Isabel Wilkerson

by The Warmth of Other Suns

  That night, George Starling was rounding the corner at 131st Street and St. Nicholas Avenue in Harlem. He was returning home from a night out with the guys and saw the fires rising up ahead. He was trying to get to 132nd and Lenox, not yet knowing what had happened to set the people off. The whole thing was a blur, and he was looking for a way to get around the mayhem.

  “It was in the direction of St. Nicholas Avenue,” he said. “It could have been on Broadway, St. Nicholas, or Amsterdam. It was up on that hill. They were burning everything up there. The sky was lit up like it was the end of time.”

  He made his way home, and it was “only when I got into the house and turned on the radio that I heard the news that Martin Luther King had been shot in Memphis.”

  The evening of the assassination, Ida Mae would cup her face in disbelief at the news playing out in a scratchy, continuous, uncomprehensible loop on the AM radio dial and the family’s black-and-white television set. She would pray for the soul of the man she so admired and had once almost seen during his Chicago campaign two years before as he had tried to free the people who had fled to the North.

  On the other side of town, over on the West Side, police sirens wailed and rocks crashed through the plate-glass windows of grocers and liquor stores. Whole blocks went up in smoke in Chicago and on the streets of Newark, Detroit, Boston, Kansas City, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. The receiving stations of the Great Migration would burn all through the night after Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. And when it was over, some neighborhoods, the old places the migrants had packed into when the Migration began, would look like Berlin after an air strike during the Second World War.

  The dispossessed children of the Great Migration but, more notably, the lifelong black northerners broken by the big cities let out a fury that made a mockery of the free harbor the North was reputed to be. A presidential commission examining the disturbances found that more black northerners had been involved in the rioting than the people of the Great Migration, as had mistakenly been assumed. “About 74 percent of the rioters were brought up in the North,” wrote the authors of what would become known as the Kerner Report. “The typical rioter was a teenager or young adult, a lifelong resident of the city in which he rioted.” What the frustrated northerners “appeared to be seeking was fuller participation in the social order and the material benefits enjoyed by the majority of American citizens,” the commission found.

  The discontent of the young people unsettled the migrant parents who had fled the violence of the South. They could do little to dissuade their children from whatever role they might play in the outburst. It was too late to try to get them jobs at now-closed factories or the education they missed if they gave up on school, or, maybe most of all, the grounding and strength they themselves had acquired after having endured so much. The parents had come from the Old Country, had been happy to have made it out alive and make a few dollars an hour. What did they know of the frustration of the young people who had grown up in the mirage of equality but a whole different reality, in a densely packed world of drugs and gangs and disorder, with promises that seemed to have turned to dust?

  Ida Mae saw the destruction on the news and, as usual, tried not to worry about things she could not control. George Starling managed to negotiate his way through the burning streets of Harlem. They had long since left the South where Dr. King had been killed. And yet they were pulled into the aftermath. In the North, the migrants grieved for the man who had worked miracles in the land of their birth and thus for them from afar.

  It was Thursday, a workday, and across the country, Robert Foster, workaholic that he was, would have been in his office attending his usual overflow of patients at what would have been late afternoon on the West Coast.

  His office on Jefferson and his house in West Adams were comfortably situated far from Watts, where the fires had burned three years before. Ever conscious of appearances and propriety, he would be nearly as incensed at the violence as he was stunned at the assassination. To him, spite never settled anything. It only gave your detractors more ammunition and, as it had back when the colored people in Monroe had urinated in the colored section of the Paramount Theater, only ended up hurting the people themselves.

  To Robert, the whole world had just about gone mad. A few years before King’s death, Robert had been beside himself when he learned that Bunny, a student at Spelman College in Atlanta caught up in the zeitgeist of the movement, was talking about maybe picketing, too, as only a bourgeois daughter of the upper class would. It would not be trying to register poor people to vote in the backwoods of Mississippi—that was out of the question—but by, say, protesting Rich’s department store in downtown Atlanta with a white-gloved delegation of other colored college girls.

  On this, Rufus Clement and Robert agreed: Bunny simply could not be seen being arrested with the riffraff, all because Rich’s wouldn’t let colored girls try on hats. Of course, Robert understood the indignity, had lived it after all, which is why he had raised her in Los Angeles and taken her to Beverly Hills for whatever she and Alice and the other girls might ever think they wanted.

  It wasn’t that he was against the civil rights movement. He was all for standing up for one’s rights. It was just that, to his way of thinking, the way to change things was to be better than anybody at whatever you did, wear them down with your brilliance, and enjoy the heck out of doing it. So he had no patience for these sit-in displays, at least for his daughters anyway, much less actual violence. The day King died was a dark day all around.

  It was around midnight that George encountered the destruction in Harlem. It wasn’t all the people out in the streets that got his attention. It wasn’t unusual for a lot of people to be out on the streets of Harlem if it were the least bit warm. What caught his eye were the flames.

  That Thursday evening in April, George had been hanging out with the guys over on Prospect Avenue. He was talking baseball and downing boilermakers—a shot of Smirnoff’s with orange juice and a chaser of beer. He was trying to escape the disappointments of an underutilized mind and a sand trap of a marriage he was too loyal and upright to leave.

  The men were so distracted by the vodka and the joshing over the Yankees and the Mets and the Dodgers, who had years before left Brooklyn for Los Angeles, and over the baseball season that was to begin the very next week, that they failed to register the assassination of one of the most influential figures in American history.

  It was only when George finally made it into his car and back into Harlem that he realized that something terrible had happened.

  “The sky lit up,” he remembered. “When I turned into 131st Street, as soon as I looked, I saw: ‘The whole sky is on fire.’ ”

  George Starling knew what it meant to stare an enemy down in a life-and-death sort of way and had respect for Dr. King. But by the time King was assassinated, George was unable to marshal much emotion. He had grown up with that kind of violence against people fighting the system and half expected it. No, what had really shaken him was the assassination five years earlier of John F. Kennedy, the president so many blacks had placed their hopes in, Kennedy having come from the North and from what they saw as a more enlightened generation than previous presidents.

  George was in Florida in November 1963. “I used to go down every October or November. I had just passed through Ocala, on the way to Gainesville, and it was in the afternoon,” George remembered.

  “And I turned the radio on, and I heard them say, ‘And the President of the United States has been assassinated. He was shot, and he did not survive.’ Or something like that. And I said, ‘Now, what kind of joke is that?’ And then it came back on. You know they wouldn’t have risked repeating it over and over. And when I realized that Kennedy had really been killed, assassinated, that thing hit me. When I knew anything, I had run off the road. I don’t know what I was doing. And it just so happened that the shoulder was grassy. It wasn’t that much traffic. It was i
n the midafternoon, and I just brought the car to a stop, and I just sat there, and I cried like a baby.”

  For some reason it was different with King than with Kennedy. Perhaps the losses were piling up and George couldn’t muster the same shock and pain anymore. “I didn’t cry,” he said. “I was just astonished. I was just numb. I couldn’t believe it. Then I thought about his speech. He predicted his own death whether he knew it or not. He told it. ‘I’ve been to the top of the mountain, and I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not make it there with you, but you will get to the Promised Land.’ ”

  James Earl Ray, a forty-year-old drifter and prison escapee, would be convicted of the murder. Ray left a trail of evidence that he had been stalking King for months, but, until his own death in 1998, left questions as to what role he had actually played in the assassination.

  Ray was not from the South, as the migrants who left it might have expected. He was from Alton, Illinois.

  Precisely a week after King’s death, and two years after King’s brokered and dispiriting effort to end housing segregation in Chicago, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act of 1968, banning discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin in the renting or selling of property. King’s bruising fight for the people in the North would not be won until King had died.

  THE FULLNESS OF THE MIGRATION

  And so the root

  Becomes a trunk

  And then a tree

  And seeds of trees

  And springtime sap

  And summer shade

  And autumn leaves

  And shape of poems

  And dreams

  And more than a tree.

  — LANGSTON HUGHES

  THE NORTH AND WEST, 1970

  THIS WAS THE YEAR that demographers called the turning point in the exodus of black Americans out of the South. It was the year that the revolutions of the 1960s began to bear fruit and black children were entering white schools in the South without death threats or the need for the National Guard. The people from the South continued to go north in great waves because nobody told them the Migration was over, but fewer were leaving than in previous decades and nearly as many blacks in the North and West, particularly the children of the original people of the Great Migration, began to contemplate or act upon a desire to return south, now that things appeared to be changing.

  Ida Mae, the sharecropper’s wife from Chickasaw County, Mississippi, was not among them. She was like the majority of the original migrants, people who were not really migrants at all but who had left for good and didn’t look back. She was fifty-seven years old now, a grandmother, and had been in Chicago for more than half her life. The elevated train, the three feet of snow falling in April when it had no business falling, the all-white neighborhood that had turned black in an eye blink—it was all part of her now.

  Her life revolved around family, church, and work, really no different than the order of things would have been in Mississippi, except that the city that brought freedom also brought unforeseen hazards and heartbreak.

  She had gotten used to the concrete and congestion, the press of buildings in place of the expanse of field. She had learned to quicken her step as she walked to or from work, but she still smiled at people on the bus or reached out to help young mothers balancing babies and strollers. She was even getting to know the gangbangers who had begun to position themselves on the street corners to establish their turf and organize their drug inventory. She spoke to them and they spoke back to her, calling her “Grandma” and watching out for her, to the dismay of her own children, whose objections she largely ignored because the gangbangers and their little lookouts were God’s children too, to her way of thinking.

  She was in the city but not fully wise to it, nor seeking to be.

  One day, coming home from work, she stepped off the curb at the green light for pedestrians to cross Eighty-seventh Street at the Dan Ryan Expressway. The right turn on red had just been made legal. A man in a late-model sedan pulled out in front of the bus just as she was trying to cross. She fell onto the hood and then tumbled to the concrete.

  “That was a good fall,” she said. She was sore but not much else.

  The man who hit her was worried for her and drove her to Jackson Park Hospital, where she was declared fine, save for a few bruises to her legs, arms, and ego. They called her husband to tell him what had happened.

  “Oh, he fussed,” she said, which looked to be the only way he knew to show he cared.

  “You should have watched where you were going!” he told her when she got home. The idea of losing Ida Mae seemed to incite as much anger as worry in him.

  There was already a sense of lingering sadness in the house. Their beloved Velma, the little girl Ida Mae hadn’t wanted at first but whom she had held close and cherished and who had ridden next to her, along with little James, on the train ride north, was gone now. There had been a car accident a few years before. The details of the crash somehow didn’t matter so much in the eternity between getting the call and making it to the hospital. Ida Mae saw her firstborn trying to hold on to life and then slip away. Ida Mae almost fell apart. Decades later, it would be the one thing she rarely talked about, as if not talking about it made it less real. And even though she knew full well that it was, she couldn’t bear to let the thought of it slip into her subconscious. She acted as if it had never happened, and if it came up, her voice went uncharacteristically flat, and she quickly found something else to talk about. “The police,” she would say, “they was riding last night.…”

  Ida Mae and her husband had settled into whatever they were going to be in the North. They were blue-collar, churchgoing, taxpaying home owners with now two, instead of three, grown children. Ida Mae now had six little grandchildren, all of whom had been born within the bonds of holy matrimony, even though Eleanor’s didn’t manage to last, which perfectly reflected the demographics of the times. Ida Mae’s husband was a deacon in the church whose pastime was cheering the White Sox on television with their grandson Kevin and instructing him on the strategies of the game. Ida Mae and her husband were never going to go to college or rise much beyond where they were, but they had come a long way from where they had started, and that was an accomplishment in itself.

  Many years later, people would forget about the quiet successes of everyday people like Ida Mae. In the debates to come over welfare and pathology, America would overlook people like her in its fixation with the underclass, just as a teacher can get distracted by the two or three problem children at the expense of the quiet, obedient ones. Few experts trained their sights on the unseen masses of migrants like her, who worked from the moment they arrived, didn’t end up on welfare, stayed married because that’s what God-fearing people of their generation did whether they were happy or not, and managed not to get strung out on drugs or whiskey or a cast of nameless, no-count men.

  There were two sets of similar people arriving in Chicago and other industrial cities of the North at around the same time in the early decades of the twentieth century—blacks pouring in from the South and immigrants arriving from eastern and southern Europe in a slowing but continuous stream from across the Atlantic, a pilgrimage that had begun in the latter part of the nineteenth century. On the face of it, they were sociologically alike, mostly landless rural people, put upon by the landed upper classes or harsh autocratic regimes, seeking freedom and autonomy in the northern factory cities of the United States.

  But as they made their way into the economies of Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and other receiving cities, their fortunes diverged. Both groups found themselves ridiculed for their folk ways and accents and suffered backward assumptions about their abilities and intelligence. But with the stroke of a pen, many eastern and southern Europeans and their children could wipe away their ethnicities—and those limiting assumptions—by adopting Anglo-Saxon surnames and melting into the world of the more privi
leged native-born whites. In this way, generations of immigrant children could take their places without the burdens of an outsider ethnicity in a less enlightened era. Doris von Kappelhoff could become Doris Day, and Issur Danielovitch, the son of immigrants from Belarus, could become Kirk Douglas, meaning that his son could live life and pursue stardom as Michael Douglas instead of as Michael Danielovitch.

  A name change would have had no effect in masking the ethnicity of black migrants like Ida Mae, George, and Robert. It would have been superfluous, given that their surnames, often inherited from the masters of their forebears, were already Anglo-Saxon. They did not have the option of choosing for themselves a more favored identity. They could not easily assimilate whether they sought to or not. They could send their children to northern schools that were superior to anything back south, acquire a northern accent, save up for suits to replace the overalls and croker sack dresses of the field, but they would never be mistaken for an English or Welsh arriviste the way a Czech or Hungarian immigrant could if so inclined. Black migrants did not have the same shot at craft unions or foreman jobs or country clubs or exclusive cul-de-sac lace-curtain neighborhoods that other immigrants could enter if they were of a mind to do so.

  A daughter of white ethnics could instantly escape the perceived disadvantages of her origins by marrying a man of northern or western European descent and taking his surname. She and whatever children she bore could thus assume the identity of a more privileged caste. With the exception of extraordinarily light-skinned blacks passing into the white world for these very same privileges, the daughter of the average black migrants would gain no such advantage by intermarrying. She would still be seen as black and be subject to the scrutiny of the outside world, no matter whom she married or whose name she took.