Yep, own the Libs at any cost. Very clever and innovative. Except it's not. Applaud W.S. playing pranks brehs
GOP governors sending immigrants to Democrat-led cities are following in the footsteps of the Southern white supremacists who bussed poor Black people to “liberal” areas.
www.thedailybeast.com
In the early 1960s, another group of white supremacists, relying on the same racism-and-spite blueprint, and peddling the same lies about housing and opportunity, bussed vulnerable people—Black Americans living in the Jim Crow-era South—across the Mason-Dixon line to get back at Northern liberals involved in the civil rights movement. The Reverse Freedom Rides were a racist prank in the same mean-spirited, pitiless vein we’re seeing from MAGA immigration hardliners. And while Abbott has
boasted that his “unprecedented” bussing plan is doing “what no state has done in American history to secure our border,” it’s hard to believe he hasn’t cribbed every note from those racist originators.
In 1961, the Freedom Rides saw interracial groups of activists travel to Southern cities by Greyhound buses to protest racial segregation in interstate travel, which had already been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. John Lewis, Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture), and Ralph Abernathy were among the original 13
riders organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), but that group would ultimately grow to include more
than 400 volunteers.
In response to the Freedom Rides, which one Southern segregationist
described as a movement “with the express purpose of violating our laws, fomenting confusion [and] trying to destroy 100 years of workable tradition and good relations between the races,” Gutheridge (who headed up Arkansas’s Little Rock White Citizens Council) and his fellow segregationists sought a way to exploit Black folks seeking better lives—and get back at white Northerners and other “outside agitators” perceived as threatening absolute white supremacy.
They came up with the Reverse Freedom Rides, a plan to transport thousands of Black folks—via bus, no less—from the South to the North. It was an effort conceived to remove “surplus” Black folks from the South for the collective sin of demanding full citizenship, to reveal the hypocrisy of white Northern liberalism, to redeem the South via both-sidesism, to embarrass Democratic politicians perceived to be complicit in the Black Civil Rights Movement, and to propagate a very Great Replacement-like theory that white Democrats were using Black folks for their votes.
"We want to see if northern politicians really love the Negro or whether they love his vote,” Gutheridge told one newspaper. “And we want to acquaint the North, which has been making the South a whipping boy with some Southern problems.”
Then as now, the plan used human beings who had already endured staggering trauma and tragedy as “political pawns” in a sick game. The Reverse Freedom Rides should today be regarded as rightwing proto-trolling, foreshadowing and shaping white conservative politicking today.
George Singelmann, aide to the viciously racist and notoriously corrupt New Orleans political boss Leander Perez, and the head of the city’s White Citizens Council, bragged about choosing cities based on spite.
“I selected the destinations,” Singelmann said, “on the basis of where I thought it would do the greatest amount of good to expose the hypocrisy of the community.”
I get it. That being said, Dems have senate and the house, why haven't they done anything about immigration yet? They can't find 10 Republicans to go along with a compromise?
