177 “A resident of Accra”: Hirsch, Making of the Second Ghetto, p. 53.
178 “Our nation is moving”: Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), p. 1. The 609-page report, issued by a commission chaired by Otto Kerner, then governor of Illinois, and at the behest of President Lyndon B. Johnson, examined the causes of a national outbreak of violence in twenty-three cities in the mid-1960s. The commission stated: “This is our basic conclusion: Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”
179 “The panic peddler”: Hirsch, Making of the Second Ghetto, pp. 31–35.
180 We are going to blow: “Bomb Explosion Wrecks Flat Building; Lives Imperiled When Angry Whites Hurl Dynamite: Police Failed to Protect Homes,” Chicago Defender, September 28, 1918, p. 1.
181 “crowded out of Detroit”: Meyer, As Long as They Don’t Move Next Door, p. 122.
182 He read in: See “RR Employes Give to Church Fund,” New York Amsterdam News, January 5, 1963, p. 24, for George Starling raising money to help rebuild churches in Georgia.
183 In March, George: See “Airline Workers Still Helping Razed Church,” New York Amsterdam News, March 16, 1963, p. 5, for George Starling handing over the second check to help rebuild churches in Georgia.
REVOLUTIONS
184 I can conceive: James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 59.
185 “Negroes have continued”: James R. Ralph, Jr., Northern Protest: Martin Luther King Jr., Chicago and the Civil Rights Movement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 35.
186 “almost everybody is against”: Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, vol. 2 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944), p. 1010.
187 “So long as this city”: “White and Black in Chicago,” Chicago Tribune, August 3, 1919, p. F6. The editorial also said, “We admit frankly that if political equality had meant the election of Negro mayors, judges, and a majority of the city council, the whites would not have tolerated it. We do not believe that the whites of Chicago would be any different from the whites of the south in this respect.… Legally a Negro has a right to service anywhere the public generally is served. He does not get it. Wisely, he does not ask for it. There has been an illegal, nonlegal or extra legal adjustment founded upon common sense which has worked in the past, and it will work in the future.”
188 “in one sense”: Ralph, Northern Protest, p. 34.
189 It was August 5, 1966: Gene Roberts, “Rock Hits Dr. King as Whites Attack March in Chicago,” The New York Times, August 6, 1966, p. 1.
190 The march had barely begun: Ibid. on where the rock hit King. Ralph, Northern Protest, on the size of the rock.
191 As the eight hundred: Roberts, “Rock Hits Dr. King as Whites Attack March in Chicago.”
192 Some of King’s aides: See Ralph, Northern Protest, p. 33, for attempts by top advisers to dissuade King from going north. The advisers argued that their work in the South was far from complete, that the North would be unreceptive, and that such efforts would hurt northern support for their cause. “King thought otherwise, and rejected this counsel just as he would subsequent warnings,” according to Ralph.
193 “I have to do this”: “Dr. King Is Felled by Rock: 30 Injured as He Leads Protesters; Many Arrested in Race Clash,” Chicago Tribune, August 6, 1966, p. 1.
194 “I have seen many demonstrations”: Ibid.
195 “It happened slowly”: Louis Rosen, The South Side: The Racial Transformation of an American Neighborhood (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1998), p. 118.
196 “I fought the good fight”: Ibid., p. 147.
197 “It was like sitting around”: Ibid., p. 120.
198 “It was like having”: Ibid., p. 26.
199 Mahalia Jackson: Mahalia Jackson and Evan McLeod Wylie, Movin’ On Up (New York: Hawthorne Books, 1966), p. 119.
200 “Shall we sacrifice”: Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy, Anyplace but Here (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1945), p. 176.
201 The top ten cities: Isabel Wilkerson, “Study Finds Segregation in Cities Worse than Scientists Imagined,” The New York Times, August 5, 1989, an article on the findings of a five-year study of 22,000 census tracts conducted by University of Chicago sociologists Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton.
202 kept a card file: “The Extracurricular Clout of Powerful College Presidents,” Time, February 11, 1966, p. 64.
203 “in addition to his widow”: “Dr. Rufus Clement of AU Dies Here,” New York Amsterdam News, November 11, 1967, p. 45.
204 The evening was unusually cool: Earl Caldwell, “Martin Luther King Is Slain in Memphis; White Is Suspected; Johnson Urges Calm: Guard Called Out; Curfew Ordered in Memphis, but Fires and Looting Erupt,” The New York Times, April 5, 1968, p. 1.
205 “About 74 percent”: Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York: Bantam Books, 1968), p. 6.
THE FULLNESS OF THE MIGRATION
206 And so the root: Langston Hughes, “For Russell and Rowena Jelliffe,” Cleveland Call and Post, April 6, 1963, p. B1.
207 There were two sets: Stanley Lieberson, A Piece of the Pie: Blacks and White Immigrants Since 1880 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 32–33.
208 white immigrants: Ibid., p. 34.
209 “called for blacks”: Ibid., p. 35.
210 fertility rates for black women: Ibid., pp. 193–97. See also Clyde Vernon Kiser, Sea Island to City (New York: AMS Press, 1967), pp. 204, 205. This study from the 1930s found that the Migration “significantly reduced” fertility rates. In New York, “twenty-four out of forty wives married 1–10 years had borne no children. Five of the fourteen married 10–20 years were childless, as were the two wives married 20–30 years.”
211 blacks were the lowest paid: Lieberson, A Piece of the Pie, pp. 292–93; Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 16. 418 “There is just no avoiding”: Ibid., p. 369.
PART V: AFTERMATH
1 The migrants were gradually absorbed: 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), p. 75.
IN THE PLACES THEY LEFT
2 The only thing: Lonnie G. Bunch III, “The Greatest State for the Negro: Jefferson L. Edmonds, Black Propagandist of the California Dream,” in Seeking El Dorado: African Americans in California, ed. Lawrence B. de Graaf, Kevin Mulroy, and Quintard Taylor (Los Angeles: Autry Museum of Western Heritage in association with University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2001), p. 132. Jefferson Lewis Edmonds was a farmer, teacher, and state legislator in Mississippi during Reconstruction. He left Mississippi for Los Angeles in 1886, shortly after an incident in which whites, fearing that a group of colored residents were about to walk into the Carrollton County courthouse, opened fire on the unarmed people, killing twenty of them. Edmonds became editor of The Liberator, a colored newspaper in Los Angeles.
3 Mr. Edd, whose land: Chickasaw County Historical and Genealogical Society, Chickasaw County History, vol. 2 (Dallas: Curtis Media, 1997), p. 430 on Willie Jim Linn and p. 497 on Edd Monroe Pearson.
4 The people who had not gone: Ibid., p. 10.
5 “intemperate individuals”: Ibid.
6 “spent all their savings”: Mark Lowry II, “Schools in Transition,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 63, no. 2 (June 1973): pp. 173, 178.
7 In the meantime: Ibid., p. 176.
8 “My conscience told me”: Ben Green, Before His Time: The Untold Story of Harry T. Moore, America’s First Civil Rights Martyr (New York: Free Press, 1999), pp. 206–7.
9 “he dropped dead”: Ibid., p. 207.
10 “the only public building”: Ibid., pp. 206–8.
11 But Sheriff McCall did not: Ibid., p. 207.
12 McCall was reelected: Ibid., p. 208. See a
lso Ramsey Campbell, “Lake’s Willis McCall Is Dead,” Orlando Sentinel, April 29, 1994, p. A1.
13 The new high school: Contributors of Ouachita Parish: A History of Blacks to Commemorate the Bicentennial of the United States of America (The Black Bicentennial Committee of Ouachita Parish, 1976), p. 10.
LOSSES
14 It occurred to me: Jacqueline Joan Johnson, Rememory: What There Is for Us, cited in Malaika Adero, Up South (New York: New Press, 1993), p. 108.
15 “one of Los Angeles’ ”: “Rites Held for L.A. Socialite Mrs. Alice Clement Foster, 54,” Chicago Defender, December 17, 1974, p. 4.
MORE NORTH AND WEST THAN SOUTH
16 I could come back: Mahalia Jackson with Evan McLeod Wiley, Movin’ On Up (New York: Hawthorne Books, 1966), p. 117.
17 “Platters Full of Plenty Thanks”: An advertisement appearing in Chicago Metro News, November 26, 1977, p. 18.
18 “personal isolation”: Based on an undated, registered letter written by Robert Foster to Edward Bounds, director of the U.S. Labor Department in San Francisco, as part of a workers’ compensation claim filed as a result of a dispute with the West Los Angeles Veterans Administration Medical Center in Brentwood.
AND, PERHAPS, TO BLOOM
19 Most of them care nothing: James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 21.
THE WINTER OF THEIR LIVES
20 That the Negro American: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, D.C.: United States Department of Labor, Office of Policy Planning and Research, 1965), p. 23.
21 “I know everybody”: “Why Do You Live in Harlem? Camera Quiz,” New York Age, April 29, 1950.
EPILOGUE
22 “there is not one family”: Allen B. Ballard, One More Day’s Journey (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984), p. 13.
23 “Masses of ignorant”: E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (New York: Dryden Press, 1948), p. 285. Originally published by the University of Chicago Press, 1939.
24 “in such large numbers”: Sadie Tanner Mossell, “The Standard of Living Among One Hundred Negro Migrant Families in Philadelphia,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 98 (November 1921): 216.
25 better educated: Stewart E. Tolnay, “Educational Selection in the Migration of Southern Blacks, 1880–1990,” Social Forces (December 1998): 489–508. “The educational differences between southern migrants and native northerners were considerably smaller than the corresponding difference between migrants and their relatives and neighbors remaining in the South,” Tolnay writes. Because a disproportionate number of educated blacks migrated out of the South, the number of years of schooling for migrants on the whole was higher than might otherwise have been expected and not far from the educational levels of blacks already in the North, a difference of one and a half years by 1950. The quality of their southern education, however, was generally considered inferior.
26 “The Southerners had their eye”: Allen B. Ballard, One More Day’s Journey (New York: McGraw Hill, 1984), p. 191.
27 John Coltrane: Lewis Porter, John Coltrane: His Life and His Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), p. 33.
28 “Upon their arrival”: Stewart E. Tolnay and Kyle D. Crowder, “Regional Origin and Family Stability in Northern Cities: The Role of Context,” American Sociological Review 64 (1999): 109.
29 “Compared with northern-born blacks”: Stewart E. Tolnay, “The African American ‘Great Migration’ and Beyond,” Annual Review of Sociology 29 (2003): 219. See also Larry H. Long and Lynne R. Heltman, “Migration and Income Differences Between Black and White Men in the North,” The American Journal of Sociology 80, no. 6 (May 1975): 1395–1407.
30 Something deep inside: Long and Heltman, “Migration and Income Differences Between Black and White Men in the North,” p. 1395.
31 “Instead of thinking”: Tolnay and Crowder, “Regional Origin and Family Stability in Northern Cities,” p. 109.
32 “led to higher earnings”: Reynolds Farley, “After the Starting Line: Blacks and Women in an Uphill Race,” Demography 25, no. 4 (November 1988): 477.
33 “Black migrants who left”: Larry H. Long and Kristin A. Hansen, “Selectivity of Black Return Migration to the South,” Rural Sociology 42, no. 3 (Fall 1977): 325. Based on a paper presented at the annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, Atlanta, March 30–April 2, 1977.
34 “Black school principals”: Allen B. Ballard, One More Day’s Journey, p. 186.
35 “Since 1924”: “4,733 Mob Action Victims Since ’82, Tuskegee Reports,” Montgomery Advertiser, April 26, 1959.
36 The mechanical cotton picker: Donald Holley, The Second Great Emancipation: The Mechanical Cotton Picker, Black Migration, and How They Shaped the Modern South (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas, 2000), pp. 38–40.
37 Still, many planters: Ibid., p. 101.
38 “Much of this labor”: Harris P. Smith, “Late Developments in Mechanical Cotton Harvesting,” Agricultural Engineering, July 1946, p. 321. Smith, the chief of the division of agricultural engineering at the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station, presented this paper at a meeting of the American Society of Agricultural Engineers at Fort Worth, Texas, in April 1946. See also Gilbert C. Fite, “Recent Changes in the Mechanization of Cotton Production in the United States,” Agricultural History 24 (January 1950): 28, and Oscar Johnston, “Will the Machine Ruin the South?” Saturday Evening Post 219 (May 31, 1947): 37.
39 “If all of their dream”: “Our Part in the Exodus,” Chicago Defender, March 17, 1917, p. 9.
40 Toni Morrison: Toni Morrison’s parents migrated from Alabama to Lorraine, Ohio. Diana Ross’s mother migrated from Bessemer, Alabama, to Detroit, her father from Bluefield, West Virginia. Aretha Franklin’s father migrated from Mississippi to Detroit. Jesse Owens’s parents migrated from Oakville, Alabama, to Cleveland when he was nine. Joe Louis’s mother migrated with him from Lafayette, Alabama, to Detroit. Jackie Robinson’s family migrated from Cairo, Georgia, to Pasadena, California. Bill Cosby’s father migrated from Schuyler, Virginia, to Philadelphia, where Cosby was born. Nat King Cole, as a young boy, migrated with his family from Montgomery, Alabama, to Chicago. Condoleezza Rice’s family migrated from Birmingham, Alabama, to Denver, Colorado, when she was twelve. Thelonious Monk’s parents brought him from Rocky Mount, North Carolina, to Harlem when he was five. Berry Gordy’s parents migrated from rural Georgia to Detroit, where Gordy was born. Oprah Winfrey’s mother migrated from Kosciusko, Mississippi, to Milwaukee, where Winfrey went to live as a young girl. Mae Jemison’s parents migrated from Decatur, Alabama, to Chicago when she was three years old. Romare Bearden’s parents carried him from Charlotte, North Carolina, to New York City. Jimi Hendrix’s maternal grandparents migrated from Virginia to Seattle. Michael Jackson’s mother was taken as a toddler from Barbour County, Alabama, by her parents to East Chicago, Indiana; his father migrated as a young man from Fountain Hill, Arkansas, to Chicago, just west of Gary, Indiana, where all the Jackson children were born. Prince’s father migrated from Louisiana to Minneapolis. Sean “P. Diddy” Combs’s grandmother migrated from Hollyhill, South Carolina, to Harlem. Whitney Houston’s grandparents migrated from Georgia to Newark, New Jersey. The family of Mary J. Blige migrated from Savannah, Georgia, to Yonkers, New York. Queen Latifah’s grandfather migrated from Birmingham, Alabama, to Newark. Spike Lee’s family migrated from Atlanta to Brooklyn. August Wilson’s mother migrated from North Carolina to Pittsburgh, following her own mother, who, as the playwright told it, had walked most of the way.
41 “almost exactly at the norm”: Otto Klineberg, Negro Intelligence and Selective Migration (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935), pp. 43–45. The IQ tests were of ten-year-old girls in Harlem, divided on the basis of how long they had lived in New York. Those in New York for less than a year scored 81.8, those in New York one to two years scored 85.8, those in New York for three to four y
ears scored 94.1, and those born in New York scored 98.5. Other studies—of boys or with the use of other measurements—found what Klineberg described as an “unmistakable trend” of improved intellectual performance the longer the children were in the North.
42 Klineberg’s studies: “Otto Klineberg, Who Helped Win ’54 Desegregation Case, Dies at 92,” The New York Times, March 10, 1992.
43 Jean Baptiste Point DuSable: Bessie Louise Pierce, A History of Chicago, vol. 1 (New York: Knopf, 1937), pp. 12, 13. Pierce describes Point DuSable as having been the son of a man from “one of France’s foremost families” and says “that his mother was a Negro slave.” Christopher R. Reed, “In the Shadow of Fort Dearborn: Honoring DuSable at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933–1934,” Journal of Black Studies 21, no. 4 (June 1991): 412.
44 Jan Rodrigues: Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 12–13.
45 “In the simple process”: Lawrence R. Rodgers, Canaan Bound: The African American Great Migration Novel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), p. 186.
NOTES ON METHODOLOGY
1 It is important: 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. xxiii, xxiv.
PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
BEACON PRESS: Excerpts from Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin, copyright © 1955 and copyright © renewed 1983 by James Baldwin. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston.
DUTTON SIGNET, A DIVISION OF PENGUIN GROUP (USA) INC.: Excerpt from Act 1, Scene i, from The Piano Lesson by August Wilson, copyright © 1988, 1990 by August Wilson. Reprinted by permission of Dutton Signet, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration Page 69
