Touchstone and other segregationists thought there was no way the Freedom Riders or their fellow northern liberals actually cared about integrating interstate transit or advancing civil rights. In a television interview from the time, Ned Touchstone of Louisiana – a spokesperson for a local segregationist group – said the North was “sending down busloads of people here with the express purpose of violating our laws, fomenting confusion, trying to destroy 100 years of workable tradition and good relations between the races.” When the buses pulled into cities across the South, they were greeted by mobs armed with bats and firebombs. Southern segregationists, who were still furious over the school desegregation fights that dominated the 1950s, saw the Freedom Riders as no more than sanctimonious provocateurs. In the summer of 1961, black and white activists boarded Greyhound buses and crisscrossed the South with the goal of integrating seating on interstate buses and in bus terminals. One hundred years after the Civil War, the North and South were still caught in a vicious struggle over civil rights. And for the families that came north based on a lie, the journey has cast an enduring shadow on their lives. The scheme almost never appears in history books and is little-known even in Hyannis, the primary target of the ploy.īut today, with racial tensions re-inflamed, some hear echoes of that segregationist past in America’s present. The Reverse Freedom Rides have largely disappeared from the country’s collective memory. The hypocrisy of northern liberals would be exposed. The idea was simple: When large numbers of African Americans showed up on northern doorsteps, northerners would not be able to accommodate them. In 1962, they tricked about 200 African Americans from the South into moving north. Fuming over the Civil Rights Movement, southern segregationists had concocted a way to retaliate against northern liberals.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |