On May 22, 1962, Victoria Bell and her 11 children, ranging in age from two to 14, arrived in Hyannis, Massachusetts, after a days-long bus ride to Cape Cod from Little Rock, Arkansas. Amis Guthridge, an attorney and the leader of the southern segregationist group, the Capital Citizens’ Council, gave Bell $60 and paid for the family’s one-way tickets north. Bell was forced to care for her children with little support after her husband left and the local government cut off her welfare. In a photo from that time, she and her sons and daughters can be seen waving in front of a sign for the Cape Cod Community College, which had been turned into temporary housing for her and other families. “I hope my children get a better chance here,” Bell told the Boston Globe. The following day, Lela Mae Williams, a mother of nine from Huttig, Arkansas, disembarked from a Greyhound bus at a stop near President John F. Kennedy’s summer home in Hyannis. She had heard about “free rides” on a Louisiana radio station and been lured by promises of housing, job prospects, and a presidential welcome at their final destination.
It was all a cruel hoax.
Bell and Williams were among almost 100 people to be shipped under false pretenses to the resort town over the spring and summer of 1962 as part of a white supremacist campaign to send Black people from the South to northern cities. Overall, some 200 people were bused to Chicago, Cleveland, New York, Los Angeles, and other cities in Indiana, Idaho, and New Hampshire. The political ploy was a retaliation for the Freedom Rides from the previous year, when a group of 13 Black and white civil rights activists with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) embarked on southbound buses from Washington, DC, to protest continued segregation in interstate transportation despite the Supreme Court having ruled that it was unconstitutional. What became known as the “Reverse Freedom Rides” was meant to embarrass liberal politicians fighting for civil rights and presumably expose their hypocrisy by confronting them with the demand to live up to their values and assist the Black southerners. “We want to see if Northern politicians really love the Negro or whether they love his vote,” Guthridge said. He framed the unapologetically racist campaign as being beneficent and humanitarian and then underscored its basic intent: “And we want to acquaint the North, which has been making the South a whipping boy with some Southern problems.”
To embarrass Northern liberals and humiliate Black people, southern White Citizens Councils started their so-called "Reverse Freedom Rides," giving Black people one-way tickets to northern cities with false promises of jobs, housing, and better lives.https://t.co/xLpTjxG0PD pic.twitter.com/voiPBbwRuN
— JFK Library (@JFKLibrary) September 15, 2022
