The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

by Isabel Wilkerson

  George slung a rug across his shoulders and hoisted a block of ice on his back to carry it up the tenement steps. He was used to hauling a hundred pounds of cotton in a day for fifty cents. Now he could make that with each fifty-pound block of ice. And he was delivering a lot of it. Ice melted fast in the summer heat. Some people needed to replenish their iceboxes every day. He was already making more money than in Mississippi, and not under the shotgun scrutiny of a planter. It was stoop labor, and he couldn’t do it forever. But it would have to do for now.

  By the time Ida Mae got back with the baby and little James and Velma, he had secured for his family a one-room basement apartment among the frail tenements and dilapidated lean-tos in the roped-off colored section of town.

  It was a kitchenette in a two-flat in the low Forties off St. Lawrence. Preceding waves of European immigrants had lived there before them in creaking buildings from the nineteenth century, the streets now pockmarked and piled so high with rubbish that ice wagons couldn’t get through some of them. It was only a few miles south but a world away from the boulevards and skyscrapers Ida Mae had seen when she first arrived, gray and weed-strewn as this new place of hers was.

  They were confined to a little isthmus on the South Side of Chicago that came to be called “Bronzeville,” the “black belt,” “North Mississippi.” It was “a narrow tongue of land, seven miles in length and one and one half miles in width,” as the midcentury historians St.67 Clair Drake and Horace Cayton described it, where a quarter-million colored people were packed on top of one another by the time Ida Mae and her family arrived.

  Up and down Indiana and Wabash and Prairie and South Parkway, across Twenty-second Street and down to Thirty-first and Thirty-ninth and into the low Forties, a colored world, a city within a city, rolled out from the sidewalk, the streets aflutter with grocers and undertakers, dressmakers and barbershops, tailors and pressers, dealers of coal and sellers of firewood, insurance agents and real estate men, pharmacists and newspapers, a YMCA and the Urban League, high-steepled churches—Baptist, Holiness, African Methodist Episcopal churches practically transported from Mississippi and Arkansas—and stacked-heeled harlots stumbling out of call houses and buffet flats.

  There were temptations a southern sharecropper couldn’t have known existed and that could only catch root when so many people were packed into one place, the police could be bought, and the city looked away: reefer pads, card sharks, gangsters and crapshooters.68 The so-called mulatto queen of the underworld running poker games. Policy kings running the numbers racket, ready to take a migrant’s newly earned dollar fresh from the slaughterhouse. The migrants could see Ma Rainey at the Regal or just melt into the neon anonymity of city life without a watchful uncle or jackleg preacher knowing about it.

  This was the landing place in Chicago for most colored people just in from the South.69 They had left the wide-open spaces and gravel roads of the cotton fields and had to watch their every step. Ida Mae and George, in particular, pious and churchly as he was, wanted nothing to do with the devilment crowding in on them but had to make the best of it and just be thankful for having made it out of Mississippi alive.

  By the time Ida Mae and her family arrived, Chicago was a major terminus of the Great Migration of colored people out of the South and of latter-day immigrants from central and eastern Europe. It had first been settled in 1779 by a black man named Jean Baptiste Point DuSable in what was then wilderness. He was a fur trader who built a “rude cabin on the sandpoint at the mouth of the river.”70

  Ida Mae found the living conditions not much better than those back home and, in some cases, worse. “A few goats and an occasional pig” roamed alleyways that reeked of rotting vermin.71 Front doors hung on single hinges. The sun peeked through cracks in the outer walls. Many rooms sat airless and windowless, packed with so many people that some roomers had to sleep in shifts, all of which made a mockery of city codes devised to protect against these very things.

  “Families lived without light, without heat, and sometimes without water,” observed Edith Abbott, a University of Chicago researcher who studied tenement life in Chicago in the 1930s, the time when Ida Mae arrived.72 “The misery of housing conditions at this time can scarcely be exaggerated.”

  They were living in virtual slave cabins stacked on top of one another, wives, like Ida Mae, cooking on hot plates and hanging their laundry out the window, if they had a window at all, unable to protect themselves or their children from the screams and conversation and sugar talk and fighting all around them. It was as if all of them were living in one room without space for their own thoughts or for their dreams of how best to get out.

  Ida Mae soon discovered that there really was no getting out, not right off anyway. “Negro migrants confronted a solid wall of prejudice and labored under great disadvantages in these attempts to find new homes,” Abbott wrote.73 The color line in Chicago confined them to a sliver of the least desirable blocks between the Jewish lakefront neighborhoods to the east and the Irish strongholds to the west, while the Poles, Russians, Italians, Lithuanians, Czechs, and Serbs, who had only recently arrived themselves, were planting themselves to the southwest of the colored district.

  With several thousand black southerners arriving each month in the receiving cities of the North and no extra room being made for them, “attics and cellars, store-rooms and basements, churches, sheds and warehouses,” according to Abraham Epstein in his study of the early migration, were converted to contain all the new arrivals.74 There was “rarely a place in these rooms for even suitcases or trunks.”

  People like Ida Mae had few options, and the landlords knew it. New arrivals often paid twice the rent charged the whites they had just replaced for worn-out and ill-kept housing.75 “The rents in the South Side Negro district were conspicuously the highest of all districts visited,” Abbott wrote.76 Dwellings that went for eight to twenty dollars a month to white families were bringing twelve to forty-five dollars a month from black families, those earning the least income and thus least able to afford a flat at any rent, in the early stages of the Migration.77 Thus began a pattern of overcharging and underinvestment in black neighborhoods that would lay the foundation for decades of economic disparities in the urban North.

  Ida Mae tried never to worry about things she couldn’t change and so made do with what they could get. She wasn’t the only one. “Lodgers were not disposed to complain about the living conditions or the prices charged,” Epstein wrote.78 “They were only too glad to secure a place where they could share a half or at least a part of an unclaimed bed.”

  The story played out in virtually every northern city—migrants sealed off in overcrowded colonies that would become the foundation for ghettos that would persist into the next century. These were the original colored quarters—the abandoned and identifiable no-man’s-lands that came into being when the least-paid people were forced to pay the highest rents for the most dilapidated housing owned by absentee landlords trying to wring the most money out of a place nobody cared about.

  It would soon come to be that anyone living in any American city would know exactly where these forgotten islands were, if only to make sure to avoid them: under the viaduct along a polluted stream in Akron, Ohio; in the Hill District in Pittsburgh; Roxbury in Boston; the east side of Cincinnati; the near east side of Detroit; nearly all of East St. Louis; whole swaths of the South Side of Chicago and South Central in Los Angeles; and much of Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant in New York.

  Like other migrants with limited options, Ida Mae and her family moved from place to place, from one unacceptable flat to a slightly larger and less odious option a few blocks away, not unlike sharecroppers moving from farm to farm looking for a less exploitive arrangement with, they hoped, a fairer planter. Soon they were living on the top floor of a three-flat at Thirty-sixth and Wabash. It was well into the Great Depression, and a man took to sleeping at odd hours of the day on the little landing outside their kitchen door.
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br />   “I open the door and put garbage out there, and he still be sleep,” Ida Mae remembered. “I don’t know who he was. He stayed there winter and summer. He didn’t bother nobody. He was sleeping like he was in a bed. He had his little cover out there.”

  Did he ever wake up when you went out there? I asked her once. “No,” she said. “Because I reckon he done did his devilment all night.”

  Ida Mae didn’t know it, but, with the Great Depression deepening, she and her family had arrived in a city unprepared for and utterly resistant to the continuing influx of migrants. City fathers and labor experts had expected the Great Migration to end with World War I. Jobs and housing were scarcer now. White unions were refusing colored workers membership, keeping colored wages low, restricting the work that migrants could do, and leaving them unprotected during cutbacks.

  The colored old-timers who were already there were not especially happy to see them. Even as the Migration was a bonanza for colored storekeepers and businessmen, it meant more competition for the already limited kinds of jobs blacks were allotted and made the black presence in the city more conspicuous and threatening to the city’s racial alchemy.

  As it was, the city was still recovering from the tensions of one of the worst race riots in American history. The riots had set the city on edge and hardened race lines that would persist for generations.

  The trouble began after an incident only blocks from the three-flat at Thirty-sixth and Wabash where Ida Mae’s family would live exactly two decades later. It was the summer of 1919. World War I, the stimulus of the first wave of the Great Migration, was over. Munitions plants had shut down, the factories that lured black southerners were now letting workers go, the country was on the verge of recession, not able even to imagine the actual Depression that was brewing. The migrants, hemmed in and living on top of one another, even as more of them arrived, pressed against the white neighborhoods on their borders and were met with death threats and bombings when they ventured to the other side.

  The demilitarized zone was a moving target that no one could see but that everyone knew in his bones. Blacks were finding more things off-limits than it would otherwise appear, defined by custom and whites’ discomfort rather than by law. Even the beaches of Lake Michigan were segregated. Everyone was feeling the strain of a declining economy. Whites saw the migrants as competition for a scarcer pool of jobs and took to attacking them along the western boundary of the black belt.79

  Then on Sunday, July 27, 1919, a seventeen-year-old black boy named Eugene Williams, swimming along the shore of Lake Michigan, drifted past an invisible line in the lake into the white side of the Twenty-ninth Street beach.

  As was common in the North, there were no white or colored signs. It was merely understood that whites entered and used the beach at Twenty-ninth Street and blacks were to stay near the Twenty-seventh Street entrance two blocks north. The imaginary color line stretched out into the water. Swimming as he was, the boy couldn’t see the line where the white water began because the water looked the same.

  Carl Sandburg, the future poet who was then a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, recounted it this way: “A colored boy swam across an imaginary segregation line.80 White boys threw rocks at him and knocked him off a raft. He was drowned.”

  Blacks demanded that the white police officer on the scene arrest the whites they said had hurled rocks at Williams. The officer refused, arresting, instead, a black man in the crowd “on a white man’s complaint.”81

  Within hours, tensions reached a boil on both sides, and a riot was in full cry. Whites dragged black passengers from streetcars and beat them. Blacks stabbed a white peddler and a white laundryman to death.82 Two white men were killed walking through a black neighborhood, and two black men were killed walking through a white neighborhood.83 White gangs stormed the black belt, setting houses on fire, hunting down black residents, firing shotguns, and hurling bricks.84

  All told, the riots coursed through the south and southwest sides of the city for thirteen days, killing 38 people (23 blacks and 15 whites) and injuring 537 others (342 blacks, 178 whites, the rest unrecorded) and not ending until a state militia subdued them.

  Contrary to modern-day assumptions, for much of the history of the United States—from the Draft Riots of the 1860s to the violence over desegregation a century later—riots were often carried out by disaffected whites against groups perceived as threats to their survival. Thus riots would become to the North what lynchings were to the South, each a display of uncontained rage by put-upon people directed toward the scapegoats of their condition. Nearly every big northern city experienced one or more during the twentieth century.

  Each outbreak pitted two groups that had more in common with each other than either of them realized. Both sides were made up of rural and small-town people who had traveled far in search of the American Dream, both relegated to the worst jobs by industrialists who pitted one group against the other. Each side was struggling to raise its families in a cold, fast, alien place far from their homelands and looked down upon by the earlier, more sophisticated arrivals. They were essentially the same people except for the color of their skin, and many of them arrived into these anonymous receiving stations at around the same time, one set against the other and unable to see the commonality of their mutual plight.

  Thus these violent clashes bore the futility of Greek tragedy. Yet the situation was even more complicated than the black migrants could have imagined. As they made their way north, so did some of the poorer whites from the South, looking not for freedom from persecution but for greater economic rewards for their hard work. Slavery and sharecropping, along with the ravages of the boll weevil and floods, had depressed the wages of every worker in the South. The call of the North drew some of the southern whites the migrants had sought to escape.

  Initially, they came to the North in greater numbers, but they were much more likely to return south than colored southerners were—fewer than half of all white southerners who left actually stayed in the North for good, thus behaving more like classic migrant workers than immigrants.85 Still, many brought their prejudices with them and melted into the white working-class world of ethnic immigrants to make a potent advance guard against black inroads in the North.

  As a window into their sentiments, a witness to the Detroit riots in 1943 gave this description of a white mob that had attacked colored people in that outbreak. “By the conversation of the men gathered there, I was able to detect that they were Southerners and that they resented Negroes working beside them and receiving the same amount of money,” the informant said, adding that these southern whites believed that the black migrants “ought to be ‘taken down a peg or two.86’ ”

  Perhaps the earliest indication of what the migrants were unknowingly up against came from an outbreak directly related to the Great Migration, or rather to how the North reacted to the newcomers from the South. These were the riots that erupted in East St. Louis, Illinois, in the summer of 1917 after companies being struck by white workers hired colored migrants to replace them. The migrants were flocking to the city at a rate of a thousand a month, some eighteen thousand having arrived that spring, and they instantly became the perfect pawns, an industrialist’s dream: they were desperate to leave the South, anxious for work, untutored in union politics or workers’ rights—as most could not have imagined unionizing themselves as field hands, thus uncomprehending of the idea of a worker making demands and unlikely to complain about whatever conditions they might face.

  Once the strike was over, the colored migrants, resented by the unions and unprotected by the plants that had hired them, paid the price. One union wrote its members that “the immigration of the southern Negro into our city for the past eight months has reached a point where drastic action must be taken” and demanded that the city “retard this growing menace, and devise a way to get rid of a certain portion of those who are already here.”87

  On the night of July 1, a carload o
f whites fired shots into colored homes. The colored residents fired back when a second car filled with whites passed through, killing two policemen. The next day, full-scale rioting began. Colored men were “stabbed, clubbed and hanged from telephone poles.”88 A colored two-year-old “was shot and thrown into the doorway of a burning building.”

  “A black skin was a death warrant on the streets of this Illinois city,” wrote an observer shortly afterward.

  The police, charged with quelling the riot, in some cases joined in, as did some in the state militia sent in to restore order, actions that resulted in seven courts-martial.89 All told, thirty-nine blacks and eight whites were killed, more than a hundred blacks were shot or maimed, and five thousand blacks were driven from their homes.

  After the two riots, city leaders in Chicago could see no end to the racial divisions without intervention and a public appeal for tolerance. A white-led, biracial commission set up to investigate the climate and circumstances leading to the riots produced a 672-page report, The Negro in Chicago. It stands to this day as one of the most comprehensive examinations of both the early stages of the Great Migration and race relations in a northern American city.

  With a sense of urgency, it set out fifty-nine recommendations for improving race relations.90 It urged that the police rid the city’s colored section of the vice and prostitution that plagued the black belt; that the schools hire principals with an “interest in promoting good race relations”; that white citizens seek accurate information about blacks “as a basis of their judgments”; that restaurants, stores, and theaters stop segregating when they weren’t supposed to; that companies “deal with Negroes as workmen on the same plane as white workers” and stop using them as strikebreakers and denying them apprenticeships; that labor unions admit colored workers when they qualified; that employers “permit Negroes an equal chance with whites to enter all positions for which they are qualified by efficiency and merit”; that the press avoid using epithets in referring to blacks and treat black stories and white stories with the same standards and “sense of proportion.”