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

by Isabel Wilkerson

  “The panic peddler and the ‘respectable’ broker earned the greatest profits,” Hirsch wrote, “from the greatest degree of white desperation.”179

  It seemed as if little had changed from the hostilities of the early years of the Migration, when colored tenants on Vincennes Avenue got the following notice: “We are going to blow these flats to hell and if you don’t want to go with them you had better move at once.180 Only one warning.” The letter writers carried out their threat. Three bombs exploded over the following two weeks.

  Thirty years later, things were no better and may actually have been worse, as the black belt strained to hold the migrants still pouring in even as the borders with white neighborhoods were being more vigorously defended.

  By the late 1950s, Ida Mae and George, now both working blue-collar jobs and their children now adults and with blue-collar jobs of their own, were dreaming of finding a place where they could pool their incomes and live together under one roof. But it would be some time before they were in a position to act or could find a safe and affordable place to go.

  At the same time, an urban turf war had risen up around them. Bombings, shootings, riots, or threats greeted the arrival of nearly every new colored family in white-defended territory. The biggest standoffs came between the groups with the most in common, save race: the working-class white immigrants and the working-class black migrants, both with similar backgrounds and wanting the same thing—good jobs and a decent home for their families—but one group not wanting to be anywhere near the other and literally willing to fight to the death to keep the other out.

  It was a chilling parallel to the war playing out at the very same time in the South, from the arrest of Rosa Parks in 1955 for refusing to give up a bus seat in Alabama to white troops blocking nine colored students in 1957 on their first day of school in Little Rock, Arkansas, after the Supreme Court said they had the right to enroll.

  After World War II, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and other northern and western cities would witness a fitful migration of whites out of their urban strongholds. The far-out precincts and the inner-ring suburbs became sanctuaries for battle-weary whites seeking, with government incentives, to replicate the havens they once had in the cities.

  One such suburb was Dearborn, Michigan, just outside Detroit. By the mid-1950s, Dearborn was swelling with white refugees from the city. The suburb’s mayor, Orville Hubbard, told the Montgomery Advertiser in Alabama that the whites had been “crowded out of Detroit by the colored people.”181 He was more than happy to welcome these new white residents and said, to the delight of southern editorialists, “These people are so anti-colored, much more than you in Alabama.”

  Having already fled the cities, the newcomers were not going to let colored people into their new safehold. “Negroes can’t get in here,” Mayor Hubbard told the southerners. “Every time we hear of a Negro moving in, we respond quicker than you do to a fire.”

  Decades later, the message would still hang in the air, the calculus pretty much the same. By the end of the twentieth century, blacks would make up more than eighty percent of the population of Detroit. Just across the Ford Expressway, the black population of the suburb of Dearborn, the 2000 census found, was one percent.

  NEW YORK, 1963

  GEORGE SWANSON STARLING

  EVERY NIGHT, the violence came into George Starling’s living room. He had been watching the nightly news, the grainy black-and-white images of colored teenagers standing up to southern sheriffs, and he could see himself as a young man again, pressing against the barbed wall of the caste system in Florida. Sheriff’s deputies were pounding the young people with fire hoses and beating them with batons. This was the South he left. He wondered if it would ever change.

  He was on the subway one morning heading to work at Pennsylvania Station in the midst of this southern assault. He got settled in his seat and opened the newspaper. “I looked at the front page,” he said, “and there’s all these black people down on the ground, and dogs jumping all over them and the cops standing over them with billies and beating on them down in Alabama on a march.”

  Something welled up in George. Everything raced before him: the cheating foremen in the groves, his running for his life, the hangings and burnings, the little southern dog that would rather die than be black, the bomb going off on Christmas Day under the bed of a good man trying to bring justice to Florida. And then there was New York. Wide open and stifling at the same time. Yes, he was alive, but it was a slow death in a hard city. He was a baggage handler for all intents and purposes and would be no more than that no matter how much potential he had.

  The city was pressing down on him and swallowing up his children. It never failed to remind him that he was seen as alien, the Yankee bartender taking the trouble to break the glass George had drunk from rather than use it again. There was no place else to run. And now the heat was turning up in the South again. Hosing and police dogs and people watching it as if it were a made-for-TV movie and the blacks just having to take it like they had for generations.

  “I had the paper in front of my face,” he said. “And I got so mad. I dropped the paper down. And when I dropped the paper, I’m looking right in a white man’s face just sitting across from me. I had never seen the man before, didn’t know him from Adam, but he was white. And the hatred just surged up in me after looking at this thing in the paper. I just wanted to hurt somebody white. And I had to just really restrain myself to keep from just getting up. And that was the thing that went on during the whole campaign,” as he called the civil rights movement.

  George got hold of himself. He pulled himself back from the edge. This thing was driving him crazy, and there was nothing he could do about it. The white man probably never had a clue. George would go about his job on the train, and no one would know the difference. But the despair did not leave him. He still had loved ones in the South. “I was worried about all my family and friends,” he said. “I had a lot of people there. My father and mother were living. My brother and all the kids that I went to school with and my wife’s people. There were a lot of people that I was concerned with.”

  He saw the fear firsthand on the faces of colored passengers heading north and in his tense interactions with white southerners when he worked the rails going south. As bad as it was, and as bad as it had been all those decades before, some of the most boldfaced terrors of the civil rights movement were yet to come—the bombing deaths of four little girls just before a Sunday church service in Birmingham, the assassinations of civil rights workers, black and white, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner and Medgar Evers, the confrontation on a bridge in Selma, Alabama. Those would not come until Jim Crow’s fitful last hours.

  George kept close contact with the people back home and, like many migrants in the North, sent money to support the protests because the migrants knew more than most anyone what the people back home were up against.

  One day in 1962, in the middle of the civil rights movement, he heard something that set him off again. By civil rights standards it was a relatively small thing, and that is what drew him to it. For some reason nothing seemed as fate-tempting and blasphemous as someone setting fire to three defenseless colored churches, as in Georgia in September 1962. They were razed to the ground by white supremacists bent on keeping colored people from something as basic as signing up to vote. George was raised in the church and felt it hallowed and sanctified and the only safe place even the old slaveholders had dared not enter. It represented a breach of the most private, holy space.

  He read in the New York Amsterdam News that there was a drive on to raise money to rebuild the churches.182 He started a collection himself. He went to the underpaid cooks and baggage men and redcaps and porters working the rails with him. He got fifty cents here and a dollar there from people like Walter Watkins from Washington, D.C., Ralph Covington from Brooklyn, Van Truett from the Bronx, G. T. Craig from Baltimore, J. E. Aaron of Brooklyn, and thirty-eight
other co-workers. It took him four weeks to raise forty-one dollars. In January 1963, he walked over to the office of the Amsterdam News and handed a check in that amount to a rebuilding fund the paper was sponsoring.

  With George, it was never the money when it came to these things but the sense of indignation over the injustice of it all and about doing something, anything, and getting other people as roused up about it as he was, just like he did back in the orange groves in Florida all those years ago. He had been in Harlem and working for the railroad for eighteen years now and knew he and his co-workers could raise more than a few dollars to help fight bigotry in the region they left.

  The Amsterdam News soon closed the fund, figuring it had raised all it was going to get. The churches in Georgia had already begun rebuilding with donations that had come in from all over the country. But George hadn’t stopped collecting money. He kept a ledger of all the men who contributed and what they contributed, each fifty-cent and dollar increment from Percy Brown of Mount Vernon, Yace Brown of Queens, Adolph Thomas of Philadelphia. In March, George showed up again at the newspaper office with a check for forty-four dollars more.183

  “I wanted to help in the only way I know,” he told the Amsterdam News.

  LOS ANGELES, AUGUST 1961

  ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER

  ROBERT WAS IN REGULAR CONTACT with the folks back home, and in one of his phone calls to Monroe, his big brother Madison mentioned that he was due for some upcoming surgery, what seemed on the face of it to be fairly routine, the problem being his gallbladder. But Robert, a surgeon of many years now, knew that nothing involving surgery was routine and urged his brother to come out to California, where he could get the best of medical care. Robert would make all the arrangements, and Madison wouldn’t have to submit to the small-town, probably proficient, but still segregated medicine back in Louisiana.

  “Come,” Robert told him. “I don’t want those white doctors in Monroe operating on you. You come out here so I’ll know what kind of care you’re getting.”

  Madison had heard about the state-of-the-art facilities in Los Angeles. He knew his brother would see to it that he got the very best—that was just the way Robert was and he couldn’t help himself. So, although the trip out west would be taxing, he decided to leave his wife, Harriet, and son, Madison James, in Monroe and follow his little brother’s advice and come to L.A.

  “He had confidence in me,” Robert said.

  Robert set about planning the best medical care for his brother. He handpicked the surgeon—board-certified, it went without saying—who was one of his most trusted friends. On the day of the operation, Robert was there in his scrubs in the operating room, serving as second assistant and watching every move.

  “And when he picked the knife up to make the incision,” Robert remembered, “I closed my eyes and flinched. I felt it. I couldn’t assist with that attitude. So the surgeon said, ‘Bob, you let Palmer Reed move up, and you step back so I can sponge.’ And I settled down.”

  Robert stayed for the duration of the surgery. “I saw everything, and it was a flawless operation. It was beautiful. There was no mistake made. None.”

  He felt proud and vindicated that he had insisted that his big brother come out to California and that things had gone so well. To Robert, it was just one more way to prove to the brother who had stayed in the South that he had made the right decision to migrate and that things really were better in California.

  Robert was in a great mood and started joking with his brother that maybe he should recuperate at Robert’s house or with their sister, Gold, who by now Robert had lured to California, too.

  “You wasting money in a private room,” Robert said. “Come to my house or go live with Gold.”

  “Okay,” Madison said. “I’ll be ready to go. I just don’t feel good right now.”

  Three or four days after surgery, Madison was still saying he didn’t feel good. He started sending out for antacids to relieve his abdominal pressure. But he wasn’t complaining.

  “And he didn’t have any symptoms that would make us want to do anything special,” Robert later said. “We know there’s a certain amount of discomfort you gonna have. He was taking soft foods, and he was up. He was ambulated the next day after surgery. Temperature was flat. He was doing fine.”

  After several more days, a nurse woke Robert up one morning.

  “Dr. Foster, this is Miss Smart. I’m calling you about Dr. Madison Foster.”

  “Yes.”

  “He went to the bathroom, Dr. Foster.”

  Robert heard the gravity in her voice, the succinctness of her message, and knew what it meant, could read her shorthand. Madison must have strained himself and, in the straining, dislodged some plaque that could be anywhere in his body, in his heart, his lungs, his brain. There was no telling where it could be. Robert got straight to the point.

  “Is he alive?”

  The nurse told him, yes, and that they had called in several doctors to attend to him.

  “Fine,” Robert said, suspecting that it wasn’t.

  At once he began calling in the specialists he knew, and then he rushed to the hospital. Madison’s hospital room was full of doctors. They were surrounding his bedside, all working on him.

  “And I’ll never forget the look in his eyes,” Robert said, his head down now. “And he’s looking at me. And that look in his eye was saying, ‘Is this it?’ Little Bubba, he called me. ‘Little Bub, is this it?’ He was so worried. And I’m crying and talking.”

  Robert tried to comfort him.

  “Don’t worry, Bubba,” Robert said. “It’s alright. It’s gonna be alright.”

  Madison was a physician himself and knew that it wasn’t.

  “He knew I was only reassuring him,” Robert would later say, “because why would I be crying?”

  Robert got on the phone with Madison’s wife, Harriet, who was still awaiting word back in Monroe about how the gallbladder surgery had gone. “I gave her an hour-to-hour report,” he said. “And that went on all day.”

  Instead of saving his brother in California, Robert would end up sending Madison back home in a casket, the people in Monroe clucking over Robert’s so-called Promised Land and what a shame it all was. Harriet would hold it against him for years. Madison had died of a blood clot; that had been the source of his discomfort, and nothing, it seemed, could have prevented it. Robert would have been the first to blame the doctors if it had happened in the South, but this had been in California, and he had chosen the surgeons and seen the operation with his own eyes. Robert would blame himself for as long as he lived, torture himself with “What would have happened if …,” and would never truly get over it.

  REVOLUTIONS

  I can conceive of no Negro native to this country

  who has not, by the age of puberty, been irreparably scarred

  by the conditions of his life.…184

  The wonder is not that so many are ruined

  but that so many survive.

  —JAMES BALDWIN, Notes of a Native Son

  CHICAGO, 1966

  IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY

  ONE DAY IN 1966, something hopeful called to Ida Mae, who was now fifty-three and a grandmother. She scuttled past the dime stores and beauty shops on Sixty-third Street with Eleanor’s little children, Karen and Kevin, in tow. They were rushing in the direction of a quavering voice on a loudspeaker. Up ahead, she could see a crowd of onlookers, the faithful and the curious, packed in the street and on the sidewalks near Halsted and sober-faced police officers circling the crowd on horseback.

  She arrived late and out of breath. Years later, all she would remember was the voice saying something about “little white children and little colored children,” or so she thought, and all the people, hordes of them, straining to hear but tense from the police scrutiny and the vaguely dangerous nature of the moment.

  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was there in person and speaking before them. It was one of his ra
re appearances in Ida Mae’s neighborhood during his first major attempt to bring the civil rights movement to the North. Ida Mae almost missed it. She arrived too late to get anywhere near the podium. Neither she nor Karen or Kevin could see over the crowd that had gathered long before them.

  “They had him way up on something high,” she said decades later. “And you could hear his voice talking through those horns.”

  Ida Mae wanted to move closer to see him. That was what she had come for, after all. “I never did get close enough,” she said. “I didn’t want to push through the crowd. Everybody was so touchy. And I had kids, you see, and I just couldn’t pull them up in there. I never did get to see him good.”

  Ida Mae was taken in by the sheer presence of the man, who by then had already won the Nobel Peace Prize, led the March on Washington, witnessed the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and overseen his epic battles against Jim Crow in places like Selma and Montgomery.

  But Chicago was a turning point for King. His movement was aging, its actions drawing greater skepticism and its successes leaving him with fewer obvious dragons to slay. It was a campaign looking for a cause. The inroads into southern segregation gave King a greater awareness of the unresolved tensions in the North in the wake of the Great Migration.

  “Negroes have continued to flee from behind the Cotton Curtain,” King told a crowd at Buckingham Fountain near the Loop, testing out a new theme in virgin territory.185 “But now they find that after years of indifference and exploitation, Chicago has not turned out to be the New Jerusalem.”

  Yet the very thing that made black life hard in the North, the very nature of northern hostility—unwritten, mercurial, opaque, and eminently deniable—made it hard for King to nail down an obvious right-versus-wrong cause to protest.