The Cruel Story Behind The 'Reverse Freedom Rides'

[Nittersing]

This story is from 2/29/20... but it's exactly what the GOP just did

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/02/29/809740346/the-cruel-story-behind-the-reverse-freedom-rides

It tells the story of a family tricked into travelling from the south, with promises unfulfilled, dumped on the side of the road to make a political point... back in the sixties. A look at the full journey and a grandson who was surprised, in 2013, to find out his Grandmother was not a Freedom Rider.

__________________________

"After three days on a Greyhound bus, Lela Mae Williams was just an hour from her destination—Hyannis, Mass.—when she asked the bus driver to pull over. She needed to change into her finest clothes. She had been promised the Kennedy family would be waiting for her.

It was late on a Wednesday afternoon, nearly 60 years ago, when that Greyhound bus from Little Rock, Ark., pulled into Hyannis. It slowed to a stop near the summer home of President John F. Kennedy and his family. When the doors opened, Lela Mae and her nine youngest children stepped onto the pavement.

Reporters' microphones pointed at her, their cameras trained on her family. The photographs in the next day's newspaper show Lela Mae looking immaculate. In an elegant black dress, a triple string of pearls and a white hat, she was dressed to start a new life.

"She was going to have a job, and she was going to be able to support her family," one of Lela Mae's daughters, Betty Williams, remembered in a recent interview. Before coming north to Massachusetts, Lela Mae had been promised a good job, good housing and a presidential welcome."

[Casady1]

1. Its the same people

as before. Honestly, The south has never wanted to be part of America. They institutionalized slavery and then legalized Jim Crow. They are now behind taking away women's rights. This is a bad culture.

[CrispyQ]

2. Not surprised I'd never heard of the Freedom Riders or the Reverse Freedom Riders.

Moseley remembered one of the children who arrived asking, "Where are the cotton fields?" She told him there were no cotton fields. She said this news came as a terrible blow. She recalled the child saying, "Well, what am I going to do to find employment? I can chop cotton. I don't know how to do anything else."

Oh my.