The full episode transcript for Rachel Maddow Presents: Deja News | Episode 5: Taken for a ride
Episode 5: Taken for a ride
Kaplow: Then a heavyset man asked me whether I was one of the group. I said I was not. I noticed then that he was holding in his right hand an open pen knife with a blade extended. A few moments later, someone else pointed out to this very same man that Levy was making pictures. The man — now the knife, I believe, had been put away because I no longer saw it — he went right to Levy and started to strike at him, which started this violence.
He pulls out the equipment that he and his crew were carrying when they were attacked to show viewers how badly everything was damaged. Maddow: After we were forced away, that’s when the attack on the riders themselves started. In other words, the mob first took care of the reporters and the cameras, even the sound equipment, so nobody could record what they were about to do. And then they had at it.
Four white men accused of throwing a fire bomb into a stalled bus outside Anniston, Alabama, were arrested by the FBI. But this so enraged Southern segregationists that their violence could barely be contained. In many cases, it was not contained. Alabama’s governor was asked why the violence was so out of control in his state. He was asked why in city after city, his state couldn’t protect people who were just riding buses and sitting in waiting rooms. His response was that the people who were being attacked, well, they had it coming.
They were going to get even with the people they felt were behind the Freedom Rides: President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Bobby, the attorney general, and also all those northern liberals who insisted on upsetting that spirit of harmony and peace that supposedly prevailed in the South. Those elites up north just didn’t understand why things had to stay the way they were in the South, why these Freedom Rides were such a problem.
Maddow: And as always, here on Déjà News, there’s the question of whether history can help. If we, as a country, have done this before, what does it mean that we’re doing it again? And can we learn anything from how and why it started last time and how and why it stopped?Archival Recording: Relaxing while we’re riding in a Greyhound bus, we’re seeing all the scenery in comfort plus. It’s such a comfort to take the bus, and leave the driving to us.
Kellie Carter Jackson: I think what upset white Southerners so much is not the fact that Black people were coming to the South, because Black people have always been in the South. I think the fact is that these were integrated acts of civil disobedience, meaning white and Black people were sitting on buses together, congregating in spaces together.
Carter Jackson: There’s no reason for a Black person and a white person to share a space unless that Black person is in service to that white person. And so, the idea of Black and white people coming down leisurely, somewhat, right, was huge for white Southerners. It meant that there was a real threat to their way of life and mostly to their white supremacist ideas.
Aronson: This is Gabrielle Emanuel of Boston Public Radio station, WBUR. She’s done groundbreaking recent reporting on the reverse Freedom Rides and their long legacy. Aronson: That’s George Singelmann, who was part of a White Citizens’ Council in Louisiana. He was one of the architects of the Reverse Freedom Rides.
Carter Jackson: Black families are brought to the front steps of JFK’s summer home to really teach him a lesson. And they tell these families, JFK is going to greet you. He’s going to be there with open arms.Carter Jackson: There are people who are being duped, who are saying, oh, you’re going to have jobs. You’re going to have a house. JFK, the president, is going to greet you at his summer home.
Aronson: In her reporting on the Reverse Freedom Rides, Gabrielle Emanuel explored the history of one family in particular, a family headed by Lela Mae Williams, a single mother in Arkansas who had recently lost her welfare benefits. And actually, on the way to get to the bus terminal, Guthridge took the kids out for ice cream and root beer. And many of the families that went north didn’t take luggage. They had been told that everything would be provided for them. The Williams family, they spent three days on the bus. Lela Mae asked the bus driver about half an hour before getting to Hyannis to pull over so she could put her finest clothes on.
Margaret Moseley: To send people out into the world to a destination they have no understanding of, don’t even know where it is, where on the map it would be, with no money, nobody to receive them, just to come to a strange place, get off a bus, stand on the street, not know where to turn, not to have even money enough to eat, I think, is about as despicable as one can think of treatment of one human to another.
The first question that most of the arrivals asked was, where is President Kennedy? We were told that he was going to meet us at the bus. It was one of the most inhuman things that I have ever seen. Aronson: It did not last 10 years or 5 years or 2 years. In the end, it lasted barely a few months. The final tally of Reverse Freedom Riders was two or three hundred, with the largest number of them, 96 people, bused to Hyannis.
Some of the Reverse Freedom Riders ultimately returned to their homes in the South, but among those who never went back were Lela Mae Williams and her kids. Their feelings about it have only gotten more complicated in recent years, as they’ve learned the full story of how their family ended up in Massachusetts. Many of the children remember the bus ride north, but they had no idea it was part of some political scheme or that their mother had in some way been misled into taking the trip.
But now, today, the buses are once again rolling north, or sometimes it’s planes now, and it’s undocumented immigrants, some of them deceived or coerced into traveling to places they never intended to go to, they never wanted to go to, places that have not been prepared in any way for their arrival. People being dropped off, among other places, outside the home of Vice President Kamala Harris, or on Martha’s Vineyard, which is not far at all from Hyannis on Cape Cod.
Kerry Sanders: Forty-eight Venezuelan migrants, the youngest only three years old, flown to Martha’s Vineyard, Wednesday, will spend another night at a local church. Officials say they were given no notice the migrants were headed there. The charter flights to the wealthy, heavily Democratic enclave where former President Obama has a home, arranged by Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis.
But unlike the Reverse Freedom Rides, which sputtered out after a few months and a couple of hundred people being duped into it, now the transporting of undocumented immigrants north is still going on. The flights to Martha’s Vineyard in September last year, those were just the start of it. Since then, thousands of people, men, women, children have been bused to New York or Chicago or Washington, D.C.
Emanuel: So that happened. It caused an uproar. It was in the press. And my editor called me into his little office in our local newsroom and he said, years ago, he had lived on the coast of Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, and he had heard rumors that something similar had happened years ago — people had been put on buses as part of a political plot.
Aronson: Now, I know we use the word uncanny a lot on this podcast, but this time we’re really earning it. Here’s basically that exact same speech from Ron DeSantis, except it’s from 1962. Aronson: This is Reverend Juan Carlos Ruiz of the Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. But it seems some of the politicians down south are playing with the lives of people in a very cruel way. So, you get a lot of people really being injured and harmed, if not physically, psychologically.
Blake Masters: They just want this open border. This is the way Democrats like it. And again, I’m bold enough to admit the obvious, right, which is that they’re doing this so that someday they can amnesty these people and make them voters who they expect to vote Democrat. This is an electoral strategy for the Democrats. Their policies are --
But the pleasure piece of it, the pleasure aspect feels sadistic. It feels perverse. It feels like there’s actually no purpose for doing this other than to bring about your laughter and to bring about my demise. And it’s a sinister way of thinking about racism. But I also think it’s a very honest way of thinking about racism. It is honest to say that there are people who are laughing, people who are in their offices saying, ha-ha, we got them on the bus, we duped them, take that, North.
She believed in the basic decency and humanity of other human beings. She believed that people would not try to harm her or her nine children. That’s just basic human decency. And I think we need to see more of that. I think we need to see more people as mothers and daughters and sons and brothers and children and elders and hard workers.Maddow: That’s so simple and yet so hard, right? It’s the most basic thing, but you also can’t legislate human decency.
Aronson: There’s something that Kellie Carter Jackson pointed out that I think is really important, which is that sometimes, even if people can’t be moved by shame, they can be moved by their pocketbooks. Aronson: This is one of the big differences between the Reverse Freedom Rides and the immigrant busing stunts today. Today’s rides are being funded by taxpayer dollars, millions of them. After Ron DeSantis made a big splash flying those undocumented immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard, Republican legislators in Florida gave the governor over $10 million to pay for recruiters and buses and planes for more of these stunts.
Maddow: So, I guess it’s still an open verdict as to how this whole episode, A, is going to end, and B, how it’s going to be viewed by history. I mean, clearly, Ron DeSantis in Florida and Greg Abbott in Texas think this is hilarious, that the cruelty of this is what everybody wants, that this is a brilliant scheme that’s going to get them into the political strategy hall of fame.
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