Despite the sanitized name, the councils were essentially "the Ku Klux Klan without the hoods and the masks," said historian Clive Webb. The segregationists tapped into a network of local groups called Citizens' Councils. My mom thought that when she came to the North, she was going to have a better life for her children. and the Kennedys, all of them, really do have an interest in the Negro people, really do have a love for the Negro." "We're going to find out if people like Ted Kennedy. "For many years, certain politicians, educators and certain religious leaders have used the white people of the South as a whipping boy, to put it mildly, to further their own ends and their political campaigns," said Amis Guthridge, a lawyer from Arkansas who helped spearhead the Reverse Freedom Rides. The segregationists decided to answer the Freedom Rides with the "Reverse Freedom Rides." They would use the same weapon-Greyhound buses-and send African Americans to Northern cities. Instead, they were convinced it was a strategy to embarrass the South and capture black votes for the Democratic party. Touchstone and other segregationists thought there was no way the Freedom Riders or their fellow Northern liberals actually cared about integrating interstate transit or advancing civil rights. In a television interview from the time, Ned Touchstone of Louisiana-a spokesperson for a local segregationist group-said the North was "sending down busloads of people here with the express purpose of violating our laws, fomenting confusion, trying to destroy 100 years of workable tradition and good relations between the races." Southern segregationists, who were still furious over the school desegregation fights that dominated the 1950s, saw the Freedom Riders as sanctimonious provocateurs. Martin Luther King Jr., civil rights leader, shakes hands with Paul Dietrich just before a bus of Freedom Riders left Montgomery, Ala., May 24, 1961.
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