After three days on a Greyhound bus, Lela Mae Williams was just an hour from her destination—Hyannis, Mass.—when she asked the bus driver to pull over. She needed to change into her finest clothes. She had been promised the Kennedy family would be waiting for her. It was late on a Wednesday afternoon, nearly 60 years ago, when that Greyhound bus from Little Rock, Ark., pulled into Hyannis. It slowed to a stop near the summer home of President John F. Kennedy and his family. When the doors opened, Lela Mae and her nine youngest children stepped onto the pavement. Reporters' microphones pointed at her, their cameras trained on her family. The photographs in the next day's newspaper show Lela Mae looking immaculate. In an elegant black dress, a triple string of pearls and a white hat, she was dressed to start a new life. "She was going to have a job, and she was going to be able to support her family," one of Lela Mae's daughters, Betty Williams, remembered in a recent interview. Before coming north to Massachusetts, Lela Mae had been promised a good job, good housing and a presidential welcome. But President Kennedy was not there to meet her. And there was no job or permanent housing waiting for her in Hyannis. Instead, Lela Mae and the others were unwitting pawns in a segregationist game. "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. Fuming over the civil rights movement, Southern segregationists had concocted a way to retaliate against Northern liberals. In 1962, they tricked about 200 African Americans from the South into moving north. The idea was simple: When large numbers of African Americans showed up on Northern doorsteps, Northerners would not be able to accommodate them. They would not want them, and their hypocrisy would be exposed.
I know you don't make this comparison in good faith, so i'm not going to bother trying to point out how dishonest it is to make the comparison you are making with what desantis is doing. You tell yourself this is the same because it's the only way you can excuse the shitty things you support.
This is the most telling part of the story. I’ve been to Marthas Vineyard and yes it would be hard for them to suddenly deal with 50 people with no housing, food or money. They very easily could’ve just put them on a ferry back to the mainland and pushed the problem to someone else. Instead they took them in got them fed and housed and are looking to get them services.
I was talking to a friend of mine in Nashville. He runs a string of fast food restaurants in TN. He said he hopes DeSantis and Abbott send some of those people his way. He’s having so much trouble getting and retaining employees he would give those people a job.
Boy do the racists come out in these responses, hiding behind their justification of using non-white immigrants as political stunts. I see the typical ones liking their posts.
How is this the same as providing safe, appropriate care to unaccompanied migrant children during the time they are in our custody that included transportation to vetted sponsors while they await immigration proceedings? Did Abbott and DeSantis ensure vetted sponsors would be there to meet them before shipping them off and bragging about it? Nope.
I think what those cities should do is bus inmates to TX and FL since Republicans are so pro law and order and convert the jails to housing.
Partisanship is making good people turn away, ignore, rationalize or even support something they otherwise wouldn't. So toxic.
I bet the migrants prefer Martha's Vineyard to most places. Not like some hardship has been done to them.
I doubt they could afford housing there once they find a job unless someone gives them a cush job paying over $300,000 a year.
