Unwritten, mercurial, opaque, and eminently deniable

For Black History Month I read The Warmth of Other Suns, The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson. It is the non-fiction story of the five and a half million black people who left Jim Crow South for the North or West between 1915 and 1970, a time of more than a half century. Wilkerson focused on three people Ida May Gladney of Mississippi who migrated to Chicago, George Starling who left Florida for New York, and Robert Pershing Foster who drove from Louisiana to Los Angeles. A book that tells three biographies plus background material is long – 543 pages. Even so, it is a fascinating read. I recommend it. Along the way Wilkerson explained why they left – Jim Crow really was that harrowing and that bad, bad enough that millions of people decided leaving home was a much preferable choice. There was an important aspect to their going – the former slave class, current servant class, didn’t ask. Sometimes for safety reasons they couldn’t even tell. They took it on themselves to go, a big step up in claiming their own humanity. But life in the North and West had its own racial problems. Foster was trained to be a surgeon. He spent a couple years in the military during the Korean War and was awarded a prestigious post in Austria. Once there, his supervisor, who was from the South, made sure he was given the lowliest tasks. Back in Louisiana he had the choice. He could be a small town doctor to colored people in which he carried his operating table in his trunk because the hospital was off limits to a black doctor. Or he could leave. On his drive west hotel clerks would say, Oh, sorry, forgot to turn on the no vacancy sign. That meant a really hard drive across New Mexico and Arizona. The discrimination wasn’t in the law, but it was still there, more subtle and genteel. Not Jim Crow, but James Crow. During WWII Starling noticed the shortage of workers picking citrus. He led workers to demand 22 cents a box instead of 6 cents a box. He and his coworkers made good money – more in a day than they usually got in a week. Then he heard the growers were talking about a “necktie” party. He fled. Gladney and her husband were sharecroppers. He picked cotton – 70,000 cotton bolls to make the 100 pound goal for the day. She wasn’t good at it and mostly did other tasks. The book explored the difficulties of sharecropping. Because the landowner billed the workers for the supplies there were many years the landowner said the books balanced and he owed them nothing more. That meant an entire year of labor paid for room and board and nothing more, not much different than slavery. Of course, the landowner was the one who kept the books. Other landowners said the workers owed him, a debt they could never repay. Gladney saw how a member of her community was falsely accused of stealing turkeys and beaten. Her husband decided it was time to go. The Illinois Central Railroad had a line into Mississippi, which is why many black people in Mississippi ended up in Chicago. At the Ohio River there was an elaborate reshuffling as segregated cars were replaced with integrated cars for the rest of the trip north, with the reverse on the trip south. Once in Chicago, Gladney and fellow migrants were allowed to live in only certain areas of the city, which made them overcrowded. Attempts to move to the suburbs were met with violent force. A move to a white portion of the city meant taking white-only covenants to court. When those were struck down a neighborhood would quickly shift from white to black. Gladney ended up in the South Shore neighborhood. She took part in neighborhood meetings with police, reporting on crime she saw from her window. During one of those meetings in 1996 a new candidate for state senate appeared – Barack Obama. In 1966 Gladney attended a rally when Martin Luther King came to Chicago. She never got close enough to actually see him. This gave Wilkerson a chance to discuss a big difference between the South and North.

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 ... with few people able to get out and problems so complex as to make it impossible to identify a single cause or solution. ... Thus any civil right campaign in the North would not be an attack on outrageous law that, with enough grit and fortitude, could be overturned with a stroke of the pen. Instead, King would be fighting the ill-defined fear and antipathy that made northern whites flee at the sight of a black neighbor, turn away blacks at realty offices, or not hire them if they chose. ... No laws could make frightened white northerners care about blacks enough to permit them full access to the system they dominated.

Wilkerson closed the book with the gains America made through this migration. While the migration was going on migrants were portrayed as the worst of the South coming North to corrupt the cities. But, Wilkerson laid out, those from the South were usually better educated, more likely to get and hold a job, more likely to stay married, and more likely to contribute to the neighborhood and city than Northern born blacks. She also had a long list of migrants or children of migrants, Aretha Franklin being one, who made a significant contribution to American culture that would not have been possible had they stayed in the South. The Great Migration was a significant event in American history. It doesn’t seem like that because it was not coordinated. It was millions of individual decisions stretched over a half century. But the effect on the country was profound. There were three important migrations in American history – East to West, South to North, and City to Suburb. This is the story of one of them.