Reverse Freedom Rides: How Racists Tricked Black Americans Out Of Their Homes
Last month America lost beloved civil rights activist Representative John Lewis, famous as one of the brave “Freedom Riders” who rode south to New Orleans in a push for desegregation. Nearly all of the tributes since his passing have included a recap of the riders’ historic journey. And while that story is deeply compelling, film worthy, its real-life sequel — that of “Reverse Freedom Riders” — has been almost completely forgotten even here in the Crescent City…despite our native role in it.
As “blue” as New Orleans is today, it’s still part of Louisiana and the larger South. And around July 1962, Southern conservatives were collectively white-hot pissed about the civil rights movement. The Artists Formerly Known as The Confederacy fumed over the advocacy of “Northern liberals” and “[expletive deleted] yankees,” some of whom had begun working with black Americans to abolish segregation nationwide. One of the ways activists pushed for desegregation was through the aforementioned Freedom Rides, a public act of civil disobedience which drove integrated Greyhound buses across state lines into very segregated southern cities. These riders — including organizer James Farmer and Rep. Lewis — were not greeted with Southern Hospitality, but with firebombs, violent mobs, and police brutality.
Louisiana’s Ned Touchstone, a leading segregationist, complained in 1961 that Northerners were “sending down busloads of people here with the express purpose of violating our laws, fomenting confusion, tryin’ to destroy years of workable tradition and good relations between the races.” (This statement was, for the record, fake news. Relations between blacks and whites in the many decades since the Civil War had not actually been good, unless you consider the Knights of the White Camilla massacring hundreds of black citizens across Louisiana a feelgood recreational activity.)
Cut to Summer 1962. The one year anniversary of the Freedom Rides was approaching. Ads started appearing in local papers and fliers, promising to help unemployed African Americans start a new life in friendlier territory up north. Approved applicants, the ads explained, would be provided a one-way bus ticket, good job with a living wage, professional housekeeper, and free housing in liberal cities like New York, Boston, and Los Angeles. Some would even get to meet President Kennedy himself as part of a media event, with the bus dropping them off outside his Hyannis, Massachusetts, summer home.
Dozens of single mothers, ex-convicts, and poor families applied and were thrilled to be approved. Some were so poor when they arrived at New Orleans’ bus station their belongings fit in a single paper bag. A few didn’t even have pocket change for buying snacks on the road. “The many champions of the Negro race in the northern cities will certainly welcome you and help you get settled,” one flier had said.
But it turned out there were no jobs, homes, or presidential receptions waiting in Hyannis, or anywhere else. Carrying their suitcases and trailing young children, the riders’ devastation was captured by reporters as they learned they’d been publicly conned. Broke, unemployed, homeless, and over a thousand miles from anyone they knew, the passengers were left in heartbroken dismay. Segregationists like New Orleans’ George Singelmann and Little Rock’s Amis Guthridge had decided to prove Northern liberals didn’t care about black lives. They believed the Freedom Riders and liberal calls for equality were a theatrical political move, nothing more, a media-friendly scheme to lure black voters into the Democratic party.
And so these segregationists, led by Singletonn and his New Orleans branch of the White Citizens Council, secretly organized “Reverse Freedom Rides,” a coordinated effort to dump hundreds of black bodies on the doorsteps of Northerners unannounced. When the liberals were faced with hundreds of African Americans in their own communities, all suddenly seeking housing and jobs, surely they would reveal themselves to “liberal hypocrites.”
“For many years, certain politicians, educators, and religious leaders have used the white people of the South as a whipping boy, to put it mildly, to further their own ends and their political campaigns,” Guthridge said at the time. “We’re going to find out if people…really do have a love for the Negro or whether they love his vote.” He also threatened on TV that the councils would continue to send busloads of unsuspecting blacks across the country “until the people in the majority tell those politicians that we are done with this foolishness, this ‘civil rights.’”
(Equal rights being dismissed as election season “foolishness” by some folks is timeless in America.)
Citizens Councils were, by and large, localized groups of conservative males bound together exclusively by whiteness. Most members were businessmen, police officers, and well-monied community professionals with political connections. Singelmann and the New Orleans council were so brazen they petitioned the Louisiana legislature for $100,000.00 to fund the scheme, though fortunately their request was denied. Which at least meant they had to pay out of pocket to terrorize their own community.
Because all of this happened pre-internet and social media, it took months before word of what the racists were doing to poor black Southerners really got out. The very first “reverse ride” dropped victims from New Orleans in New York City on April 20, 1962. Singelmann and his gang tipped off the media in advance, making sure cameras captured the pained faces of pregnant Dorothy Boyd, her out-of-work husband Louis, and their eight children. But though the Boyds’ horrific story was published in papers, the majority of those publications did not immediately reach the southern and rural blacks being targeted.
And so the reverse rides continued.
Reactions to this human fuckery were all over the map, literally. Prominent southern conservatives lauded the effort, with White Citizens Councils in Alabama and Georgia eagerly joining in. The Mississippi House of Representatives even announced support for the stunt, stating there was a need to “redistribute the dissatisfied Negro population to other areas where the political leadership constantly clamors for equal rights for all persons without regard to the constitution, judicial precedent, and rights of the states.” (Wow, Mississippi. Just…wow.)
Fortunately, the sheer cruelty of dumping poverty-ridden children and their parents into traumatized homelessness also offended the ethics of a LOT of people who otherwise may have remained silent. Unsurprisingly, OG Freedom Rider James Farmer was livid, calling the act “a device to gain cheap publicity at the expense of personal suffering and deprivation.” Roy Wilkins and Martin Luther King Jr. echoed his sentiments. The New York Times editorial team called it “a cheap trafficking in human misery on the part of Southern racists.” Illinois Governor Otto Kenner Jr. compared it to Nazi deportation, and President JFK labeled it “deplorable.”
Predictably, however, a few Northern liberals fell right into the trap laid for them. Massachusetts governor John Volpe almost immediately proved Singelmann’s point, begging for legislation to make shipping people across the country without consent illegal. (To be fair THIS SHOULD DEFINITELY BE A LAW. But the proper “f*** y’all” to the Citizens Council would have obviously been to first help the homeless victims standing in the parking lot, and then mail every dog turd in the city of Boston to Singelmann’s house without ice.)
And Despite JFK’s weirdly prescient condemnation of abuse, he stated it was technically legal and made no attempt to stop the bussings as they continued. Civil rights groups rushed to try and help — in the case of the Boyds, they successfully got the family settled in New Jersey — but lacked the resources or funding to deliver what Singelmann had promised. A few ethical business owners also offered jobs to the riders, while churches worked overtime to try and find housing. The National Guard was even called in to set up a camp for the southern refugees. But overall the North dropped the ball as far as enthusiastically showing up for what were essentially victims of domestic deportation.
By the time Reverse Freedom Rides finally ceased, an estimated 200–300 human beings had been relocated under false pretenses.
There were, sadly, few happy endings in this story. Some of the riders did indeed find jobs and housing. A fair number stayed North, refusing to go back to a place which had so maliciously dehumanized them. But many had no resources available, not even enough cash for a few nights in a boarding house. Without a job finding housing was a Herculean task. Some riders were simply too hurt and depressed to function, a reasonable response to being lied to and humiliated on a national stage.
Overall the majority returned home, some in just a few days, the rest as they grew older and missed their large family support systems. A couple even made it home on the dime of the sympathetic reporters who received them.
This happened just 58 years ago. Some of the relocated children effected by the actions of New Orleans’ White Citizens Council still do not qualify for social security…because they’re too young. That’s how recent this history is.
You can read one of the original NYT articles on the rides here: https://www.nytimes.com/1962/06/13/archives/120-negroes-took-free-ride-north-white-council-had-hoped-to-send.html
You can watch an interview with one of the juvenile Reverse Riders here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RB_QR-QPx6Q
Written in collaboration with Hottest Hell Tours, New Orleans #1 Boutique True Crime and Odd History Tour. You can hear more forgotten, strange, and utterly batshit history free at Hottest Hell Presents.
