Many articles have noted the eerie resemblance of the migrant busing ploy and the Reverse Freedom Rides. But the similarities go beyond the headlines, and the Rides offer more than a sad reminder of how white supremacy repeats itself.
A closer look at the Reverse Freedom Rides reveals the underreported history of people who organized to combat or undermine the racist cynicism of the Rides—and offers some hope for 2022.
‘A strictly promotional venture’
When Louis and Dorothy Boyd stepped off a Trailways bus with their eight children at New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal early on the morning of April 21, 1962, they were mobbed by reporters, aid workers, activists, and gawkers. Louis Boyd, an unemployed longshoreman from New Orleans whose public benefits had been cut off back home, was dazed and sleep deprived after a 41-hour bus ride with his wife and eight children. Still, he summoned the energy to give a statement to reporters.
“We’re tired of suffering,” he said. “I am not sorry to leave the South. There is nothing there for me.”
Then Boyd and his family were escorted to a hotel in Midtown Manhattan that had agreed to temporarily house them. The next day was Easter Sunday, and the Boyds, in swanky new outfits donated by a benefactor from the NAACP, showed up to worship at Concord Baptist Church of Christ, a venerable Black church on Marcy Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. By Tuesday, Louis Boyd had found a job in Jersey City paying $100 a week (about $1,000 today; a 1962 dollar is worth, conveniently, just under $10 in 2022) and had promises from the Urban League’s Newark office to find him housing within walking distance of work.
No one was happier to hear of Boyd’s success than George Singelmann, then chairman of the Citizens’ Council of Greater New Orleans, a racist nonprofit organization dedicated to fighting integration and equality. Singelmann had paid for the Boyds’ tickets to New York and given them $50 spending money as part of a publicity stunt called the “Freedom Rides North” or the “Reverse Freedom Rides,” a parody of the famous 1961 Freedom Rides, which had been a turning point in the Civil Rights Movement.
The Reverse Freedom Rides were no mere charity. They were a deliberate provocation by Southern racists to expose perceived hypocrisy in the North and West. Singelmann wanted to watch Northerners squirm at the thought of hundreds or thousands of Black people—he especially wanted poor single men and very large families—descending on their cities. In opposition to them, activists in both North and South organized to fight the rides themselves, and to support the people who were bused.