 | | Peola Denham Jr. and his family left New Orleans for Los Angeles with their one-way fares paid by the pro-segregation Citizens Council of Greater New Orleans in 1962.Jim Bourdier/Associated Press |
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Pawns in a Political Fight |
When two planeloads of asylum seekers were flown to Martha's Vineyard last month, Peola Denham Jr. recognized an echo of his own experience from six decades ago — one nearly forgotten in the long history of Black Americans' struggle for civil rights. |
"What really took me back," recalled Mr. Denham, 73, "is that when the people got to their destinations, they didn't get what they were promised." |
The migrants on Martha's Vineyard, who were primarily from Venezuela, found themselves repeating history, pawns in a political fight. The promise — as dozens of them would later recount to lawyers and journalists — was of jobs and resettlement help. Instead, they arrived with no warning to the community, which nevertheless scrambled to find them food and shelter. |
For Mr. Denham, in the spring of 1962, the promise came in the form of bus and train tickets offered to his family and other Black Southerners by members of the White Citizens' Council, a segregationist group, to take them to Northern and Western states where many were promised jobs and housing. |
 | | Peola Denham Jr. at his home in Destrehan, La.Edmund D. Fountain for The New York Times |
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That's how Mr. Denham, at 12 years old, found himself on the Southern Pacific Railway from Baton Rouge, La., to Los Angeles, along with his father, stepmother and nine siblings. |
They were among a couple hundred participants in what came to be know as the reverse freedom rides, a segregationist political stunt that had ripple effects across generations of Black families, and whose parallels were noted by historians and others after the migrant flights touched down in Martha's Vineyard. |
Mr. Denham's memories of his train ride and its origins are hazy. His stepmother, he said, was interested in the tickets because she had relatives in California. "My parents, coming up the way we came up, and all the hardships we were having in segregated Baton Rouge — I guess that's the reason why they were ready to get out," he said. |
Mr. Denham remembers a rush of reporters approaching the family when the train made a stop in Texas, telling his parents that their tickets had been paid for by racists, which he said surprised and upset them. Mr. Denham also remembers arriving at a Los Angeles train station, where the family was again mobbed by reporters. |
Clive Webb, a professor of American history at the University of Sussex, said the reverse freedom rides — concocted in response to the Freedom Rides organized by civil rights groups to challenge segregation on interstate buses — attracted plenty of media attention at the time, but have since been largely overlooked. In a 2004 paper on the subject, he estimated that more than 200 Black Southerners took the free tickets. |
 | | Reverse freedom riders on their way to New England boarded a bus in New Orleans in 1962, left, and a migrant boarded a bus on a ferry headed for Woods Hole, Mass., last month.From left: Jim Bourdier/Associated Press; Matt Cosby for The New York Times |
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But the Martha's Vineyard flights, along with the busing of Central American migrants to the vice president's residence in Washington last month, dredged the reverse freedom rides back into public consciousness. A letter signed by some House Democrats accused the Republican governors who arranged the trips of "using the same ploys" as the segregationists of 1962, while the Biden administration accused them of using the migrants as political pawns. |
"No historical parallel is ever precise," Dr. Webb said of the comparisons between the migrant trips and the reverse freedom rides. "But it was a cheap publicity stunt in the early '60s, and this is a publicity stunt, too." |
The migrants taken to Martha's Vineyard on flights arranged by Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida had recently crossed the southwestern U.S. border without authorization and turned themselves in to border officials to seek asylum, with many saying they had fled violence at home. The migrants who were dropped at Vice President Kamala Harris's home the same week, on buses sent from Texas by Gov. Greg Abbott, were from Colombia, Cuba, Guyana, Nicaragua and Panama and came into the country in the same manner. |
A spokeswoman for Mr. Abbott called comparisons of transporting migrants to high-profile destinations with the reverse freedom rides "a garbage attempt to deflect from the hypocrisy of Democrat mayors." Representatives of Mr. DeSantis did not respond to requests for comment. |
Those attention-getting moments were an escalation of a tactic being used by Southern officials this year to shift the problems of border crossings onto Northern states. Since the spring, Texas and Arizona have provided thousands of undocumented migrants with bus rides to Northern cities, including New York, Chicago and Washington, taxing those cities' capacities to provide emergency food and housing. Mayor Eric Adams of New York recently declared a state of emergency and called for state and federal funding to help pay for housing and services for the migrants. |
Arizona officials described the state's chartered buses as a humanitarian project — distinct from the efforts of Texas and Florida — and said that the roughly two thousand migrants who traveled from there to Washington this year had been vetted to ensure they wanted to go east and knew where they were headed. |
Unlike the reverse freedom riders, who were from the American South, many of the migrants who boarded buses this year had no personal ties to the U.S. border towns they departed from. Many have since connected with family members in the cities where they arrived, or begun to put down roots far from the southern border. |
 | | Dolores DaLuz was living in Hyannis in 1962 and was one of the residents who helped new migrant arrivals get situated.Matt Cosby for The New York Times |
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All of this feels familiar to Dolores DaLuz, 88, a longtime civil rights activist in Massachusetts. In May 1962, she learned that dozens of Black Southerners had taken a reverse freedom ride bus from Arkansas to Hyannis, Mass., where she lived. Segregationists chose the spot because it was close to where President John F. Kennedy and his family vacationed. |
Ms. DaLuz rushed downtown to find the bewildered travelers. "They said that their governor had sent them down and told them that Kennedy would be there waiting for them with jobs and housing," she said. "Of course, there was no such thing." |
Read the rest of the story here. |
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