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Code Switch

The Martha's Vineyard migrant flight has echoes of a dark past: Reverse Freedom Rides

Code Switch

NPR

Society & Culture

4.614.5K Ratings

🗓️ 11 December 2019

⏱️ 40 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Many people have heard of the Freedom Rides of 1961, when civil rights activists rode buses through the South to protest segregation. But most people have never heard of what happened the very next summer, when Southern segregationists decided to strike back.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Just the heads up y'all, this episode contains some people using racial slurs.

0:04.3

What's good y'all? I'm Gene Demby.

0:06.0

And I'm Karen Grookesby-Vet.

0:07.6

And this is Code Switch.

0:12.6

Gene, you know that story about the 50 migrants,

0:16.2

most of them from Venezuela,

0:18.1

who were deceived into boarding a flight to Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts.

0:22.7

Yeah, I mean, I'm just picturing those group of people

0:25.3

who are spent from this treacherous journey just getting to the United States,

0:28.8

hoping to find a better life, you know,

0:30.3

and then they get tricked into getting on this plane from Texas

0:34.0

with promises that only other end,

0:35.9

they'd be housing, they'd be jobs,

0:37.9

all that, as we know, was a lot.

0:41.0

Exactly. It was a political stunt,

0:43.6

this time by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis,

0:46.2

who paid for their flights, by the way.

0:48.6

But there was no one there to greet them when they arrived,

0:51.7

no coordination, no alerts to agencies

0:54.7

that could have helped to settle them, nada.

0:57.4

Yeah, and that was on purpose.

0:58.8

And this has been happening all summer.

...

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