Everything old is new again
3rd October 2022 · 0 Comments
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is in the eye of a storm of criticism for tricking immigrants into boarding planes in Texas and transporting them to Martha’s Vineyard under the pretense of jobs, housing, and asylum.
Although Hurricane Ian might give DeSantis a tranche of free publicity and the opportunity to look like a compassionate and caring individual just weeks from his bid for a second gubernatorial term, his act of what could be deemed as human-trafficking migrants was deplorable.
Hindsight is always perfect. DeSantis could have used Florida’s taxpayers’ money to fly 50 migrants to a resort town to help his fellow Floridians in the wake of Ian.
After reviewing the facts, Newsweek concluded that it’s true that DeSantis allocated $12 million of the state’s budget to transport migrants.
That DeSantis is an asylum denier is hypocritical given that some of his Italian ancestors emigrated from southern Italy. His great-great-grandmother almost didn’t get into the U.S.
Megan Smolenyak, a professional genealogist and former chief historian for Ancestry.com, recently published the details of Luigia Colucci’s trip on Medium, the Tampa Bay Times reported.
Luigia Colucci left Italy in early 1917 and arrived at Ellis Island on February 21. While Colucci crossed the Atlantic Ocean, the U.S. Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1917. Among other restrictions on “undesirable” immigrants, it barred illiterate people from entering the United States.
Colucci couldn’t read or write, according to immigration documents. But she got in because the law didn’t go into effect until May. She was allowed in.
In transporting migrants and denying the legitimacy of the 2020 election, DeSantis, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey are shilling for votes and recruiting members to join the Republican Party from the White nationalists, White supremacists, and fascists, Republican extremists, and racists like Donald J. Trump have let out the closet.
The human-trafficking scheme has its roots in one of the many tactics employed by White Citizen Councils in the Deep South. When the Supreme Court abolished legal school segregation on Monday, May 17, 1954, White Southerners formed Citizens’ Councils — organizations of white segregationists and supremacists who opposed integration and the Supreme Court decision.
Mississippi Circuit Court Judge convened the first Citizens’ Council meeting in a living room in Indianola, Mississippi. Council members published a book entitled Black Monday, which outlined their simple beliefs: African Americans were inferior to whites, and the races must remain separate.
The groups’ weekly TV and radio programs and promotional films spotlighting the benefits of segregation were forerunners to the White Supremacists’ websites, podcasts, and social media platforms, like Truth Social.
Of course, Louisiana and New Orleans’ White City Council members were among the most virulent racists in the nation.
In 1955, the Citizens’ Council of Louisiana was founded in Homer, Claiborne Parish, and the parish’s stalwart segregationist politician, William M. “Willie” Reinach, became the first president of the state-wide Association of Citizens’ Councils a year later. By the Council’s first anniversary, twenty-eight of Louisiana’s sixty-four parishes had Council chapters, claiming 75,000 to 100,000 members in total.
The Citizens’ Council of Greater New Orleans (CCGNO) was one of the state’s most influential White Citizens Councils. Members included Plaquemines Parish’s leader Leander Perez and Dr. Emmett Lee Irwin, the former chief of surgery at Louisiana State University’s Medical School and CCGNO president from 1956 until he died in 1965.
The 1962 “Freedom Rides North” campaign initiated by CCGNO executive and Plaquemine Parish Judge Leander Perez’s aide George Singelmann was a human trafficking strategy that set a precedent for DeSantis, Abbott, and Arizona Governor Doug Ducey’s human trafficking schemes.
“In 1962, “reverse” Freedom Rides solicited black families from the South for one-way bus and train tickets to Northern destinations, including Chicago, New York, and Hyannis, Massachusetts, near President John F. Kennedy’s residence.
While the Reverse Freedom Rides began in New Orleans, many also originated from other Southern cities, most notably Little Rock, Arkansas. The first group sent by the Citizens’ Council arrived in New York by bus on April 21, 1962. According to the Amistad Research Center, it consisted of one large family from Algiers, Louisiana.
African-American “participants” in the Reverse Freedom Rides were offered free one-way transportation and the promise of free housing and guaranteed employment in Northern cities. George Engelmann of the Greater New Orleans Citizens’ Council orchestrated the Reverse Freedom Rides, which served as the Citizens’ Council’s means of testing the sincerity of Northern liberals’ quest for equality for African Americans.
This attempt to embarrass Northern critics of the Citizens’ Councils was a way of, in Singelmann’s words, “telling the North to put up or shut up.”
Engelmann’s vision for the Reverse Freedom Rides was expansive. He wanted chartered buses. He wanted a “Freedom Train” to carry as many as 1,000 Black Louisianans to Chicago. He wanted buses from Little Rock, Shreveport, and Birmingham, the Texas Observer reported last week.
Engelmann rolled out his plan in a fundraising letter to members of his organization. “We in the Citizens’ Council have long waited to go on the offense in this segregation struggle and we now have that opportunity.” Each bus, he wrote, “will take 39 negroes at a time from our midst. Those on welfare will be given first choice.”
The Citizens’ Councils claimed they did not sanction violence. Still, the venom spouted at their meetings and from their leaders, mainly Mississippi’s segregationist senator and plantation owner James O. Eastland, fostered a violent, reactionary climate where punishment against blacks was sanctioned, according to a PBS documentary. In Louisiana, the Deacons of Defense and CORE were targets of the KKK and the White Citizens. Both groups shared some of the same members.
On the morning of September 15, two buses full of migrants arrived near Vice President Kamala Harris’s residence in Washington D.C., sent by Abbott.
Since April, Abbott has sent more than 10,000 migrants—many of them Venezuelans exercising a legal right to seek asylum—from Texas to Washington, D.C., New York City, and Chicago, at the cost of more than $12 million, as part of his made-for-TV, publicly-funded initiative, “Operation Lone Star.”
Ducey sent at least 1,600 migrants, mostly asylum seekers, from Columbia, Peru, and Venezuela to New York, New Jersey, and Florida.
The Louisiana Weekly reported on the GNOCC human trafficking ploy in “Freedom Bus,” April 14, 1962.
Donald Trump Sr. rode into the Oval Office using hate speech and promoting white superiority ideals. He tapped into the racists and fascists in America and showed that hate and violence in the name of white supremacy are acceptable in the mainstream Republican Party.
White nationalist terrorists and white supremacist extremists are the greatest threats to democracy in the U.S. and abroad, according to a 2019 Congressional Hearing, which cited instances of violence carried out by racist and fascist whites.
“They share an ideology that asserts, among other beliefs, that white people and white identity in Western countries are under siege by massive waves of immigration from non-white countries.
“White nationalists also perpetuate conspiracy theories that claim that Jews control industries, governments, and other organizations through shadow groups which allegedly pose a threat to white civilization.
“White nationalists claim they are protecting the white race and will use any means necessary to defend it against this supposed dispossession,” said Congressman Theodore E. Deutch (Fla.), Chairman of the Subcommittee on the Middle East, North Africa, and International Terrorism.
Americans dedicated to the ideals of our Democratic Republic must prevail. How? The ballot box is our greatest weapon.
This article originally published in the October 3, 2022 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
