America Behind the Color Line

by Henry Louis Gates

  If you had gone to Tuskegee or Fisk or Howard and you were dark and you had some money, then you fitted in. If you were light-skinned, like Earl B. Dickerson and that group of people—in other words, if you looked white— they figured eventually you would struggle into the money. They figured white people didn’t have no right to be poor. So we had lawyers and doctors and businesspeople living in the area along with maids and janitors and unemployed people and working-class people. It was a whole self-contained colored world.

  In my block there was Dr. Dawson, brother of the late congressman William L. Dawson. There were many others whose names I can’t recall. There was Bob Carroll, whose father associated with the big ministers in New York and in Europe, and they would come to his house and we would meet them. I’d be looking at Dr. Dawson and I would say to myself, I can be like that. We played together, Dr. Dawson’s son and daughter and all those people. We played basketball and softball, and we were equal.

  The change in the character of the community began to come at the beginning of World War II, December 7, 1941, when there was again a need— as there had been during World War I—for cheap labor. The restrictions on certain potential immigrants from Europe then made jobs available for well-trained Southern young men and women of that period. They flocked north because there was very little work for them in the South, given the kind of training they had.

  That was the first flood of primarily young African Americans, male and female, and the start of the second Great Migration. As World War II went on, it gave rise to inventions, particularly in the field of agriculture. Agriculture became more mechanized. One example would be the invention of the cotton picker, which meant that the labor of the people who had worked in the fields of Mississippi and Arkansas, in the tobacco fields and other places, was now unnecessary. So the people of the second Great Migration were mostly from the rural agricultural South. They came to Chicago with less training and less motivation. They had been isolated in these areas of the South in the cotton fields and tobacco fields and other large plantation-like places. They’d been denied the opportunity for education, and their reading ability was scanty. The wave of new immigrants, pushed off the land in the South, came north with almost no context. They didn’t have relatives already living in the North, and they brought with them a different culture. Many times their hopes and dreams were not that big. They’d heard of the Promised Land of Chicago, where there were plenty of jobs, a diversity of job opportunities. There was a saying during the first migration, when my mother and father came north: if you can’t make it Chicago, you can’t make it anywhere. That meant that if you got without a job in one place, the stockyards, for example, you’d go to a steel mill or some other place. It was very open to colored labor, to cheap labor.

  But even if you were skilled, as my father was, you could not get a job that surpassed that of a white person. And very few colored people could get into the craft unions. Very few of the bricklayers, the painters, and decorators. In fact, I gave testimony on this before Adam Clayton Powell’s committee in Washington, D.C., on the issue of the exclusion of blacks from the opportunity to get into apprenticeships. It had to be based on your lineage, on your uncle or your papa or someone in your family. It was very select. And so blacks hadn’t got in, even though many of the blacks from the South had experience in the crafts, like the sheet metal workers.

  The people in the first migration, though they had been the children of slaves, stopped in places like Birmingham before they came to big cities like Chicago. Many people don’t realize that in the first migration, more black people moved from the rural South to the urban South than moved from the South to the North. They were urbanized even though they may not have been urbane. They became urbane through the experiences that were cited to them by the friends they met in the urbanized North. They were pretty sophisticated politically, particularly. It is important for people to know that the first black American to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in the twentieth century was Oscar Stanton De Priest, from Chicago, in 1928. He was elected to the Seventy-first Congress and the two succeeding Congresses.

  There was a political sensitivity in that group who comprised the first migration. My mother told us that my father would put his gun in his pocket and go vote in Birmingham. He was considered a “crazy nigger.” There were a few like that. My mother persuaded my father to leave the South and come to Chicago, because she feared for his safety; she dragged him into the city, practically.

  The reason my father got away with his attitude in the South, I was told, is that my family name, Black, derives from the family name of Hugo Black. According to the oral history of my family, all of my grandparents were born in slavery. When I was about six years old, my father told my brother and me that his own father was a slave in the home of Hugo Black’s father in Alabama. It was customary in those days for slave masters to impose their family name on their slaves so that people would know who owned them. Thus my father was considered a Hugo Black “nigger.” And there was some favoritism toward my grandfather and his family because of the relationship with the Black family— a relationship that was respected by the larger, hostile white community. During their lifetime, my grandfather and my father continued to have communication with Hugo Black and his family in Alabama.

  Here’s a little sidebar in connection with that story. When Hugo Black was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1937, I went to my dad in anger. I had just graduated from high school and thought I knew something. When I said to my dad—who didn’t care for white people at all, particularly white men— “The president has nominated an ex–Ku Klux Klansman,” my dad put a cigar in his mouth and said, “He’ll be all right.” I thought my dad had gone crazy. But Hugo Black turned out to be one of the most liberal Supreme Court justices on all issues. He was a very unusual man.

  In 1939, Mr. Carl Hansberry, father of Lorraine Hansberry, the great playwright, went to the Supreme Court of the United States. He had enough money to be able to do that. He wanted the right to move into a restricted white neighborhood. It was the first time such a case had gone that far since Plessy v. Ferguson, in 1896, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the ruling of separate but equal facilities for blacks and whites after Mr. Plessy had objected to separate transportation facilities for blacks in Louisiana.

  Mr. Hansberry had the means to carry his case all the way to the Supreme Court, with the help of some other people and of the NAACP, of course. We had a very strong NAACP in Chicago. The case was Hansberry v. Lee, and Justice Hugo Black read the majority opinion that outlawed restrictive covenants in this one particular white section of Chicago. Those of us whose parents could afford it immediately moved into that section. And that’s what we were supposed to do. That was what part of the Civil Rights Movement was about: as soon as you could break it down, you got out of segregation and you integrated the white community.

  The white community soon fled these neighborhoods, though the people who came in were better than those who were there, educationally and all kinds of ways, if you want to measure it in those terms. But the white people left, because there are factors called prestige and status that go with living in certain neighborhoods, around certain people. There was an attitude about living around all those colored people, but we didn’t care, because we had more space now and we brought our entertainment with us. We brought our jazz and all the good things that went with the life we’d had on the other end. And now we could brag that we lived in the better neighborhood.

  In 1948, another case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, Shelley v. Kraemer. In 1945, Mr. Shelley had purchased a house in St. Louis on a tract of land that was restricted to white occupancy. And in that case the same justice, Hugo Black, read the majority opinion that restrictive covenants were unenforceable anywhere in the United States, which meant now that the second migration had barged in. Stylistically, the two Great Migrations were different, not inferior or superior to each other. Different people. Walked dif
ferent, talked different. The new migrants brought with them country blues, not city jazz. Country Negroes. That’s what we unfortunately labeled those who came with the second migration. We gave them almost no help. The separation was dramatic and complete. The class separation was pronounced right away. If they lived on the West Side, those of us who lived on the South Side already had a snobbish attitude towards them. Still do. I’m the only one who can cross those boundaries. The mother of the person who runs Indigo grew up in Chicago. I asked her, what did she know about the West Side? She said, “What do I know? I don’t need to know about the West Side.”

  A lot of people don’t understand that blacks have been divided among ourselves by class for a long, long time. And that separation removed the knowledge, the experience, and much of what we had been given by those who were part of the first Great Migration. You see, the black population at the time of the first migration outvoted the immigrant white population.

  And then the new migrants didn’t vote. The new black migrants of the 1940s and 1950s plummeted almost immediately. I was teaching school, and I noticed the difference in attitudes towards education. I noticed the difference in the students I was teaching in the early 1950s. By that time, as a result of Shelley v. Kraemer, the more fortunate had moved to neighborhoods like Hyde Park and Woodlawn. They had begun to move into the South Shore and had created another neighborhood in Chatham, which is still a very stable middle-class black community. They began to move into Beverly and other neighborhoods. It was like two streams that just start to diverge. The rural Southern people in the second migration then went one way and became poor, and the other people went into the middle class.

  Then another thing happened. When those in the second Great Migration first arrived, there were quite a few jobs for them. But then the jobs began to go away—they were going to the suburbs, or companies were going out of business and moving somewhere else. The stockyards, for example, began to move to places like Iowa. The steel mills began to send much of their business overseas and other places.

  Jobs that could have unskilled labor were no longer available. Even jobs requiring semiskilled labor were no longer available. Now this meant that the woman would apply for welfare, but she could not receive it if there was a male in the house over eighteen years old. So the family began to be immediately affected. The social worker had the right to come into your apartment any time of the day or night and look around. And if she even saw a pair of shoes that belonged to a male, she had a responsibility to cut that person off the welfare list, very much in the same mood as John Ashcroft’s attorney general office.

  So then the increase in public housing began and the beginning of the demolition of the old housing structures that were dilapidated, the real slum kind of housing. There was no resistance to that, because the people had not learned how to organize. And the idea came up to keep this population contained, to build more public housing. Like the Robert Taylor Homes. The high-rises. That was coming into the 1960s. The concentration of poverty and problems became intensified and greater. And that has continued up until the present.

  The separation, psychological and social and certainly economic and cultural, was very pronounced. For a period of time, during Harold Washington’s mayoralty—the first black mayor of Chicago, who was also a Du Sable High School graduate—we brought people together. I got money for Mayor Washington’s campaign from Ed Gardner, who had a big business, according to black business standards. Ed brought all the black businessmen together because the whites would not finance a black man.

  If I had been born in the Robert Taylor Homes in the 1960s, it would have been very much more difficult. There are examples of those who somehow did it and there are some who will do it. They are usually people who have met with a great teacher or a minister or a very strong woman or someone else who has helped them, like a mentor or some kind of role model. Sometimes just Mama, who somehow can see that future that my mother and father saw for their children.

  The way to transform the tragedies of that period and those people—the decline from the wonderful self-contained colored world to all the statistics that we know about the Robert Taylor Homes today—is that number one we must provide quality education, the kind of education that will prepare all of the young people for college and for citizenship and for earning a living. We can do that. We must break down the barriers that cause any form of segregation, so that people can make a choice as to where they want to live. And we must create institutions of mentoring that will help those less fortunate people recognize that they must somehow change their style of living if they are to be accepted.

  We must also teach them the nature of power. We must help them understand finances, as we understood in my generation. People were taking money that we earned out of the community. I walked my first picket line when I was twelve years old and thought that things would be all right after that. We created a slogan: Don’t spend your money where you can’t work. We must use our finances much more carefully and we must organize politically. Not exclusively for any party, but so that we can bargain—with our vote, with the power that comes from the black vote—with all of the parties. We can do all these things on the inside, among ourselves. The rest of the society needs to recognize what it promised: freedom, equality, and justice to all people. The larger society must recognize its role and understand that if it does not play its role fairly, the society itself may be in jeopardy in the long run. So there’s societal responsibility. There is group responsibility and individual responsibility.

  The breakdown of the community, so rapidly as it occurred, left those who were left behind with relatively few resources to survive. That community then was given an opportunity, or maybe it was imposed by outside forces that said, we can help you live. Then those outsiders brought in drugs in great quantities to be delivered to other people and guns to protect the turf. Those people who live in the Robert Taylor Homes do not make the drugs and they don’t manufacture the guns. That’s an outside industry that is very, very prosperous. The people who do these things and who live in the suburbs or in the more wealthy communities are respected citizens in those communities, while they have exploited these poor people who have no choice if they are to survive.

  One reason the people in those conditions were exploitable was that they did not have the protection or the wisdom and support of those who had left the old community. The black middle class had left because of the end of segregation, in housing especially, and because great opportunities in education began to open up. We’re talking about the civil rights period again now, in the 1960s particularly, when young people, my children, for example, were able to go to any school they wanted to go to, if they had the qualifications. The old colored middle class moved in with the white middle class.

  The breakdown of the family occurred partly because of the poverty and the fact that resources were not available for a full family, particularly if there were males over eighteen years old in the house. Then you had the concentration of this despair and poverty, and you began to get three generations living in the same building or adjacent to one another, feeding on each other’s misery. One of the things some of them felt was that to have more children was to get more money from the welfare system. There are great-grandmothers who live in those situations who are not forty-five years old. When I approach some of these young people, where I would ordinarily be the grandfather, say, of a teenager, or maybe even someone in their early twenties, they consider me at the very least a great-grandfather.

  In the rural South, where most of these young people’s families came from, children were considered part of a responsibility. They could slop the hogs and they could milk the cows and gather the eggs and pick cotton. They were an asset there. They were a liability here. That tradition still exists in the South because it has not been erased. But as a sign of manhood and womanhood in the environment where they now are, girls will say to other girls, this girl has a baby. Something must be wrong w
ith you, honey; you’re not pregnant yet. A boy is accused of being something different if he has not fathered a child by the time he’s fifteen, sixteen, or seventeen years old. So for them in that group, that’s normal. Leon Dash wrote a superb book about this, called When Children Want Children: An Inside Look at the Crisis in Teenage Parenthood. And since we haven’t broken that cycle, then you’re acting out of normalcy. You’re acting out of the normal trend in a community to become pregnant or a father at such an early age. And then once a girl has one or two children, she becomes fair game for all the other young men, because they know she has done it. And so they are predators.

  I think the only way to change that is we have to break those communities up, just like the people who live across the street from me in the high-rise have to be separated from that background. They may be moved out; the university wants to clear the property. Even though they are not friendly to people like me, I have tried to be friendly with them. I live in a building with middle- and upper-middle-class people. The people who live in the high-rise think I’ve got something and that I think I’m better than they are. And then the males may think I’m a spy for the police, because I’m almost sure that drug dealing is going on over there. I have approached some of them on occasion, and I find myself being asked by the men, what do you want? I think that’s a sign they’re suspicious I might be doing undercover work for the police or something of that sort.