During the migration six decades, Black flight to the north continued to surge ironically, just as the civil rights movement was gaining momentum in the South.

The day has come when racism must be banished.

Northern organizations sent reinforcements.

One group, The Congress of Racial Equality, would tackle segregation head on with its bold series of freedom rides in 1961.

We had these mixed groups of black and white activists were traveling throughout the South to test whether southern states are abiding by the fact that there is no federal segregation laws that govern these spaces.

This is very threatening to white Southerners who act accordingly.

What these rides inevitably do is bring national attention on the South, and a spotlight on the treatment of these integrated riders.

These integrated groups.

While the Freedom Rides generated a violent backlash, one pro segregationist group had something much more devious in mind.

A New Orleans chapter of the White Citizens Council organized what became known as the Reverse Freedom Rides.

It was a diabolical attempt to disempower the growing political movement and make a mockery of the Great Migration.

They paid Greyhound to take busloads of black Southerners to northern cities for free, promising that they'd be received with jobs and housing accommodations.

I'm going because I'm trying to better my condtion.

I'm looking for employment.

The work is very slow.

Everybody is looking for a job, whites wouldn't hire me.

They select the poorest of the poor.

People who are out of work who lack skills.

Those who would not have had access to begin with.

Of course, it was a ploy.

When the busses finally arrived in cities like New York, Cleveland or Chicago, the passengers, to their horror, found no one waiting to welcome them.

The Reverse Freedom Rides preys on the Great Migration, preys on the hopes and aspirations of black folks, but they were still utilizing as a means of escape from southern apartheid.

It's done in ways that disregard their humanity in the worst possible way.

Despite attempts by advocacy organizations to come to their rescue, many of these Reverse Freedom Riders were stranded in the North and left to fend for themselves.

We believe in segregation for exactly the same reason that the white people in New York don't want to live in Harlem.

They can examine their own motives and their own consciences...

The southern architects of this strategy were interested only in trying to discredit desegregation, but they recognized that there were limits on how far white liberals in the North would go to really create the conditions for justice.

There was a lot of frustration among black northerners in the 1960s about the slow pace of change.

Frustration grows out of unmet expectations, and migrants who come to the North with really high expectations.