Governors who shipped migrants north took a page from an old, racist playbook

Segregationists from the Jim Crow South did pretty much the same thing to African Americans during the early 1960s.

A woman, who is part of a group of immigrants that had just arrived, holds a child as they are fed outside St. Andrews Episcopal Church, Wednesday, Sept. 14, 2022, in Edgartown, Mass., on Martha's Vineyard. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Wednesday flew two planes of immigrants to Martha's Vineyard, escalating a tactic by Republican governors to draw attention to what they consider to be the Biden administration's failed border policies.Read moreRay Ewing/Vineyard Gazette / AP

Published Sept. 16, 2022, 2:28 p.m. ET

Republican governors Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott probably thought they were being clever when they shipped migrants from Central and South America to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts and to Vice President Kamala Harris’ residence earlier this week.

In reality, they were following an old, racist playbook.

Segregationists from the Jim Crow South pretty much did the same thing to African Americans during the early 1960s. Back then, they made all kinds of empty promises and bought Black people one-way tickets.

In one case documented by National Public Radio in 2020, Lela Mae Williams, a Black mother from Arkansas, took her nine children on a three-day bus ride from Arkansas to Hyannis, Mass., after being promised a job, housing, and that she would be welcomed by members of the Kennedy family, which has a compound in the area.

You can imagine how it turned out — not just for her, but also for other African American families who were similarly duped. They wound up strangers in a strange land, just like the migrants who were left outside the Naval Observatory where Harris resides or on Martha’s Vineyard where former President Barack Obama bought a home in 2019.

Segregationists called the people they tricked like this “Reverse Freedom Riders” — a play on the Freedom Riders, Black and white activists who traveled around the South on buses during the civil rights movement attempting to desegregate lunch counters and public restrooms in bus stations.

“They were sent here to embarrass the Kennedys,” John L. Reed, president of the NAACP chapter in Cape Cod, Mass., told me recently about the Reverse Freedom Riders. “Now you have a whole generation of people pulling the same crap that they did before. This is nothing new.”

Reed, who said he taught some of the children whose families were used that way, recalled that they “had it tough.”

“They struggled,” said Reed, who is also the director of the Zion Union Heritage Museum, which celebrates the history of Black and Indigenous people in Cape Cod. “Some stayed. Some left.”

One can only imagine the humiliation those poor families must have suffered once they realized that they had been tricked.

I only learned about the term “Reverse Freedom Riders” on Thursday, after the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library tweeted out what appeared to be an undated yellowed newspaper article about a family who the White Citizens’ Council of Louisiana reportedly had placed on a bus and sent to New Jersey. I started digging and came across numerous other references about this almost forgotten chapter in history.

I tracked down Betty Williams, the daughter of Lela Mae Williams, who reportedly arrived in Hyannis wearing a fancy hat and pearls only to find out that she’d been the victim of an elaborate hoax. We exchanged pleasantries for a few minutes, but she declined to be interviewed. I don’t blame her for not wanting to relive it all.

Decades from now, the children of the migrants who were shipped to Martha’s Vineyard will probably want to forget the shabby way their relatives were treated, too. Imagine being in a foreign country, unable to speak the language, and being shipped from one place to another by politicians seeking to make a political point.

“Just like the reverse freedom rides in the 1960s, this endeavor is a cruel ruse that is manipulating families who are seeking a better life,” said State Sen. Julian Cyr in the Vineyard Gazette. “No one should be capitalizing on the difficult circumstances that these families are in and contorting that for the purposes of a ‘gotcha’ moment.”

It’s not over. Republicans want to motivate their base in advance of the midterm elections. Gov. DeSantis reportedly is planning to send migrants to Delaware, the home state of President Joe Biden.

He and Gov. Abbott have played their hand by using the same racist tactics as the White Citizens’ Councils that sprang up throughout the South following the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling ending school segregation.

They should be embarrassed at how they are using human beings as political pawns. The governors may think they are winning now, but history won’t judge either of them well. Maybe if they let schools in their areas teach the real history of the United States, they would know that.