The Citizens' Councils attempted to cloak their racism in respectability, Webb said.
Fifteen years ago, he published the first-and still the only- major academic article on the Reverse Freedom Riders. Webb, a professor at the University of Sussex in England, specializes in studying racists. Despite the sanitized name, the councils were essentially "the Ku Klux Klan without the hoods and the masks," said historian Clive Webb. The segregationists tapped into a network of local groups called Citizens' Councils. My mom thought that when she came to the North, she was going to have a better life for her children. When the buses pulled into Southern cities, they were greeted by mobs armed with bats and firebombs. In the summer of 1961, black and white activists, who became known as the Freedom Riders, boarded Greyhound buses and crisscrossed the South with the goal of integrating interstate buses and bus terminals. And for the families that came to the North based on a lie, the journey has cast an enduring shadow on their lives. But some hear echoes of that segregationist past in America's present. The scheme almost never appears in history books and is little-known even in Hyannis, the primary target of the ploy. The Reverse Freedom Rides have largely disappeared from the country's collective memory.
They would not want them, and their hypocrisy would be exposed. The idea was simple: When large numbers of African Americans showed up on Northern doorsteps, Northerners would not be able to accommodate them. In 1962, they tricked about 200 African Americans from the South into moving north. "It was one of the most inhuman things I have ever seen," recalled Margaret Moseley, a longtime civil rights activist in Hyannis, in a televised interview a few years before her death.įuming over the civil rights movement, Southern segregationists had concocted a way to retaliate against Northern liberals.
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