don't have any relatives many times. They don't know anybody. You get a lot of people really being injured and harmed, if not physically, psychologically.

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.