Isabel Wilkerson

by The Warmth of Other Suns

  4 The Detroit riots: Ibid., p. 28.

  5 A colored teacher: William H. Chafe, Raymond Gavins, and Robert Korstad, eds., Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South (New York: New Press, in association with Lyndhurst Books of the Center for Documentary Studies of Duke University), p. 201.

  6 Enlisting widespread interest: “Alice Clarissa Clement to Wed Robert Foster: She Is a Spelman 1941 Graduate,” Chicago Defender, June 21, 1941, p. 18.

  7 The Atlanta Daily World: “Miss Clement Is Wed to Robert P. Foster Tuesday,” Atlanta Daily World, December 25, 1941, p. 3.

  8 “because they were taking”: Baker, Following the Color Line, p. 250.

  9 In the spring of 1919: “Army Uniform Cost Soldier His Life,” Chicago Defender, April 5, 1919, p. 1.

  10 Pitocin: The use of pitocin, a synthetic form of the hormone oxytocin, has grown more controversial in the decades since the Korean War, as more women seek natural childbirth with as few artificial inducements as possible. The emphasis on natural childbirth was not the prevailing view during the time of Pershing Foster’s army service and was in fact considered the slower, more natural, and perhaps more progressive alternative to the cesareans preferred and commonly performed by many doctors of the era.

  11 fifty million dollars a year: Citrus Growing in Florida, Bulletin no. 2, New Series, State of Florida, Department of Agriculture, October 1941, p. 5.

  12 It was an illegal form: Terrell H. Shofner, “The Legacy of Racial Slavery: Free Enterprise and Forced Labor in Florida in the 1940s,” The Journal of Southern History 47, no. 3 (August 1981): 414–16. The case against the Sugar Plantation Company in the Everglades was ultimately unsuccessful in the southern court system, which was sympathetic to the planters and hostile to the federal government, and may have in fact emboldened some planters to continue forcing colored people to work against their will. But it offered evidence and made public the extent of the alleged abuses. The company managed to evade prosecution when a Florida judge quashed the indictment.

  13 Willis Virgil McCall: John Hill, “A Southern Sheriff’s Law and Disorder,” The St. Petersburg Times, November 28, 1999. See also Greg Lamm, “Willis V. McCall: Blood, Hatred, Fear: The Reign of a Traditional Southern Sheriff,” Leesburg (Fla.) Commercial, May 20, 1987, p. A1.

  14 In February: Shofner, “The Legacy of Racial Slavery,” pp. 421–422.

  15 McCall struck: “Terrorism Being Used to Frustrate Justice,” The Atlanta Daily World, June 30, 1945, p. 1.

  16 “leaving all their possessions”: “Harlem Pair Tells of McCall’s Acts,” New York Amsterdam News, November 24, 1951, p. 1.

  17 “returns to the grower”: “Lake County Growers Shown Management Theories in Grove Tour,” The Sunday Orlando Sentinel Star, December 21, 1941, p. 22.

  18 four dollars and forty cents: Ibid., pp. 30–36.

  19 2.6 million citrus trees: “Citrus Shipments Up 15% over Last Week; Tangerines in Van,” The Sunday Orlando Sentinel Star, November 30, 1941, p. 10. See also “Growing Conditions,” The Sunday Orlando Sentinel Star, December 28, 1941, p. 19. For ranking of citrus industry by county, see Fruit and Vegetable Crops of Florida: A Compendium of Information on the Fruits and Vegetables Grown in Florida (Tallahassee: Florida State Department of Agriculture, August 15, 1945).

  20 “the killing of a Negro”: Wilbur J. Cash, The Mind of the South (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1941), p. 129.

  21 Later, in 1879: Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas After Reconstruction (New York: Knopf, 1977), pp. 109–10, 184–85.

  22 Immigration plunged: Florette Henri, Black Migration: Movement North, 1900–1920 (Garden City, N.Y.:Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1975), p. 52. Original data on immigration of 1,218,480 in 1914 plunging to 110,618 in 1918 from the U.S. Census.

  23 So the North: David L. Cohn, God Shakes Creation (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1935), p. 335.

  24 The recruiters would stride: James R. Grossman, Land of Hope (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 70.

  25 “As the North”: “Why the Negroes Go North,” Literary Digest 77, no. 7 (May 19, 1923): 14, quoting The Times-Picayune (New Orleans). Appears in Grossman, Land of Hope, p. 43.

  26 “Where shall we get”: Montgomery Advertiser, quoted in “Negro Moving North,” Literary Digest 53, no. 15 (October 7, 1916): 877; from Grossman, Land of Hope, p. 40.

  27 “Black labor”: Columbia State, quoted in Emmett J. Scott, Negro Migration During the War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1920), p. 156, and Grossman, Land of Hope, p. 40.

  28 “It is the life”: Report of the Industrial Commission on Agriculture and Agricultural Labor, vol. 10 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1901), pp. 382–83, 518; cited in Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), p. 27.

  29 “With all our crimes”: Cohn, God Shakes Creation, p. 205.

  30 “We must have”: The Macon Telegraph, September 15, 1916, p. 4.

  31 “Why hunt for the cause”: Montgomery Advertiser, a letter in response to “Exodus of the Negroes to Be Probed,” September 1916.

  32 “If you thought”: George Brown Tindall, Emergence of the New South, 1913–1945 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), p. 149; cited in Henri, Black Migration, p. 75.

  33 “Conditions recently”: U.S. Department of Labor, Division of Negro Economics, Negro Migration in 1916–1917 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1919), p. 63.

  34 Macon, Georgia, required: 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. 59.

  35 “Every Negro”: U.S. Department of Labor, Negro Migration in 1916–1917, p. 12.

  36 The chief of police: Grossman, Land of Hope, p. 44.

  37 In Brookhaven, Mississippi: Scott, Negro Migration During the War, p. 77.

  38 In Albany, Georgia: U.S. Department of Labor, Negro Migration in 1916–17, p. 110.

  39 In Summit, Mississippi: Grossman, Land of Hope, p. 48, from Junius B. Wood, The Negro in Chicago (Chicago: Chicago Daily News, 1916), p. 9; Scott, Negro Migration, p. 73; Chicago Defender, August 26, 1916; Emmett J. Scott, “Additional Letters of Negro Migrants of 1916–1918,” Journal of Negro History, October 1919, p. 451; William F. Holmes, “Labor Agents and the Georgia Exodus,” South Atlantic Quarterly 79 (1980), pp. 445–46, on dispersal of Georgia migrants at train station.

  40 “served to intensify”: Willis D. Weatherford and Charles S. Johnson, Race Relations: Adjustment of Whites and Negroes in the United States (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1934), p. 339.

  41 some migrants: Scott, Negro Migration During the War, p. 77.

  42 one man disguising himself: Interviews with Ruby Lee Welch Mays Smith, Chicago, January–October 1996.

  43 one delegation: David L. Cohn, Where I Was Born and Raised (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967), pp. 340–45. Managers at King and Anderson plantation went to Chicago to convince sharecroppers to come back in the 1940s; cited in Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land (New York: Knopf, 1991), pp. 47–48.

  44 In the 1920s: 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. 104.

  45 “Owing to the scarcity”: U.S. Department of Labor, Negro Migration in 1916–17, p. 96.

  46 Men hopped freight trains: Grossman, Land of Hope, p. 40.

  47 “One section gang”: Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy, Anyplace but Here (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1945), p. 164.

  48 the weeds grew up: Grossman, Land of Hope, p. 40.

  BREAKING AWAY

  1 I was leaving: Richard Wright, Black Boy (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 493.

  2 Of the few who got: Hortense Powdermaker, After Freedom: A Cultural Study of the Deep South (New York: Viking Press, 1930), pp. 86–87.

  3 “How a man treats”: Ibid.,
p. 86.

  4 Like one planter: Based on a letter sent to me by Ruth McClendon of Waukegan, Illinois. She heard me speaking about the Great Migration on WBEZ-FM, the public radio station in Chicago. The letter, dated August 17, 1995, was three pages, handwritten on yellow legal paper. In it, she shared the story of her grandparents leaving Alabama for Illinois during World War I.

  5 Pershing was working: Ozeil Fryer Woolcock, “Social Swirl,” Atlanta Daily World, March 8, 1953, p. 3, and March 15, 1953, p. 18. Both stories are useful in that they confirm the general timing of Robert Foster’s departure. They note that he went to see his wife and daughters in Atlanta in early to mid-March before his migration trip to California. On Friday, March 13, 1953, the latter story notes, he was feted with “a small impromptu party by his wife, Alice Clement Foster, who invited a few former college mates in for an evening of dancing and chatting. The residence was most colorful with the St. Patrick motif, assisting Mrs. Foster was her mother, Mrs. Rufus E. Clement.” The story said that Robert was to leave Atlanta that Tuesday, which would have been March 17. Robert would head back to Monroe one last time before his migration, as he would have to pass through Louisiana en route to California. There, he had at least two weeks to spend time with his own family and friends and to prepare for the long journey ahead. When he later recounted the time leading up to his departure, he went on at length about his final weeks in Monroe and the pre-Easter send-off given him by his close friends and family in his hometown, marking the beginning of his journey out of the South. He never mentioned the visit to Atlanta or the party given him by his in-laws, which suggests it did not figure into his definition of his migration journey or the moment of his emotional break from the South. It also reflected how he viewed the more formal, socially correct world of the Clements compared to the humbler circles of his origins, which seemed to have greater meaning to him.

  6 I pick up my life: Langston Hughes, One-Way Ticket (New York: Knopf, 1949), p. 61.

  7 “Migratory currents flow”: E. G. Ravenstein, “The Laws of Migration,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, no. 2 (June 1889): 284.

  8 “They are like”: Ibid., p. 280.

  9 Some participants: Joe William Trotter, Jr., Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915–1945 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985). Trotter recounts the especially convoluted migration of a man, identified as J.H., who was “born in Canton, Mississippi. At 16, he went to Memphis, Tennessee. From Memphis he went to Sapulpa, Oklahoma. From Sapulpa he went to the army and to France. After the war [World War I] he settled in Kansas City. From Kansas City [he migrated to] Chicago and then Milwaukee at the age of 40. He has lived in Milwaukee for six years.” The account was originally published by the Milwaukee Urban League in its 1942–1943 Annual Report.

  10 “go no further”: Ravenstein, “Laws of Migration,” p. 250.

  11 “The more enterprising”: Ibid., p. 279.

  PART III: EXODUS

  1 There is no mistaking: The Cleveland Advocate, April 28, 1917.

  2 We look up at: Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices (New York: Viking Press, 1941), p. 92.

  THE APPOINTED TIME OF THEIR COMING

  1 A toddler named Huey Newton: Dennis Hevesi, “Huey Newton Symbolized the Rising Black Anger of a Generation,” The New York Times, August 23, 1989, p. 37.

  2 Another boy from Monroe: Bill Russell, Second Wind: The Memoirs of an Opinionated Man (New York: Fireside, 1979), pp. 24–27.

  3 It carried so many: Hollis R. Lynch, The Black Urban Condition: A Documentary History, 1866–1971 (New York: Crowell, 1973), pp. 425–32. The black population of Chicago rose from 30,150 in 1900 to 44,103 in 1910, the last census before the Migration statistically began, and rose to 1,102,620 in 1970. In Detroit, the black population rose from 4,111 in 1900 to 5,741 in 1910 and 660,428 in 1970.

  4 the Illinois Central: John F. Stover, History of the Illinois Central Railroad (New York: Macmillan, 1975), p. 15 on its founding, p. 89 on Lincoln’s role.

  5 Later, it was the first stop: Ray Stannard Baker, Following the Color Line (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1908), p. 113.

  6 “How a colored man”: Robert Russa Moton, What the Negro Thinks (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1929), p. 82. See also Bertram Wilbur Doyle, The Etiquette of Race Relations in the South: A Study in Social Control (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1937), p. 156. Doyle was a professor of sociology at Fisk University.

  7 a family from Beaumont: Interview with Pat Botshekan in Los Angeles, March 18, 1996.

  CROSSING OVER

  1 Do you remember: Charles H. Nichols, ed., Arna Bontemps—Langston Hughes Letters, 1925–1967 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1980), p. 24.

  2 In South Carolina: Graham Russell Hodges, Studies in African History and Culture (New York: Garland, 2000), p. 155.

  4 Some of my people: 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. 97–98.

  5 The earliest departures: Emmett J. Scott, Negro Migration During the War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1920), p. 13.

  6 Instead of the weakening stream: E. G. Ravenstein, “The Laws of Migration,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 52, no. 2 (1889), p. 278. “The most striking feature of the northern migration was its individualism,” Emmett J. Scott wrote in 1920, as if the Migration were over.

  7 “A large error”: Florette Henri, Black Migration: Movement North, 1900–1920 (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1975), p. 72.

  8 Robert Fields: Interview with Robert Fields in Chicago, 1995.

  9 Eddie Earvin: Interview with Eddie Earvin in Chicago, May 1995, after having been given his name at a reunion at DuSable High School.

  PART IV: THE KINDER MISTRESS

  1 The lazy, laughing South: Langston Hughes, “The South,” The Crisis, June 1922.

  CHICAGO

  1 Timidly, we get: Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices (New York: Viking Press, 1941), pp. 99–100.

  NEW YORK

  1 A blue haze: Arna Bontemps, “The Two Harlems,” American Scholar, Spring 1945, p. 167.

  LOS ANGELES

  1 Maybe we can start again: John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Viking Press, 1939; updated edition New York: Penguin Books, 1997), p. 89.

  2 They went to court: “Covenant Suit Arguments on August 22,” Los Angeles Sentinel, July 31, 1947, p. 3, gives an overview of the case as it is about to go before the court.

  3 a small contingent: Lawrence Brooks de Graaf, “Recognition, Racism and Reflections on the Writing of Western Black History,” Pacific Historical Review 44, no. 1 (February 1975): 23.

  4 strongly discouraged: Lawrence Brooks de Graaf, “Negro Migration to Los Angeles, 1930–1950,” dissertation submitted to the University of California, Los Angeles, May 1962, p. 14.

  5 By 1900: Ibid., p. 16.

  6 “Even the seeming”: Octavia B. Vivian, The Story of the Negro in Los Angeles County (Washington, D.C.: Federal Writers’ Project, Works Progress Administration, 1936), p. 31.

  7 “In certain plants”: Ibid., p. 33.

  THE THINGS THEY LEFT BEHIND

  1 There were no Chinaberry: Clifton Taulbert, The Last Train North (Tulsa, Okla.: Council Oaks Books, 1992), pp. 43–44.

  2 had toiled: It is not known precisely why there was a two-and-a-half-year delay in getting word to the slaves in Texas. One theory was that a messenger bearing the news of freedom was murdered on his way to Texas. Another was that slave masters deliberately withheld the news to keep their unpaid labor for as long as they could. Another was that there simply weren’t enough Union troops in Texas to enforce the Proclamation, which was dated January 1, 1863. The announcement read by the Union troops in the form of General Order no. 3 was as follows: “The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights and right
s of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and free laborer” (available at www.juneteenth.com). Also see “An Obscure Texas Celebration Makes Its Way Across the U.S.,” The New York Times, June 18, 2004.

  3 “If I were half”: Abraham Epstein, The Negro Migrant in Pittsburgh (New York: Arno Press, 1969 reissue of 1918 original), p. 27.

  4 Epstein found: Ibid., p. 24.

  TRANSPLANTED IN ALIEN SOIL

  1 Should I have come: Richard Wright, Black Boy (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), pp. 306–7.

  2 A map: Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy, Anyplace but Here (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1945), p. 164.

  3 Beloit, Wisconsin: Morton Rubin, “Migration Patterns from a Rural Northeastern Mississippi Community,” Social Forces 39, no. 1, Oct. 1, 1960–May 1961, pp. 59–66. See also Paul Geib, “From Mississippi to Milwaukee: A Case Study of the Southern Black Migration to Milwaukee, 1940–1970, The Joural of Negro History 83, no. 4 (Autumn 1998): 229–48.

  4 Gary: The Jackson Family of singers, including Michael and Janet, probably the most famous natives of Gary, Indiana, had roots in the South like most other black people born in Gary in the past century. The singing group’s father, Joseph, was born in Fountain Hill, Arkansas, in 1929 and went to Chicago, just west of Gary, when he was eighteen. The group’s mother, the former Katherine Scruse, was born in Barbour County, Alabama, and brought to East Chicago, Indiana, by her parents when she was four. Joseph and Katherine met in the Chicago area and married in November 1949. Their nine surviving children were born in Gary.

  5 But, as in the rest: Joe William Trotter, Jr., Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915–1945 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 42.

  6 “They are superior”: Ibid., p. 55.

  7 “only did the dirty work”: Ibid., p. 47.

  8 even those jobs: Ibid., p. 152.

  9 “never did”: Ibid., p. 167.

  10 The first blacks in Harlem: James Riker, Revised History of Harlem (City of New York): Its Origin and Early Annals (New York: New Harlem Publishing, 1904), p. 189; cited in Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York, 1890–1930 (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), p. 83.