Isabel Wilkerson

by The Warmth of Other Suns

  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.…

  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 rare 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. “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.

  Blacks in the North could already vote and sit at a lunch counter or anywhere they wanted on an elevated train. Yet they were hemmed in and isolated into two overcrowded sections of the city—the South Side and the West Side—restricted in the jobs they could hold and the mortgages they could get, their children attending segregated and inferior schools, not by edict as in the South but by circumstance in the North, with the results pretty much the same. The unequal living conditions produced the expected unequal results: blacks working long hours for overpriced flats, their children left unsupervised and open to gangs, the resulting rise in crime and drugs, with few people able to get out and the problems so complex as to make it impossible to identify a single cause or solution.

  King was running headlong into what the sociologist Gunnar Myrdal called the Northern Paradox. In the North, Myrdal wrote, “almost everybody is against discrimination in general, but, at the same time, almost everybody practices discrimination in his own personal affairs”—that is, by not allowing blacks into unions or clubhouses, certain jobs, and white neighborhoods, indeed, avoiding social interaction overall.

  “It is the culmination of all these personal discriminations,” he continued, “which creates the color bar in the North, and, for the Negro, causes unusually severe unemployment, crowded housing conditions, crime and vice. About this social process, the ordinary white Northerner keeps sublimely ignorant and unconcerned.”

  Thus any civil rights campaign in the North would not be an attack on outrageous laws that, with enough grit and fortitude, could be overturned with the stroke of a pen. Instead, King would be fighting the ill-defined fear and antipathy that made northern whi
tes flee at the sight of a black neighbor, turn away blacks at realty offices, or not hire them if they chose. The “enemy” was a feeling, a general unease that led to the flight of white people and businesses and sucked the resources out of the ghettos the migrants were quarantined into. No laws could make frightened white northerners care about blacks enough to permit them full access to the system they dominated.

  “So long as this city is dominated by whites, whether because of their numbers without force or by their force if they were in the minority,” the Chicago Tribune once wrote, “there will be limitations placed on the black people.”

  Still, despite the odds, King was compelled to go north—was called to it, he said—as had a good portion of his people in the still-unfolding Migration. He had made the journey himself when he went to Boston University for graduate school and while there met his wife, Coretta, another southerner. King’s campaign in the North was “in one sense simply reacting to a major shift in the epicenter of black America,” the historian James R. Ralph wrote. “It was following the great demographic flow of black Americans from the rural South to the urban North.”

  King actually moved into an apartment in the most hardscrabble section of town, the West Side neighborhood of North Lawndale, where the poorest and most recent arrivals from the South had shakily established themselves. He had a chesslike series of encounters with Mayor Richard J. Daley, the mayor-boss of Chicago, who managed to outwit the civil rights leader at nearly every turn. For one thing, Daley knew not to make the same mistakes as his southern counterparts. He met with King, appearing cooperative rather than ignoring him or having him thrown into jail. He vowed to protect the marchers with a heavy police presence that sometimes outnumbered the marchers. It worked so well that the protesters rarely had the chance to contrast their peaceable courage against foaming-at-the-mouth supremacists because Daley’s police force didn’t let any white mob get near them, which kept the protests off the news and kept the movement from gaining traction, just as Daley had hoped.

  That is until, after months of buildup, King went to march against housing segregation in a neighborhood called Marquette Park on the city’s southwest side. This was a working-class neighborhood of Poles, Lithuanians, Germans, and Italians who had not long since gotten their starter bungalows and were standing their ground against the very thought of colored people moving in.

  It was August 5, 1966. A fist-shaking crowd of some four thousand residents had gathered in advance. Upon his arrival, they cursed King with epithets from a knoll overlooking the march. Many people in the crowd waved Confederate flags. Some wore Nazi-like helmets. One placard read KING WOULD LOOK GOOD WITH A KNIFE IN HIS BACK.

  The march had barely begun when a heckler hurled a rock as big as a fist at King, striking him in the head, just above the right ear. He fell to his knees, and, as he tried to get up, the crowd pelted the demonstrators with bottles, eggs, firecrackers, and more rocks. Some in the crowd turned and smashed rocks into cars and buses that passed with colored people in them. Some twelve hundred police officers and two hundred plainclothesmen had gathered in anticipation of trouble, but this was one of the rare occasions that they were outnumbered by white residents primed for confrontation.

  As the eight hundred King supporters tried to carry on the march, they passed men, women, and children on their front stoops, who called the marchers “cannibals,” “savages,” and worse. A column of three hundred jeering white teenagers sat in the middle of the street to block the marchers’ path. The police dispersed the youths with nightsticks waving, and the march was able to resume. But the teenagers repositioned themselves half a block down and sat in the street again. It took a second charge from the police to break up the young hecklers.

  When the march wound down, the mob chased the buses carrying King’s people away. Rising in agitation that lasted for hours, the mob smashed an effigy of King, overturned a car on Marquette Road, stoned other cars, and fought police trying to clear the place out, requiring reinforcements to beat the mob back with clubs and shots fired into the air. In the end, some thirty people were injured and forty were arrested.

  Some of King’s aides had warned him not to go to Chicago. He said he had to. “I have to do this,” he said as he tried to steady himself after the stoning, “to expose myself—to bring this hate into the open.”

  He had marched in the deepest corners of Alabama but was unprepared for what he was in for in Chicago. “I have seen many demonstrations in the South,” he said that violent day in the Promised Land. “But I have never seen anything so hostile and so hateful as I’ve seen here today.”

  Ida Mae watched it on the news that night and worried for the man she so badly had wanted to see. She expected this in Mississippi, not in the North. “No,” she would say decades afterward, “some places I just trusted more than others.”

  NEW YORK, PENNSYLVANIA STATION, MID-1960S

  GEORGE SWANSON STARLING

  THE WORLD WAS CHANGING, and George, without trying, was on the front lines. In the South, the trains had been segregated for as long as most people had been alive. Now he was in the uncomfortable position of enforcing new laws that were just now filtering into everyday practice.

  There he was, scanning the crowds on the railroad platform as the southbound Silver Comet stretched down the track, belching and ready to board. The train would pull out of the station at 12:45 en route to Birmingham with some twenty-eight stops in between. Passengers packed the railway platform, suitcases, hatboxes, overnighters, trunks, briefcases, and Gimbel’s shopping bags at their feet.

  George went about his job of getting their luggage and helping them to their seats, but this time, he looked the passengers over in a way he never did before. He looked to see if they were in prim Sunday clothes or loud juke-joint get-ups, if the people seeing them off were self-contained New Yorkers bidding people good-bye or excitable southerners still new to the spectacle. He checked to see if they haughtily took to their reserved seats in the integrated railcar as if they owned it or if they were wide-eyed and tentative about sitting in the same section as the white passengers.

  George was paying close attention because this was the mid-1960s. The trains in the North had always been integrated, but blacks had to move to separate cars before being permitted into the South. During the run between New York and Alabama, it had been George’s job to move the colored passengers from their seats in the white section and into the Jim Crow car before crossing from Washington into the segregated state of Virginia.

  But after the sit-ins and marches in the South, things were beginning to change. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act on July 2, 1964, 101 years after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation granting rights that would have to be spelled out again long after Lincoln was gone. Now blacks were entitled to the same privileges as any other citizens. They were not to be segregated in any sphere in life. But it would take time, up to a decade or more, for the message to sink in to those who chose not to recognize the new law.

  In addition, it was not as if a copy of the Civil Rights Act went out to every black household. Some didn’t know what their new rights were exactly and had lived under the old order for so long that they were tentative about testing out the new one. In public conveyances, it fell to workers like George Starling, if they were so inclined—which it so happened he was—to alert their fellow migrants to rights they weren’t certain they could assert. On the train, it meant negotiating the tricky business of reorienting the black passengers when the train passed into or out of what had been Jim Crow territory.

  For as long as most anyone alive could remember, this was the way things had worked on the railroad: a black passenger boarding a southbound train at, say, Pennsylvania Station in New York would be assigned a seat anywhere on the train and could sit there without a second thought until the train reached the border city of Washington, D.C. From the time of Reconstruction in the 1870s, Washington had been the dividing li
ne between the free North and the segregated South. Black passengers getting off in Washington had nothing to worry about. But for those continuing south, the crews who ran the train, the porters who helped passengers on and off, and the black passengers themselves knew to gather their things and move to the Jim Crow car up front to make sure the races were separated when the train crossed into the state of Virginia.

  The civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s changed all that, or was intended to. But custom had a way of lingering well after the ink was dry. So in the transition to integration, black passengers were not automatically granted the right to keep their seats no matter what their ticket or President Johnson said.

  George was on the front lines in these early days of integration, when some conductors, many of them southern, held close the old traditions and ordered porters like George to move the colored passengers into the Jim Crow car, no matter the law. Some conductors, like many other southerners, resented the new laws that had been forced upon them. Others could always say that white southerners boarding the train below Washington were still not comfortable riding in the same coach as black people and might kick up a fuss.

  As the train drew closer to Washington, the conductor gave George a passenger manifest identifying the passengers he wanted moved to the old Jim Crow car, meaning all the black passengers traveling below Washington.

  George knew it wasn’t right and began discreetly approaching colored passengers as the train pulled out of Baltimore en route to Washington. He tried to alert them to what was about to happen and let them know they had a right to stay where they were. But it was a perilous act on his part. The passengers might get scared and turn him in. He might be accused of inciting the passengers and disrupting the orderly relocation of passengers who didn’t mind moving. It was especially dangerous because he was not heading north on the train but south into what might be considered enemy territory. Either way, he could be fired for what he was doing.