56 “not willing to risk”: Wen Lang Li and Sheron L. Randolph, “Return Migration and Status Attainment Among Southern Blacks,” Rural Sociology 47, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 395.
57 It made them “especially goal oriented”: Larry H. Long and Lynne R. Heltman, “Migration and Income Differences between Black and White Men in the North,” The American Journal of Sociology 90, no. 6 (May 1975): 1406.
58 In San Francisco, for instance: Charles S. Johnson, Herman H. Long, and Grace Jones, The Negro Worker in San Francisco (San Francisco: YWCA, the Race Relations Program of the American Missionary Association, and the Julius Rosenwald Fund, May 1944), pp. 15–23.
59 “more family-stable”: Thomas C. Wilson, “Explaining Black Southern Migrant Advantage in Family Stability: The Role of Selective Migration,” Social Forces 80, no. 2 (December 2001): 555–71.
60 “Colored pupils sometimes occupy”: W. A. Daniel, “Schools,” in Negro Problems in the Cities, ed. T. J. Woofter (College Park, Md.: McGrath Publishing, 1928), p. 183.
61 “is literally forced”: Ibid.
62 James Cleveland Owens: William J. Baker, Jesse Owens: An American Life (New York: Free Press, 1986), p. 16.
63 The boy’s first day: Ibid., p. 19.
64 It made headlines: Larry Schwartz, “Owens Pierced a Myth,” http://espn.go.com/sportscentury/features/00016393.html.
65 “I wasn’t invited”: Susan Robinson, “A Day in Black History: Jesse Owens,” www.gibbsmagazine.com/Jessie%20Owens.htm.
66 “My son’s victories”: Donald McRae, Heroes Without a Country: America’s Betrayal of Joe Louis and Jesse Owens (New York: Ecco, 2002), p. 168.
67 “a narrow tongue”: St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945), p. 12.
68 There were temptations: Ibid., p. 438. See Frazier, The Negro Family in Chicago, p. 103, on the mulatto woman running the biggest poker games on the South Side.
69 This was the landing place: Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, pp. 610–11.
70 “rude cabin”: A. T. Andreas, History of Chicago: From the Earliest Period to the Present Time (Chicago: A. T. Andreas, 1884), pp. 70, 71.
71 “A few goats”: Edith Abbott, The Tenements of Chicago, 1908–1935 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936), pp. 121–23.
72 “Families lived without light”: Ibid., p. 126.
73 “Negro migrants confronted”: Ibid., p. 117.
74 “attics and cellars”: Abraham Epstein, The Negro Migrant in Pittsburgh (New York: Arno Press, 1969), p. 13. Originally published by the University of Pittsburgh in 1918.
75 New arrivals often paid: Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922), p. 93.
76 “The rents in the South Side”: Abbott, The Tenements of Chicago, p. 125.
77 Dwellings that went: Thomas Jackson Woofter, Negro Problems in Cities (New York: Harper and Row, 1928), p. 127.
78 “Lodgers were not disposed”: Epstein, The Negro Migrant in Pittsburgh, p. 8.
79 Whites saw the migrants: Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago, p. 3.
80 “A colored boy swam”: Carl Sandburg, The Chicago Race Riots (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1919), p. 3.
81 “on a white man’s complaint”: Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago, p. 4.
82 Blacks stabbed a white peddler: Ibid., p. 10.
83 Two white men: Ibid., p. 11.
84 White gangs stormed: Ibid., pp. 1–6.
85 Initially, they came: James N. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), p. 16.
86 “By the conversation”: Alfred McClung Lee and Norman D. Humphrey, Race Riot (New York: Dryden Press, 1943), p. 81.
87 “the immigration”: U.S. Department of Labor, Division of Negro Economics, Negro Migration in 1916–17 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1919), p. 131.
88 “stabbed, clubbed and hanged”: Oscar Leonard, “The East St. Louis Pogrom,” Survey, July 14, 1917, p. 331; cited in Herbert Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), p. 116.
89 The police: Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago, pp. 71–78.
90 With a sense of urgency: Ibid., pp. 640–51.
91 “where they drank”: Arna Bontemps, “The Two Harlems,” The American Scholar, Spring 1945, p. 168.
92 There’ll be brown skin mammas: Frank Byrd, “Rent Parties,” in A Renaissance in Harlem: Lost Essays of the WPA, ed. Lionel C. Bascom (New York: Amistad Press, 1999), pp. 59–67.
TO BEND IN STRANGE WINDS
93 I was a Southerner: Zora Neale Hurston, “Backstage and the Railroad,” Dust Tracks on a Road (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1942), p. 98.
94 “They have been our best”: E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932), pp. 108–9.
95 Businessmen jumped: James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 155.
96 “I got a sharecropper”: Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), p. 50.
97 they ran notices: Grossman, Land of Hope, pp. 156–57, on the effects of the Migration on churches in the North.
98 “They tried to insulate”: Ibid., p. 139.
99 “The same class of Negroes”: Frazier, The Negro Family in Chicago, p. 112.
100 A colored newspaper: Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922), p. 304.
101 A survey of new migrants: Charles S. Johnson, Herman H. Long, and Grace Jones, The Negro Worker in San Francisco (San Francisco: YWCA, the Race Relations Program of the American Missionary Association, and the Julius Rosenwald Fund, May 1944), p. 19 on how migrants and nonmigrants viewed one another.
102 “like German Jews”: Grossman, Land of Hope, p. 144.
103 “Those who have long been”: “Our Part in the Migration,” Chicago Defender, March 17, 1917, p. 9.
104 “Well, their English”: Douglas Henry Daniels, Pioneer Urbanites: A Social and Cultural History of San Francisco (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), p. 171.
105 “Eleanor”: Ibid., p. 175.
106 “It is our duty”: Chicago Defender, March 17, 1917, and January 18, 1918, cited in Grossman, Land of Hope, pp. 144–45.
107 Don’t hang out the windows: “A Few Do’s and Don’ts,” Chicago Defender, July 13, 1918, p. 16.
108 Don’t use vile language: “Some Don’ts,” Chicago Defender, May 17, 1919, p. 20. 291
109 1. Do not loaf: Grossman, Land of Hope, pp. 146–47.
THE OTHER SIDE OF JORDAN
110 We cannot escape: James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 20.
111 “If you succeed”: Congressional Record, 75, Session 3, pp. 893, 873.
112 James Arthur Gay was perhaps: Ed Koch, “Pioneering Civic Leader, Hotel Executive Gay Dies at 83,” Las Vegas Sun, September 13, 1999, http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/1999/sep/13/pioneering-civic-leader-hotel-executive-gay-dies-a/.
113 “What do you suppose”: Scott Nearing, Black America (New York: Schocken Books, 1929), p. 78; original reference: H. G. Duncan, The Changing Race Relationship in the Border and Northern States (Philadelphia, 1922), p. 77.
114 Campbell Soup plant: “Business & Finance: Soup,” Time, September 2, 1929, www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,7737779,00.html.
115 “the great clocks of the sky”: Robert Redfield, Tepoztlán, A Mexican Village: A Study of Folk Life (Chicago: Univ
ersity of Chicago Press, 1930), p. 83. Redfield describes the daily rhythms of life in his ethnography of a village in the Yucatán. His description could apply to rural people the world over who spend their days working the land. “In Tepoztlán,” he writes, “as in other simple societies, the pulse of life is measured more directly than it is with us by the great clocks of the sky.”
116 The plant turned out: Al Chase, “Chicago to Have One of the World’s Largest Soup Factories,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 20, 1927, p. C1.
117 “making conditions so unpleasant”: Abraham Epstein, The Negro Migrant in Pittsburgh (New York: Arno Press, 1969), p. 32.
118 “friction in the washrooms”: Chicago Commision on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922), p. 395.
119 “I find a great resentment”: Ibid., pp. 394–95, on resistance to black workers at a millinery and on white women threatening to quit a laundry that introduced a black woman among them.
120 “Their presence and availability”: Charles S. Johnson, A Preface to Racial Understanding (New York: Friendship Press, 1936), pp. 38–39.
121 By 1940: St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945), p. 227, Figure 16 from the 1940 Census.
122 “where no restaurant”: Ben Green, Before His Time: The Untold Story of Harry T. Moore, America’s First Civil Rights Martyr (New York: Free Press, 1999), p. 5.
123 These were the dark: Paul Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 61.
124 “It is safe to predict”: Green, Before His Time, p. 43, citing a quote in the Tampa Morning Tribune.
125 “We are in the hands”: “Florida Topics,” New York Freeman, June 25, 1887.
126 Florida school boards: Charles Johnson, Patterns of Negro Segregation (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1943), p. 16.
127 the authorities fired: Green, Before His Time, p. 85.
128 The three young men: Ibid., p. 91.
129 The trial had been so tense: Ibid., pp. 103–6, for a detailed account of the car chase after the Groveland trial.
130 Both men were from: Ray Charles and David Ritz, Brother Ray: Ray Charles’ Own Story (New York: Da Capo Press, 1978), p. 165.
131 “even at a financial loss”: Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 101–6.
COMPLICATIONS
132 “What on earth was it”: Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1995), p. 294 (reissue; originally published by Random House, New York, 1952).
133 “positions in either”: Kimberley L. Phillips, AlabamaNorth: African-American Migrants, Community and Working-Class Activism in Cleveland, 1915–1945 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), pp. 241–42.
134 Entire companies and classes: Charles S. Johnson, To Stem This Tide: A Survey of Racial Tension Areas in the United States (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1943), pp. 11–12.
135 Those on the lowest rung: Brenda Clegg Gray, Black Female Domestics During the Depression in New York City, 1930–1940 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1993), pp. 57, 58.
136 One was by: Vivian Morris, “Slave Market” and “Domestic Price Wars,” in A Renaissance in Harlem: Lost Essays of the WPA, ed. Lionel C. Bascom (New York: Amistad Press, 1999), pp. 146–57.
137 In Chicago: St. Clair Drake and Horace H. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945, reprinted 1993), pp. 245–46.
138 “Someone would invariably”: Gray, Black Female Domestics, p. 51.
139 One colored woman: Keith Collins, Black Los Angeles: The Maturing of the Ghetto, 1940–1950 (Saratoga, Calif.: Century Twenty One Publishing, 1980), pp. 53–54, cited in Kevin Leonard, Years of Hope, Days of Fear: The Impact of World War II on Race Relations in Los Angeles, pp. 40, 41.
140 turning back the hands: Morris, “Slave Market,” p. 150.
141 One housewife: Gray, Black Female Domestics, p. 61.
142 In many cases: Ibid., p. 67.
143 Boy Willie: August Wilson, The Piano Lesson (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), p. 20.
144 The bartender: “Restaurant Keeper Who Breaks Dishes He Uses in Serving Negroes, Will Have to Get New Supply if This Plan Works,” The Pittsburgh Courier, February 14, 1931, p. A7, a story about black resistance to the practice of restaurants breaking the dishes used by blacks.
145 For several days: Michael Lydon, Ray Charles: Man and Music (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), p. 197. Ray Charles and David Ritz, Brother Ray (New York: Dial Press, 1978), p. 201.
146 After the dealer’s: Charles and Ritz, Brother Ray, p. 201.
147 It was around that time: Lydon, Ray Charles, p. 197.
148 They chose not to call: Charles and Ritz, Brother Ray, p. 202; Lydon, Ray Charles, p. 198. These accounts differ in the timing and nature of Ray’s arrival at the hospital. His biographer’s account is more consistent with the sense of obligation and protocol with which Robert Foster was known to have treated his patients. Foster, honoring the patient-doctor privilege, did not speak in detail about individual patients.
149 “Naturally, I refused”: Charles and Ritz, Brother Ray, p. 202.
150 “Everyone I met”: Ibid.
151 The tour was a dream: Lydon, Ray Charles, p. 198.
152 “one of the dearest”: Charles and Ritz, Brother Ray, p. 202.
153 “Do you feel greater freedom”: Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922), pp. 98–101.
THE RIVER KEEPS RUNNING
154 “Why do they come?”: Ray Stannard Baker, Following the Color Line (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1908), p. 133.
155 “Every train, every bus”: Interview with Manley Thomas, who migrated from Jackson, Tennessee, to Milwaukee in September 1950. Interview conducted June 26, 1998, in Milwaukee.
156 Arrington High: Dan Burley, “Mississippi Escapee Yearns to Return,” Chicago Defender, February 24, 1958, p. A4.
157 Henry Brown: Henry Box Brown, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown (Manchester, England: Lee and Glynn, 1851; reprint, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), p. 84.
158 Brown was in agony: From the account by William Still from The Underground Rail Road on the arrival of Henry Box Brown at the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society offices. Cited in Appendix B of the 2008 reprint of Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, pp. 160–63.
159 They locked the door: Henry Box Brown, Narrative of Henry Box Brown, Who Escaped from Slavery Enclosed in a Box 3 Feet Long and 2 Wide. Written from a Statement Made by Himself. With Remarks upon the Remedy for Slavery by Charles Stearns (Boston: Brown and Stearns, 1849); cited in Alan Govenar, African American Frontiers: Slave Narratives and Oral Histories (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2000), pp. 9–16.
160 many funeral directors: Interviews with black funeral directors in Chicago and at an annual National Funeral Directors Association meeting in Norfolk, Virginia, yielded polite changes of subject when directors were asked about the issue of funeral home involvement in these escapes out of the South.
161 “That underground”: Burley, “Mississippi Escapee Yearns to Return.”
THE PRODIGALS
162 [My father], along with: James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 72.
163 ’Sides, they can’t run us: Marita Golden, Long Distance Life (New York: Doubleday, 1989), p. 39.
164 “Even in the North”: Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy, Anyplace but Here (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1945), p. 170.
DISILLUSIONMENT
165 Let’s not fool ourselves: Speech by
Martin Luther King, Jr., May 17, 1956, MLK speech file, MLK Library, cited in James R. Ralph, Jr., Northern Protest: Martin Luther King Jr., Chicago and the Civil Rights Movement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 30.
166 It was a hoax: Robert Coles, “When the Southern Negro Moves North,” The New York Times Magazine, September 17, 1967, pp. 25–27.
167 “They don’t want”: L. Alex Wilson, “Plan 2-Year Ban on Migrants,” Chicago Defender, July 1, 1950, p. 22.
168 “successfully defended”: Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 223.
169 “chronic urban guerilla warfare”: Arnold R. Hirsch, Making of the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 41.
170 The moving truck arrived: “Justice Department Probes Case of Negro Kept Out of Home,” Atlanta Daily World, July 11, 1951, p. 1.
171 The Clarks did not let: “Truman May Act in Cicero Case,” Chicago Defender, September 29, 1951, p. 1.
172 A mob stormed the apartment: Stephen Grant Meyer, As Long as They Don’t Move Next Door: Segregation and Racial Conflict in American Neighborhoods (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), pp. 118–19. Details of the mob’s destruction of the Clarks’ apartment and belongings from Chicago Defender, August 11, 1951, p. 7; Chicago Defender, July 21, 1951, p. 5; Atlanta Daily World, July 13, 1951, p. 1; “Ugly Nights in Cicero,” Time, July 23, 1953.
173 The next day: “Chicago Called Guard for 1919 Riots,” Chicago Defender, July 21, 1951, p. 5, for reference to National Guard in racial incidents. “Truman May Act in Cicero Case,” Chicago Defender, September 29, 1951, p. 1, on arrests of 118 people in the Cicero rioting and the grand jury’s decision not to indict.
174 “It was appalling”: Walter White, “Probe of Cicero Outbreaks Reveals Rioters Not Red but Yellow,” Chicago Defender, July 28, 1951, p. 7.
175 “bigoted idiots”: “Support Is Growing for Cicero Riot Victims,” Atlanta Daily World, p. 1.
176 “This is the root”: “Illinois Gov. Blames Housing Shortage for Riot in Cicero,” Atlanta Daily World, October 21, 1951, p. 1.
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