Everybody's Freedom Ride

...Not that the North does not have faults of its own, but at least here one can look forward to some semblance of human decency and have a cup of coffee or go to the bathroom without risking jail...

...Our daily press, most of which is always quite ready to splash Negro crime all over the front pages, cries out against this "racism" and "traffic in human agony...

...Unfortunately, this is not so...

...the reverse freedom rides are only the opening gambit...

...Consider the facts: • White citizens of New Orleans who flatly deny that Negroes are equal and have a right to fair play, dig into their pockets to provide the most unfortunate Negroes they can find with free trips to New York—a journey most of the Negroes involved have for years yearned to make...

...For the Negro, things are bad all over America...

...The point, however, is foolish...

...That, however, is not the point...

...While thousands of Negroes and whites stand in line for their unemployment checks, New York City finds jobs for the newcomers...

...For the South is not that wrong about the North, and the migrants will make this discovery for themselves once they become merely another group of Negroes who came North in search of nonexistent green pastures...

...Well, the leaders of the NAACP, CORE, the Urban League and scores of Negro writers, myself among them, have made their living doing precisely that for years...

...Yet this sponsored, dramatized trickle of Negroes out of the South has once again laid bare how sensitive all America is to the race issue, how involved all of us are with its strains...

...Of course, white Southerners, like the Europeans in Algeria, are masters of the ill-timed and the overdone...

...Get on board, little children...

...of the National Review...

...Louis E. Lomax, a freelancer, is author of The Reluctant African and the forthcoming The Negro Revolt...

...Put the reverse freedom rides next to the picture of devout Catholics crawling on the ground and all but excommunicating their Bishop because he ordered integration in parochial schools, and a frightening tableau emerges...

...Do we know what to do about it...

...But, if the truth must be told, they are worse in New Orleans than they are in New York...

...If some private Negro families or organizations are moved to extend themselves and take care of the reverse freedom riders rather than let the South have its way, they are welcome to do so, and their concern should be applauded...

...They can always be relied upon to destroy whatever concern or sympathy anyone might have for them in their bout with change and decay...

...The white South's shameful gimmick and the North's response to it are but evidences of the deepening uneasiness over racial matters which we all feel...

...In the wake of the Boyd family, the argument that all the South needs is time, that given the opportunity to work things out by itself the South will solve its racial problem, seems to dissipate completely...

...This is Everybody's Freedom Ride...

...People who will put a family of 10 on a bus and send them to New York as a stunt are capable of much worse...

...And one of the few encouraging aspects of the whole affair is that both the NAACP and the Urban League have taken to the streets of New Orleans to spread the gospel of truth before too many Negro brethren fall victim to what St...

...New York's Mayor Robert Wagner, who cannot find money to fix the City's streets or pay the teachers who labor with migrants of long standing, finds it in his heart as well as in the public coffers to provide emergency relief for the reverse freedom riders as they arrive in Gotham in this year of anxiety and elections...

...What is really at issue in all this is the continuing battle between the North and the South...

...Until now, they have always been quick to apologize for the South and, ofttimes, to agree with it...

...The diehards of the South have once again seceded from decency, and in doing so have elicited whimpers of liberalism from some of the most unexpected quarters in the North...

...For there can no longer be any debate about how mean the Southern extremist can be...

...Now their Southern compatriots have rewarded them by sending even more candidates for the relief rolls...

...I doubt that there is anything Louis Boyd, his wife and eight children, the first arrivals on the trip from New Orleans, can say about conditions for Negroes here in New York that I have not already said...

...Indeed, what worries me is the exact opposite: The Boyd family might conclude that all Negroes in the North are received and treated as they were...

...Had these organizations concerned themselves as much with the employment and housing of the Negroes who are already here, the South's indictment of the North might well be less accurate than it is...

...The object of civil rights, after all, is not to move Negroes from South to North, but rather to cause America to shift from cruelty to decency in its treatment of the Negro...

...Are we willing to admit that it exists...

...All of us—Negro and white, conservative and liberal—can see similarly frightening tableaus elsewhere in the world because we are so far removed from them and their peril...

...On balance, I suppose the North will get the better of this particular exchange before it ends, though the high priests of white supremacy will probably come forth with another, perhaps even more inhuman, ploy...

...The entire affair—shipping the poor and the frightened to live out their lives in the ghettos of the denied and the angry—is so painful and immediate that perhaps the only way to bear it is to join with Harry Golden and laugh...

...But I have grave doubts that the interests of, the City, of the nation or, for that matter, of better race relations are served when New York and the major Negro civil rights organizations make special provisions for these migrants...

...After reading reams of his rambling conversations with newsmen, I gather Singlemann hopes that after they are here a while these Negroes will tell the world how rough life is for them in New York...

...The reverse freedom ride has made it abundantly clear that the hard core of Southern extremists is not only determined to destroy itself in a fit of racial madness, but that it could well destroy the rest of us along with it...

...The most pleasing aspect of the reverse freedom rides is its impact upon the Northern conservatives...

...Paul called "scriptural error...

...Negroes, he says, could then turn the whole mess into a vacation: They could accept a one-way ticket from the Citizens Council, come to New York, have a ball, and accept a return ticket home from liberals...

...But this is the way of Everybody's Freedom Ride...

...The South, then, resumes this session of the Civil War by saying things are not so good up North, either...

...Golden has suggested a move to buy return tickets for the' reverse freedom riders...

...After all, what does Singlemann care if the Boyd family goes on relief and moves in next door to William F. Buckley Jr...

...Hundreds of Negroes arrive in New York each week from the South...

...Negro organizations, usually much too busy with protest gestures to roll out the carpet for Southern migrants, turn out to extend a welcome hand and, while they are at it, pose for cameramen...

...Yet I think that in time the North's making special provisions for the Negroes sent here by the Citizens Council will prove to be a mistake...

...Laughter is one way of dealing with trouble, but it by no means provides a final answer...

...What, after all, do George L. Singlemann and his cohorts hope to prove by sending indigent Negroes to New York...

...White and Negro citizens of New York, who normally would not stop to give a man a helping hand if he fell down the subway steps, open their hearts and homes to the freedom riders from the South...

...It is precisely because these questions are so complex, so disturbing, that the cause of racial justice needs all the brain and soul the Republic can muster...

...They either somehow manage to make their way or they return home...

...But can we see the situation in our own country...

...Similarly, I rather doubt the usefulness of the major Negro leadership organizations making a show of welcoming the reverse freedom riders...

...Since the New York labor market cannot absorb the people who are already here, I see no merit in a liberal tour de force that provides jobs for new citizens simply to prove the South wrong about the North...

...White Southern extremists like Singlemann are just getting started...

...We have not, I suspect, seen anything yet—and it is what is to come that really concerns me...

...The only thing that, makes the reverse freedom riders different is that they have been sent here by the Citizens Council to prove a point...

...All Americans—Negro and white, liberal and conservative—are now involved...

...These are the same conservatives who are the mortal enemies of welfare payments, particularly to indigent Negroes, in the North...

...Get on board...

...Launched by the New Orleans White Citizens Council, the whole idea is little more than an exercise in cruelty carried out by the desperate and the dying...

...And even if we can overcome our blind spot, are we willing to do anything about it...