Top Quotes: “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration” — Isabel Wilkerson

Introduction

“From the early years of the 20th century to well past its middle age, nearly every black family in the American South, which meant nearly every black family in America, had a decision to make. There were sharecroppers losing at settlement. Typists wanting to work in an office. Yard boys scared that a single gesture near the planter’s wife could leave them hanging from an oak tree. They were all stuck in a caste system as hard and unyielding as the red Georgia clay, and they each had a decision before them. In this, they weren’t unlike anyone who ever longed to cross the Atlantic or the Rio Grande.”

“Over the course of 6 decades, some 6 million black southerners left the land of their forefathers and fanned out across the country for an uncertain existence in nearly every other corner of America. The Great Migration would become a turning point in history. It would transform urban America and recast the social and political order of every city it touched. It would force the South to search its soul and finally to lay aside a feudal caste system. It grew out of the unmet promises made after the Civil War and, through the sheer weight of it, helped push the country toward the civil rights revolutions of the 60s.”

“Over time, the mass relocation would come to dwarf the CA Gold Rush of the 1850s with its 100k participants and the Dust Bowl migration of some 300k people from OK and AK to CA in the 30s. But more remarkably, it was the first mass act of independence by a people who were in bondage in this country for far longer than they were free.

The story of the Great Migration is among the most dramatic and compelling in all chapters of US history. So far reaching are its effects now that we scarcely understand its meaning.

Its imprint is everywhere in urban life. The configuration of the cities as we know them, the social geography of black and white neighborhoods, the spread of the housing projects as well as the rise of a well-scrubbed black middle class, along with the alternating waves of white flight and suburbanization — all of these grew, directly or indirectly, from the response of everyone touched by the Great Migration. So, too, rose the language and music of urban America that sprang from the blue that came with the migrants and dominates our airwaves to this day. So, too, came the people who might not’ve existed, or become who they did, had there been no Great Migration. People as diverse as James Baldwin and Michelle Obama, Miles Davis and Toni Morrison, Spike Lee and Denzel Washington, and anonymous teachers, store clerks, steelworkers, and physicians, were all products of the Great Migration. They were all children whose life chances were altered because a parent or grandparent had made the hard decision to leave.

The Great Migration wouldn’t end until the 70s, when the South finally began to change — the whites-only signs came down, the all-white schools opened up, and everyone could vote. By then nearly half of all black Americans — some 47% — would be living outside the South, compared to 10% when the Migration began.

‘Oftentimes, just to go away,’ wrote John Dollard, a Yale scholar studying the South in the 30s, ‘is one of the most aggressive things another person can do, and if the means of expressing discontent are limited, as in this case, it’s one of the few ways in which pressure can be put.’

By the time it was over, no northern or western city would be the same. In Chicago alone, the black population rocketed from 44k (3%) at the start of the Migration to more than 1 million by the end of it. By the turn of the 21st century, blacks made up a third of the city’s residents, with more blacks living in Chicago than in the entire state of Mississippi.

It was a ‘folk movement of incalculable moment,’ McMillen said.

And more than that, it was the first big step the nation’s servant class ever took without asking.”

“Richard Wright, the bard of the Great Migration, gave voice to the fears and yearnings of his fellow migrants through his novel Native Son and autobiography Black Boy. He’d been a sharecropper’s son in Natchez, MS. He defected to the receiving station of Chicago, via Memphis, in 1927, to feel, as he put it, ‘the warmth of other suns.’”

“Over time, the story of the Great Migration has suffered distortions that have miscast an entire population. From the moment the emigrants set foot in the North and West, they were blamed for the troubles of the cities they fled to. They were said to have brought family dysfunction with them, to more likely be out-of-work, unwed parents, and on welfare, than the people already there.

In the past 20 years, however, an altogether different picture has emerged from ongoing research. Closer analysis of newly available census records has found that, contrary to conventional thought, black migrants were actually more likely to be married and to raise their children in 2-parent households, and less likely to have children out of wedlock. ‘Compared with northern-born blacks,’ writes sociologist Stewart Tolnay, ‘southern migrants had higher rates of participation in the labor force, lower levels of unemployment, higher incomes, lower levels of poverty and welfare dependency.’”

Life in the South

“[Her father] was diabetic, and the grown people thought he was dead [at 43]. But Ida Mae sat at the side of his bed and touched him, and he was warm. No doctor ever tended to him. There were no colored doctors around. The white ones were all in town, and the family would’ve had to meet them halfway. If they were going to see them at all, because the doctors in town didn’t know the backwoods. Even if they’d been inclined to come, the roads were too muddy from the rains to get through.

Ida Mae thought the grown people should give him more time, maybe he’d come out of the spell he was in. Years later, she learned that educated people had a name for what her father appeared to be in: a coma. But in that world and in that time, nobody could know for sure and nobody would pay a little girl any attention, and so they set the date for the burial.

She and her sisters didn’t have any shoes and went trailing behind their mom in their bare feet to the funeral. Nobody felt sorry for them because most other people didn’t have shoes either.

When they closed the casket, Ida Mae thought for sure that her father was alive in there. ‘I still say today he wasn’t dead,’ she’d say 75 years later. ‘At that time, they didn’t have a way to know.’”

“School was out because colored children only went to school when they weren’t needed in the field. Ida Mae and other colored children in rural MS didn’t start school until the cotton was picked, which meant October in November, and they stopped going to school when it was time to plant in April. 6 months of school was a good year.

She was still grieving when it was time to go back the next fall. She walked a mile of dirt road past the drying cotton and the hackberry trees to get to the 1-room schoolhouse that, one way or the other, had to suffice for every colored child from 1st to 8th grade, the highest you could go back then if you were colored in Chickasaw County.

The children formed a walking train to get there.”

“Ida Mae soon discovered that, when it came to white people, there were good ones and bad ones like anything else and that she had to watch them close to figure out the difference. She was too good-natured to waste energy disliking them no matter what they did but looked upon them as a curiosity she might never comprehend. She learned to give them the benefit of the doubt but not be surprised at anything involving them. This alone probably added decades to her life.

A white lady named Miss Julie McClenna lived across the pasture, and she was nice to Ida Mae. After Ida Mae’s father died, Miss McClenna paid Ida Mae to gather up eggs in the henhouse. Sometimes she took her into town to help her carry eggs to sell. She gave Ida Mae live chickens and leftover food, knowing that Ida Mae’s mother had just been left a widow.

After school, Ida Mae walked a mile to the big house across the pasture to gather eggs for Miss McClenna in the evenings. She always hoped for a lot of eggs. If there were too many for Miss McClenna to carry herself, she’d take Ida Mae into Okolona with her. It was the only chance Ida Mae got to go into town.

Ida Mae gathered more than usual one time, and Miss McClenna took her into Okolona to help her sell them to the white people in town. They delivered the eggs to customers’ houses, straight to their doors, and Miss McClenna had Ida Mae carry the basket of eggs for her.

The day had gone well until they knocked on one woman’s door to make a delivery. Ida Mae stood with the basket behind Miss McClenna as Miss McClenna prepared to step inside.

‘You can’t bring that n***er in,’ the woman said from her front door as soon as she saw Ida Mae.

Miss McClenna knew what that meant. She motioned for Ida Mae to go to the back door to deliver the eggs while Miss McClenna stepped inside to complete the transaction.

On the way back home, Miss McClenna seemed unsettled by it.

‘Did you hear what she called you?’ Miss McClenna asked.

‘Yeah, but I ain’t pay it no attention,’ Ida Mae said. ‘They call you so many names.’

The incident jarred Miss McClenna. The ‘hardware of reality rattled her,’ as artist Carrie Mae Weems would say decades later of such interactions.

What few people seemed to realize or perhaps dared admit was that the thick walls of the caste system kept everyone in prison. The rules that defined a group’s supremacy were so tightly wound as to put pressure on everyone trying to stay within the narrow confines of acceptability. It meant being a certain kind of Protestant, holding a particular occupation, having a respectable level of wealth or the appearance of it, and drawing the patronizingly appropriate lines between oneself and those of lower rank of either race in the world.

An attorney’s wife in AL, for instance, was put on notice one day at a gathering at her home for the upper-class women in her circle. Between the hors d’oeuvres and conversation, one of the clubwomen noticed, for the first time apparently, a statuette of the Virgin Mary on a cabinet. The guest cattily remarked upon it. Why, she never knew that the hostess and her family were Catholics!

The attorney’s wife was shaken by the accusation, and quickly replied that of course not, they were Methodists and she thought everyone knew that. She only had the statuette because she happened to like it.

But after the party was over, the accusation haunted her, and she fretted over the implication that she might be seen as a member of a lesser tribe. That day, she took down the statuette that she liked so much and put it away for good. She couldn’t afford even the appearance of having stepped outside the bounds of her caste.

Neither could Miss Julie McClenna. As far as Ida Mae knew, Miss McClenna never sold eggs to that lady again. But that was also the end of her brief employment with Miss McClenna. ‘She never did take me no more after that,’ Ida Mae said.’”

“It was a crazy enough world that they could almost time the weekends by a white farmer who lived down the road.

He was fine when he was sober and actually liked colored people. But he got drunk on Fridays and came staggering on his old horse to the colored people’s cabins. They could hear the hoof steps and hollering as he rode in waving his gun.

‘I’m coming through!’ he shouted.

Grown people dropped their buckets and went running. Children hid under the cabins on the dirt floor between the stilts, while he huffed and cussed and tried to smoke them out.

‘I’m a shoot y’all,’ he hollered. ‘I’m a kill y’all!’

There was always a commotion and a panic whenever he came through. It could happen day or night. There was never much warning, and they had to scramble to escape his ragged gunshots. Then they had to lie perfectly still. ‘We’d run under the house, and, wherever he hear a bump, he would shoot,’ Ida Mae said.”

“Home Plessy, a colored Louisianan, protested a new state law forbidding any railroad passengers from entering ‘a compartment to which by race he doesn’t belong.’ On June 7, 1894, Plessy bought a first-class ticket on the E. Louisiana Railroad, took an empty seat in the whites-only car, and was arrested when he refused to move. In 1896, in the seminal case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court sided with the South and ruled, 8–1, that ‘equal and separate’ accommodations were constitutional. That ruling would stand for the next 60 years.”

“Something called the stock market crashed, and things would get harder than they ever knew they could. Because, if the planters suffered, so much more would the sharecroppers under them.”

“15,000 men, women, and children gathered to watch 18-year-old Jesse Washington as he was burned alive in Waco in May 1916. The crowd chanted, ‘Burn, burn, burn!’ as Washington was lowered into the flames. One father holding his son on his shoulders wanted to make sure his toddler saw it.

‘My son can’t learn too young,’ the father said.

Across the South, someone was hanged or burned alive every 4 days from 1889 to 1929, for such alleged crimes as ‘stealing hogs, horse-stealing, poisoning mules, jumping labor contract, suspected of killing cattle, boastful remarks’ or ‘trying to act like a white person.’ 66 were killed after being accused of ‘insult to a white person.’ One was killed for stealing 75 cents.”

“The planter class, which had entrusted its wives and daughters to male slaves when the masters went off to fight the Civil War, was now in near hysterics over the slightest interaction between white women and black men.”

“[The laws] would come to be called Jim Crow. It’s unknown precisely who Jim Crow was or if someone by that name actually existed. There are several stories as to the term’s origins. It came into public use in the 1830s after Thomas Rice, a NY-born itinerant white actor, popularized a song-and-dance routine called ‘the Jim Crow’ in minstrel shows across the country. He wore blackface and ragged clothes and performed a jouncy, palsied imitation of a handicapped black stable hand he’d likely seen in his travels singing a song about ‘Jumping Jim Crow.’ Jim Crow was said to be the name of either the stable hand or his owner living in KY or OH. Rice became a national sensation impersonating a crippled black man, but died penniless in 1960 of a paralytic condition that limited his speech and movement by the end of his life.

The term caught the fancy of whites across the country and came to be used as a pejorative for colored people and things related to them, and, by 1841, was applied to the laws to segregate them. The first such law were passed not in the South, but in MS, as a means of designating a railcar set apart for black passengers. FL, MS, and TX enacted the first Jim Crow laws in the South right after the Confederates lost the Civil War — FL and MS in 1865 and TX in 1866. The northerners who took over the South during Reconstruction repealed those hastily passed laws. The Federal Civil Rights Act of 1875 explicitly outlawed segregation. But the northerners who were there to enforce the law retreated by the late 1870s and left the South to its own devices. As the 20th century approached, the South resurrected Jim Crow.

Streetcars, widely in use from the 1880s, had open seating in the South, until GA demanded separate seating by race in 1891. By 1905, every southern state outlawed blacks from sitting next to whites on public conveyances.”

“Those silent parties leaving Selma in winter 1916 saw no option but to go. Theirs would become the first volley of a leaderless revolution. There was no Moses or Joshua or Harriet Tubman, or, for that matter, Malcolm X or MLK, Jr, to organize the Migration. The best-known leader at the start of it, Booker T. Washington, was vehemently against abandonment of the South and strongly discouraged it. Frederick Douglass, who saw it coming but died before it began, was against the very thought of it and considered an exodus from the South ‘a premature, disheartening surrender.’

Those entreaties had little effect.

‘The Negroes just quietly move away without taking their recognized leaders into their confidence any more than they do the white people about them,’ a Labor Department study reported. A colored minister might meet with his deacons on a Wednesday, thinking all was well, and by Sunday find all the church elders gone north. ‘They write the minister that they forgot to tell him they were going away.”

“The president of SE Greyhound told the Journal, ‘It frequently costs 50% more to build a terminal with segregated facilities.’ But most southern businessmen didn’t dare complain about the extra cost. ‘That question is dynamite,’ the president of a southern theater chain told the Journal. ‘Don’t even say what state I’m in.’”

“Throughout the South, the conventional rules of the road didn’t apply when a colored motorist was behind the wheel. If he reached an intersection first, he had to let the white motorist go ahead of him. He couldn’t pass a white motorist on the road no matter how slowly they were going and had to take extreme caution to avoid an accident because he’d likely be blamed no matter who was at fault. In everyday interactions, a black person couldn’t contradict a white person or speak unless spoken to first. A black person couldn’t be the first to offer to shake a white person’s hand. A handshake could occur only if a white person so gestured, leaving many people having never shaken hands with a person of the other race. The consequences for the slightest misstep were swift and brutal. 2 whites beat a tenant farmer in Louise, MS, in 1948, wrote historian James Cobb, because the man ‘asked for a receipt after paying his water bill.’”

“The arbitrary nature of grown people’s wrath gave colored children practice for life in the caste system, which is why parents, forced to train their children in the ways of subservience, treated their children as the white people running things treated them. It was prep for the lower-caste role children were expected to have mastered by puberty.”

“Planters were known to take the same liberties the slave masters had, and the contradictions weren’t lost on colored men: white men could do to colored women what colored men could be burned alive for doing to white women.”

“In fall 1934, when George was a teen and old enough to take note of such things, perhaps the single worst act of torture and execution in 20th-century America occurred in the panhandle town of Marianna, FL.

That October, a 23-year-old colored farmhand named Claude Neal was accused of the rape and murder of a 20-year-old white woman named Lola Cannidy. Neal had grown up across the road from Lola’s family. He was arrested and signed a written confession that historians have since called into question. But at the time, passions ran so high that a band of 300+ men armed with guns, knives, torches, and dynamite went searching for Neal in every jail within a 75-mile-radius of Marianna.

The manhunt forced the authorities to move Neal across the panhandle, from Marianna to Panama City by car, to Camp Walton by boat, to Pensacola by car again, with the mob on their trail at every turn. Finally, the Escambia Co. Sheriff, fearing that his jail in Pensacola was too dilapidated to withstand attack, decided to take Neal out of state altogether, to the tiny town of Brewton, AL, 55 miles north of Pensacola. Someone leaked Neal’s whereabouts, and a lynching party of some 100 men drove in a 30-car caravan to Alabama. There the men managed to divert the local sheriff and overtake the deputy. They stormed the jail and took Neal, his limbs bound with a plow rope, back to Marianna.

It was the early morning hours of 10/26, a Friday. Neal’s chief abductors, a self-described ‘committee of 6,’ an oddly officious term commonly used by the leaders of southern lynch mobs, set the lynching for 8pm, when most everyone would be out of work. The advance notice allowed word to spread by radio, teletype, and afternoon papers to the western time zones.

Well before the appointed hour, several thousand people had gathered at the lynching site. The crowd grew so large and unruly — people having been given sufficient forewarning to come in from other states — that the committee of 6, fearing a riot, took Neal to the woods by the Chipola River to wait out the crowds and torture him before the execution.

There his captors took knives and castrated him in the woods. Then they made him eat his severed body parts ‘and say he liked it,’ a witness said.

‘One man threw up at the sight,’ wrote historian James McGovern.

Across Neal’s neck, they tied a rope and pulled it over a limb to the point of his choking before lowering him to take up the torture again. ‘Every now and then somebody would cut off a finger or toe,’ one witness said. Then the men used hot irons to burn him all over his body in a ritual that went on for several hours.

The crowd waiting in town never got to see Neal die. The committee of 6 decided finally to just kill him in the woods. His nude body was then tied to the back of a car and dragged to the Cannidy house, where men, women, and children stabbed the corpse with sticks and knives. The dead girl’s father was angry that Neal was killed before he could get to him. ‘They done me wrong about the killing,’ the father said. ‘They promised they’d bring him up to my house before they killed him and let me have the first shot. That’s what I wanted.’

The committee hanged the body ‘from an oak tree on the courthouse lawn.’ People reportedly displayed Neal’s fingers and toes and souvenirs. Postcards of his dismembered body went for 50 cents each. When the sheriff cut down the body the next morning, a mob of as many as 2,000 people demanded that it be rehanged. When the sheriff refused to return it to the tree, the mob attacked the courthouse and rampaged through Marianna, attacking any colored person they ran into. Well-to-do whites hid their maids or sent cars to bring their workers to safety. ‘We needed these people,’ said a white man, who sat on his porch protecting his interests with a loaded gun. Florida Gov. David Sholtz had to call in the National Guard to quell the mob.

Across the country, thousands of outraged Americans wrote President FDR demanding a federal investigation. The NAACP compiled a 16-page report and more files on the Neal case than on any other lynching in US History. But Neal had the additional misfortune of having been lynched just before the 1934 midterms, which were being seen as a referendum on the New Deal itself. Roosevelt chose not to risk alienating the South with a Democratic majority in Congress at stake. He didn’t intervene in the case. No one was ever charged in Neal’s death or spent a day in jail for it. The Jackson Co. grand jury, in the common language of such inquests, reported that the execution had occurred ‘at the hands of persons unknown to us.’

Soon afterward, it was learned that Neal and the dead girl, who’d known each other all their lives, had been lovers and that people in her family who discovered the liaison may have been involved in her death for the shame it had brought to the family. Indeed, the summer after Neal was lynched, the girl’s father was convicted of assault with intent to kill his niece because he suspected that that side of the family had had a hand in his daughter’s death.

In sentencing the father to 5 years in prison for attacking the relative, the judge said, ‘I hate to pass this sentence on an old man such as you, but I must do it. To be perfectly fair with you, I don’t believe you have any too many brains.’

The father replied, ‘Yes, judge. I’m plumb crazy.’

Thereafter, FL continued to live up to its position as the southernmost state with among the most heinous acts of terrorism committed anywhere in the South. Violence had become such an accepted fact of life that, in 1950, the FL governor’s special investigator observed that there had been so many mob executions in 1 county that it ‘never had a negro live long enough to go to trial.’”

“No one sat George down and told him the rules. His father was quiet and kept his wounds to himself. George’s teachers were fear and instinct. The caste system trained him to see absurdity as normal.

Like the time George went for an ice cream cone at the pharmacy in downtown Eustis. He wouldn’t be able to sit at the counter, he knew that going in. Anytime a white customer walked up, he had to step back and wait for them to be served first. George had learned this, too, by now. The pharmacist had a dog. And when George walked up to the counter, 3–4 white men who were standing around looked at one another and then at the pharmacist. The owner called out to the dog. And the dog jumped up onto the counter.

When the pharmacist had everyone’s attention, he turned to the dog.

‘What would you rather do?’ he asked the dog. ‘Be a n****er or die?’

The dog rolled over on cue. It flipped on its back, folded its legs, shut its eyes, and froze. The grown people at the counter and up front near George shook with laughter.

George was a teen and outnumbered. He was the only one of his kind in this place. All he could do was stand there and take it. Any other response would require an explanation. What’s the matter with you, boy? You don’t like it? he could hear them saying.

All kinds of thoughts went through his mind. ‘A whole lot of things,’ he said,’ ‘How you’d like to kill all of ’em, for one thing.’”

“The town came into its own in the 20s with the arrival of a crop-dusting outfit out of Macon, GA, the company having decided to move to the more strategically-located town of Monroe, closer to the MS Delta. In 1928, a businessman named C.E. Woolamn purchased what was then known as Huff Daland Dusters. He switched from crop-dusting and began running the first passenger flights between MS and TX, via Monroe and Shreveport, in 1929. The company would later come to be known as Delta Air Lines, named at the region it originally served. Delta’s presence in Monroe was little more than a distant point of pride to the colored people there, as they could not have become pilots, stewardesses, or gate agents for the airline and might glean only the ancillary benefits of cleaning the airport and serving the new wealthier customers.”

“In neighboring MS, white teachers and principals were making $630 a year, while the colored ones were paid a third of that — $215 a year, hardly more than field hands. But knowing that didn’t ease the burden of the Fosters’ lives, get their children through college, or allow them to build assets to match their status and education.

The disparity in pay, reported without apology in the local papers for all to see, would have far-reaching effects. It would mean that even the most promising of colored people, having received next to nothing in material assets from their slave foreparents, had to labor with the knowledge that they were now being underpaid by more than half, that they were so behind it would be all but impossible to accumulate the assets their white counterparts could, and that they would, by definition, have less to leave succeeding generations than similar white families. Multiplied over the generations, it would mean a wealth deficit between the races that would require a miracle windfall or near asceticism on the part of colored families if they were to have any chance of catching up or amassing anything of value. Otherwise, the chasm would continue, as it did for blacks as a group even into the succeeding century. The layers of accumulated assets build up by the better-paid dominant caste, generation after generation, would factor into a wealth disparity of white Americans having an average net worth 10x that of black Americans by the turn of the 21st century, dampening the economic prospects of the children and grandchildren of both Jim Crow and the Great Migration before they were even born.

For now, each day, Pershing’s parents and the families whose children they taught had to live with the reality that they had to do more with less. Southern states made no pretense as to the lopsided division of resources to white and colored schools devoting as much as $10 per white student for every dollar spent on a colored student and showing little interest beyond that meager investment.

‘The money allocated to the colored children is spent on the education of the white children,’ a local school superintendent in LA said bluntly. ‘We have twice as many colored children of school age as we have white, and we use their money. Colored children are mightily profitable to us.’

When a fire broke out in the basement of Monroe Colored High School, destroying classroom furniture and equipment, the city refused to so much as replace the desks and teaching supplies that had burned to ashes. The tax dollars were earmarked for Neville. The colored parents, already strapped, would have to raise the money themselves.”

“At Easter and around the 4th of July, the people from the North came. They looked like extras out of a movie at the Saturday matinee. They wore peplums and bergamot waves. Even the wind moved aside as they walked.

They flashed thick rolls of cash from their pockets — the biggest bills on the outside covering the ones and fives. They said they were making all kinds of money. But they didn’t have to say it because their cars and the clothes did the talking. They had been wiring more money to their families back home than they truly could spare and had been saving all year for those gloves and matching purse. But they weren’t telling people in the South that.

They made sure to show up at their mother-churches, where everyone would see them. The pastors would ask the visitors to rise, and it was then that the people from up north or out west stood up in their butterfly hats and angel dresses and in suits upholstered to the tall men’s frames. People hadn’t seen them in ages now craned to see how Willie and Thelma looked and if they’d changed any. And the pastor went on about how this one was building cars in Detroit and that one was doing us proud in Oakland.

They were received like visiting dignitaries. They had once been just like the people who stayed. Now they were doing important-sounding work for the government in DC, in the hotels of Chicago, in the garment district in NY, or in the apartments of the rich people in Riverside Drive. They wore the protective coating of the North. They lived in big cities too distracted to care what the colored people did as long as they did it to themselves, and that was the greatest blessing of all.”

“The sun bore down on Ida Mae and George, and soon they heard crying near the palm tree. It was Velma wailing and Baby Sis lying sick with half-eaten plums beside her. Velma had reached up and gotten her some, and Baby Sis ate them and got the flux, as the country people called whatever stomach ailment, poison, and virus had got into the baby. It was a perilous world in the early 30s, even without Jim Crow. Dysentary, typhus, malaria all thrived in the backwoods of the Deep South before penicillin or common vaccines were invented. There were no doctors nearby, and, by the time they got Baby Sis to one, it was too late. They buried her in a little box at the church cemetery near Bewnie.

Ida Mae told herself that day that she would never leave a child of hers alone again.”

“When he was a little boy, an uncle told him to come help him with an errand. The 2 of them rode out into the woods and came to a stop at a tree. A colored man was hanging dead from a limb. The uncle needed Reuben’s help cutting the rope and getting the limp, lynched body down. Reuben was 10. He would never forget that.

When Reuben got big, he fled to NY, worked at a tombstone factory in Brooklyn. He worked crushing tomatoes at a ketchup factory and had seen so many of the unmentionable things that got mangled into the ketchup.”

“In winter 1919, when Ida Mae was trailing her father out to the field, George and Pershing were learning to crawl, and the first wave of migrants was stirring to life, an astronomer made a startling discovery. Edwin Hubble, working out of U of Chicago, looked through one of the most powerful telescopes of his time.

What he saw would eventually become the most significant astronomical find of the century and would come to parallel the awakening of an isolated people in his own country. It would confirm what for generations had been whispered of but dismissed as impossible. It occurred near the start of a long pilgrimage of Americans seeking to escape their own harsh, known world.

Hubble identified a star that was far, far away and wasn’t the same sun that fed life on Earth.

It was another sun.

And it would prove for the first time in human history that there were galaxies other than our own, that the universe was much bigger than humans had ever imagined, that there were, in fact, other suns.”

The Detroit Riots

“On the humid night of June 20, 1943, a fight broke out between several hundred white and colored men on Belle Isle Park in Detroit. The fighting spread north, south, and west as rumors circulated among blacks that white men had killed a colored woman and thrown her baby into the Detroit River and, among whites, that colored men had raped and killed a white woman in the park.

Neither rumor turned out to be true, but it was all that was needed to set off one of the worst riots ever seen in the US, an outbreak that would mark a turning point in American race relations. Until the 1943 uprising in Detroit, most riots in the US, from the 1869 Draft Riots in NY to the riots in Tulsa in 1921, to Atlanta in 1906 to DC to Chicago, Springfield, and East St. Louis and Wilmington, NC, among others, had been white attacks on colored people, often resulting in the burning of entire colored sections or towns.

This was the first major riot in which blacks fought back as earnestly as the whites and in which black residents, having become established in the city but still relegated to run-down ghettos, began attacking and looting perceived symbols of exploitation, the stores and laundries run by whites and other outsiders that blacks felt were cheating them. It was only after Detroit that riots became known as primarily urban phenomena, ultimately centered on inner-city blacks venting their frustrations on the ghettos that confined them.

The Detroit riots went on for close to a week, ending in 34 deaths and 1,000+ wounded. The Sunday night the riots began, as many as 5,000 people joined in the stoning, stabbing, beating, and shooting, so many people injured that the municipal hospital was admitting riot victims at a rate of one a minute.”

The Opening Gates

“The masses didn’t pour out of the South until they had something to go to. They got their chance when the North began courting them, hard and in secret, in the face of southern hostility, during the labor crisis of WWI. Word had spread like wildfire that the North was finally ‘opening up.’

The war had cut the supply of European workers the North had relied on to kill its hogs and stoke its foundries. Immigration plunged by more than 90%, from 1.2 million in 1914 to 111k in 1918, when the country needed all the labor it could get for war production. So the North turned its gaze to the poorest-paid labor in the emerging market of the American South. Steel mills, railroads, and packinghouses sent labor scouts disguised as insurance agents and salesmen to recruit blacks north, if only temporarily.

The recruiters would stride through groupings of colored people and whisper without stopping, ‘Anybody want to go to Chicago, see me.’ It was an invitation that tapped into pent-up yearnings and was just what the masses had been waiting for. The trickle that became a stream had now become a river, uncontrolled and uncontrollable, and about to climb out of its banks. Some 555k colored people left the South during the decade of WWI — more than all of the colored people who’d left in the 5 decades after the Emancipation Proclamation, which promised the freedoms they were now forced to pursue on their own.

At first the South was proud and ambivalent, pretended that it didn’t care. ‘As the North grows blacker, the South grows whiter,’ the New Orleans Times-Picayune happily noted.

Then, as planters awoke to empty fields, the South began to panic. ‘Where shall we get labor to take their places?’ asked the Montgomery Advertiser.”

“When the people kept leaving, the South resorted to coercion and interception worthy of the Soviet Union, which was forming at the same time. Those trying to leave were rendered fugitives by definition and couldn’t be certain they’d be able to make it out. In Brookhaven, MS, authorities stopped a train with 50 colored migrants on it and sidetracked it for 3 days. In Albany, GA, the police tore up the tickets of colored passengers as they stood waiting to board, dashing their hopes of escape. A minister in SC, having seen his parishioners off, was arrested at the station on the charge of helping colored people get out. In Savannah, the police arrested every colored person at the station regardless of where they were going. In Summit, MS, authorities simply closed the ticket office and didn’t let northbound trains stop for the colored people waiting to get on.

Instead of stemming the tide, the blockades and arrests ‘served to intensify the desire to leave,’ wrote sociologist Willis Weatherford, ‘and to provide further reasons for going.’

To circumvent the heavy surveillance, some migrants simply bought tickets to cities 2–3 stations away where they wouldn’t be recognized or where there was less of a police presence. There, under less scrutiny, they bought tickets to their true destination. Those who had somehow gotten on the wrong side of somebody in the ruling class had to go to unusual lengths to get out, one man disguising himself as a woman to flee Crystal Springs, MS, for Chicago in the 40s.

Chastened by their losses, some businessmen tried conciliation, one delegation going so far as to travel to Chicago to persuade former sharecroppers that things had changed and it was time they came back. (The sharecroppers showed no interest and instead took the opportunity to complain about being cheated and whipped while in their employ.) In the 20s, the TN Association of Commerce, the Department of Immigration of LA, the MS Welfare League, and the Southern Alluvial Land Association all sent reps north to try to bring colored workers back. They offered free train tickets and promised better wages and living conditions. They returned empty-handed.

When these efforts didn’t work, some planters increased wages, if only temporarily, and tried easing up on their workers to induce them to stay.”

“Someone would try to curry favor, alert him to a sharecropper trying to leave. There were spies and Toms all over the place, setting up fellow colored men and sending them to their deaths for an extra privilege or 2. Planters didn’t like to lose good help. They had ways of keeping sharecroppers under them, claimed they owed money when they didn't, that they had to work off the debt, which meant they were working for free and made fugitives of them if they left. The planters kept the books, and, even if a sharecropper had the nerve to keep his own, a colored man’s numbers didn’t count.”

The Journey

“Like other mass migrations, it wasn’t a haphazard unfurling of lost souls but a calculable and fairly ordered resettlement of people along the most direct route to what they perceived as freedom, based on railroad and bus lines. The migration streams were so predictable that by the end of the Migration, and, to a lesser degree, even now, one can tell where a black northerner’s family was from just the city the person grew up in — a good portion of blacks in Detroit, for instance, having roots in TN, AL, W. GA, or the Florida panhandle because the historic rail lines connected those places during the Migration years.”

“The Illinois Central Railroad was a legendary rail system that, for a great portion of the 20th century, carried upward of a million colored people from the Deep South up the country’s central artery, across the Mason-Dixon Line, and into a new world called the Midwest. It carried so many southern blacks north that Chicago would go from 2% black at the start of the 20th century to 1/3 black by the time the flow of people finally began to slow in 1970. Detroit’s black population would skyrocket from 1% to 44% during the era of the Migration.”

“He was more tired now than before. He had more than half of Texas in front of him and a couple of hours of margaritas in his veins. There were roadside motels on both sides of the highway, but he drove past them and gave them no thought. There was no point in asking for a room. They didn’t take colored people, and it did no good to think about it. They might as well have not existed.

He reassured himself with the advice he’d gotten that there was a motel in Lordsburg, NM, that took in colored people.”

“Between MS and Chicago, Jim Crow went out of effect in Cairo, IL, at the southern tip of the state. For a time in the 20s, the ride to Chicago was interrupted after the train crossed the Ohio River into Cairo, as if the train were passing from Poland into the old Soviet Union. Once over the river and officially in the North, the colored cars had to be removed in a noisy and cumbersome uncoupling and the integrated cars attached in their place to adhere to the laws of Illinois. Colored passengers had to move, wait, reshuffle themselves, and haul their bags to the newly attached integrated cars. Going south, the ritual was reversed.”

“The Great Migration created a need for places where colored people could stop and rest in a world where no hotels in the South accepted colored people and those in the North and West were mercurial in their policies, many of them disallowing blacks as readily as hotels in the South.

Thus, there developed a kind of underground railroad for colored traveers, spread by word of mouth among friends and in fold-up maps and green paperback guidebooks that listed colored lodgings by state or city.

Colored travelers, hoping to plan their journeys in advance and get assurance of a room, carried the guidebooks in their glove compartments like insurance cards. But the books were often out of date by the time they were printed, the accuracy of their entries based on the fortunes of the ‘hoteliers’ who may have only been renters themselves. A colored traveler had to prepare for the possibility that they might arrive at a place in the guidebook only to find that the proprietor had been gone for years and then have to take up the search for a room all over again.”

‘Newark.’ It sounded so tantalizingly close to ‘New York,’ and maybe, some assumed, was the way northerners, clipping their words as they did, pronounced New York. It was confusing to have their intended destination preceded directly by a city with such a similar name and with an identically named station. And as they had been riding for as many as 24 hours and were nervous about missing their stop, some got off prematurely and, it is said, that is how Newark gained a good portion of its black population, those arriving in Newark by accident and deciding to stay.”

Life in the North

In the 60s, realtors found ways around the covenants by buying properties themselves and selling them at a higher price to colored people, by arranging third-party transfers that hid the identity of the true purchasers, or by matching defiant or desperate white sellers with equally anxious colored buyers, which together were just about the only way colored people could get into certain neighborhoods. In any case, Dr. and Mrs. Beck, bourgeois though they were, waited until after dark to move in 1215 St. Andrews Place. But someone must’ve seen them. That night, as they began unpacking, an orange light danced in front of the picture window. The palm tree on their manicured lawn was on fire. It wasn’t unlike the crosses that burned in the South, except this was California.

They weren’t new to this kind of hostility, and they decided not to run from it. They’d survived the South during far uglier days. And they considered themselves upstanding people that anyone should be proud to live next to. They went to court to challenge the covenant and defend the means by which they’d acquired the house; and, when it was over, they had won the right to stay. The white people emptied out of the block within months.”

“She grew a night-blooming cereus on the front porch of her yellow bungalow. Its gangly branches coiled out of its pot and snaked along the porch planks. It was an unpleasant-looking orphan of a plant that was only worth growing for the one night in the year when its white, lily-like petals managed to open for a few hours when nobody would be up to see it.

My mother’s mother tended its homely stalks all through the year. She watched it close and made note when the buds were plump and ready to unfurl. As soon as she was certain, she altered the neighbors as they passed her front yard with its roses the size of saucers, which she sold after some cajoling for a dollar apiece, and its crape myrtles the color of cotton candy.

‘My night-blooming cereus is going to open tonight,’ she told them.

Amanda Poindexter, Miss Lilybell Nelson, who live dup the hill and sang like a bird, Mrs. Jacobs next door, and a few other neighbor ladies on Gibbon St would arrive at my grandmother’s front porch around midnight. They drank sweet tea and ate freshly-churned vanilla ice cream. They rocked in the porch swing, which creaked as they rocked, and they waited. As a young girl, my mother sat waiting on the porch steps, mystified by the grown people’s patience and devotion.

The opening took hours. Sometime around 3 in the morning, the white petals spread open, and the women set down their sweet tea to crane their necks over the blossoms. They inhaled its sugary scent and tried to find the baby Jesus in the cradle in the foils. Most exclaimed that they saw it; my mother said she never did. But she would remember the wait for the night-blooming cereus, the Georgia heat stifling and heavy, and take the memory with her when she left, though she’d never share in the mystery of that Gibbon St. ritual again.”

“The people from TX took Juneteenth Day to LA, Oakland, Seattle, and other places they went. Even now, with BBQs and real soda pop, they celebrate June 19, 1865, the day the Union soldiers rode into Galveston, announced that the Civil War was over, and released the quarter-million slaves in TX who, not knowing they’d been freed, had toiled for 2.5 years after the Emancipation Proclamation.

Whole churches and social rituals in the North and West would be built around certain southern towns or entire states. Well into the 90s, at the Bridge St. Church in Brooklyn, for instance, when people from SC were asked to stand and make themselves known, half the flock would rise to its feet. To this day, people still wear sequins and bow ties to the annual Charleston Ball in DC, where a good portion of the Carolinas went.

It turned out they were not so different from the Sicilians settling in Little Italy or Swedes in Minnesota.

In the New World, colonies organized themselves into MS and AK Clubs in Chicago; Florida Clubs in Harlem; Carolinas Clubs in Brooklyn and Philly; and numerous TX Clubs, LA Clubs, several New Orleans Clubs, and, among others, a Monroe, LA, Club, and a Lake Charles, LA, Club in LA.

They met over oxtails and collared greens well into the turn of the new century or for as long as the original migrants lived to recall among their dwindling membership the things they’d left behind.”

“They wired money back home, as expected and set a larger share of their straining paychecks than they could truly afford to the people they left behind. In his study of the Migration, Eptstein found that 80% of the married migrants and nearly half of the single ones were sending money home, most sending $5/week and some $10 or more per week out of weekly wages of $15 back then for unskilled laborers, as many of them would’ve been.

There was something earnest and true-hearted about them. They greeted people on northern sidewalks a little too quickly and too excitedly for the local people’s liking and to the stricken embarrassment of their more seasoned cousins and northern-born children. They talked of a lush, hot-blooded land to children growing up fast and indifferent in a cold place too busy to stop and visit.”

“Sometimes migration origins and destinations were as random as where the northern companies recruiting southerners in WWI just happened to be based.

A map of the crosscurrents of migration would link otherwise completely unrelated southern counties and towns with seemingly random northern cities that, other than the train lines and sometimes in spite of them, made little practical sense but nonetheless made sister cities of the unlikeliest of pairings: Palestine, TX and Syracuse; Norfolk, VA and Roxbury in Boston; Brookhaven, MS and Bloomington, IL. Small colonies of migrants from Chickasaw County, MS, ended up in Toledo, where Ida Mae’s older brothers fled, and in Kalamazoo, when the call came for workers.”

“As in the rest of the industrial North, the number of Europeans immigrating to Milwaukee plummeted from 23k in the first decade of the 20th century to a mere 450 during all of the 20s because of the war. Factories that had never before considered colored labor came to see the advantage of colored workers from the South, even if some of the so-called advantages were themselves steeped in stereotype.

Most colored migrants were funneled into the lowest-paying, least-wanted jobs in the harshest industries — iron and steel foundries and slaughtering and meatpacking.”

“The kinds of jobs George was looking for and that most colored men performed — unskilled labor that was often hot, tedious, backbreaking, or dangerous — plunged by 70% from 1,600 such jobs in 1930 to only 460 at the end of the decade, around the time George and Ida Mae arrived.

With jobs scarce, the old tendency toward intolerance and exclusion reasserted itself. Hiring managers at a tank and auto frame factory said there was no use in colored people applying for jobs there because the company ‘never did and doesn’t intend to employ Negroes.’ Company guards knew to stop colored job seekers at the gates.”

“Still, the urge to get out of the South was so strong that by the mid-30s, Milwaukee’s North Side, a neighborhood of tenements and two-flats just above the city’s central business district, was already becoming the colored side of town. Since WWI, it had been filling each day with more and more colored people from the South, so much so that in some grade-school classrooms, nearly every child was from MS, TN, or AK, and those born in the North were a minority.”

Harlem’s Beginnings

“The first blacks in Harlem were actually a small group of 17th-century slaves of the Dutch West India Company. They built the original road between lower Manhattan and Harlem and worked the farms and estates of what was then underdeveloped marshland and countryside.

As more Africans were shipped in to build the colony, the majority were concentrated in lower Manhattan, where the first 11 African captives had landed on the island in 1625. They and those that followed were imported by the Dutch to clear timber and construct the city’s roads and buildings. They worked in captivity for 200 years, until NY abolished slavery in 1827. Emancipation set free 10,000 slaves in Manhattan. But they found their economic conditions little changed, confined as they were to the lowliest positions and facing steep competition from newly-arrived immigrants.

Their tenuous condition and the state of race relations in general reached a nadir in the city during the Civil War Draft Riots of 1863, when Irish immigrants launched a 5-day assault on freed slaves in lower Manhattan.

The trouble began when the federal government announced it would start drafting men to serve in the Union Army. Wealthy men could avoid the draft by paying $300 or hiring a substitute. Anger rose among Irish working-class men, in particular, who couldn’t afford to buy their way out of a war they felt they had no stake in. They saw it as risking their lives to defend southern slaves, who would, in their minds, come north and only become competition for them. As it was, the Irish were already competing with former slaves in NY, whose very presence undercut the wages of working-class whites because blacks had little choice but to accept lower pay for whatever work they did.

The draft began July 11, 1863. 2 days later, mobs began assaulting blacks on the streets. They attacked a fruit vendor and a 9-year-old boy in lower Manhattan and set fire to a colored orphanage in Midtown. They attacked white women married to colored men and burned boardinghouses and tenements where colored people lived, stripping the clothes off the white property owners. They dragged a black coachman out of his home, hanged him from a lamppost, and then dragged the body through the streets by the genitals.

In 5 days of rioting, anti-war mobs lynched 11 black men and drove the colony of former slaves in lower Manhattan into a continual search for housing. Black residents moved steadily north from one un-established and unsavory neighborhood to the next, from lower Manhattan to Greenwich Village to the coldwater flats of the Tenderloin and finally to pockets of upper Manhattan, in the emerging district known as Harlem.

By the late 19th century, Harlem was no longer isolated farmland but, due to the rise in immigration from E & S Europe, was now a fashionable district of middle-class Germans, Russians, Jews, and Irish living in recently-build brownstones on broad blvds and of newly arrived Italians living in the more working-class outskirts of E. Harlem.

As a stream of colored people trudged north from other parts of Manhattan and from the countryside of the South, the Italians and Jews ceded much of Harlem to the new arrivals in the early decades of the 20th century for the greener hamlets of Westchester, Queens, and the Bronx, or the stylish apartments on Riverside Dr.

By 1930, some 165k colored people were living in Harlem, packed so densely that some tenants had to sleep in shifts — ‘as soon as one person awoke and left, his bed was taken over by another,’ historian Gilber Osofsky wrote. Harlem had become majority black.”

“The arrival of colored migrants set off remarkable displays of hostility, ranging from organized threats against white property owners who might sell or rent to blacks to firebombing of houses before the new colored owners could even move in.

White Harlemites banded together into committees to fight what they openly called a ‘growing menace, an ‘invasion’ of ‘black hordes,’ and a ‘common enemy,’ using ‘the language of war.’ They formed orgs like the Save-Harlem Committee and the Harlem Property Owners Improvement Corp to protect against ‘the greatest problem Harlem has had to face.’

Panicked property owners drafted restrictive covenants in which they swore not to let colored people into their properties for 15 years or ‘till when it was thought this situation...will have run its course.’ Some covenants covered entire blocks and went so far as to limit the number of colored janitors, bellboys, butlers, maids, and cooks to be employed in a Harlem home or business. White leaders tried to segregate churches, restaurants, and theaters, the Lafayette Theater on 7th Av permitting colored people to sit only in the balcony, no different from Mississippi.”

“In the end, none of these things worked, not because anti-black forces gave up or grew more tolerant, but because of the more fluid culture and economics of the North — the desire of whites to sell or rent to whomever they chose whether for profit or out of fear, necessity, or self-interest, or the temptation of higher rents that could be extracted from colored tenants with few other places to go.

Just as significantly, these things didn’t work because of what might be called the dispassion of the indifferent. The silent majority of whites could be frightened into lockstep solidarity in the authoritarian South but couldn’t be controlled or willed into submission in the cacophonous big cities of the North.

The Great Migration forced Harlem property owners to make a choice. They could try to maintain a whites-only policy in a market being deserted by whites and lose everything, or they could take advantage of the rising black demand and ‘rent to colored people at higher prices and survive,’ Osofsky wrote. Most were pragmatic and did the latter.

The flood of colored migrants soon broke down the last of the racial levees in Harlem, and signs went up all over the place, alerting people to the opening up of the market.”

A By-Product of Integration

“‘I told you I wasn’t going to let no n****er doctor examine me.’

Robert was beside himself. There were many things one could say about the South, but he’d never experienced rejection by patients of his own kind and hadn’t anticipated such a thing in this new place. Colored doctors in the South were revered because there were so few of them and because they were the only ones who could be counted on to go into the country to tend to colored people. They were greeted like Union soldiers come to free the slaves. Because of the great chasm between blacks and whites, colored doctors also had a virtual monopoly on colored patients.

He realized he’d entered a more complicated universe than he’d imagined. Colored people in CA didn’t have to go to colored doctors if they didn’t want to. They had choices colored people in the South couldn’t dream of. To make matters worse for a colored doctor new in town, the very system that instilled privilege and superiority in southern whites also instilled a sense of inferiority in their colored workers, and when the latter got the chance to get all that had been denied them, some sought out whatever they were convinced was superior — and thus white.

In that one exchange, Robert experienced a by-product of integration that would affect nearly every black business and institution when the doors of segregation flung open — rejection by a black customer base for the wide-open new world. It didn’t take Robert long to realize that he’d have to work doubly hard to win over his own people and get any patients at all.”

Migrants v. Native-Born Northern Blacks

“Overall, southern migrants represented the most educated segment of the southern black population they left, sociologist Stewart Tolnay wrote. In 1940 and 1950, colored people who left the South ‘averaged nearly 2 more years of completed schooling than those who remained in the South.’ That middle wave of migrants found themselves, on average, more than 2 years behind the blacks they encountered in the North.

But by the 50s, those numbers would change. As the Migration matured, the migrants would arrive with higher levels of education than earlier waves of migrants and thus greater employment potential than both the blacks they left behind and the blacks they joined. A 1965 study of 94 migrants to Chicago, most from MS and AK, found that 13% were illiterate (defined as having 5 or fewer years of schooling), compared to 45% of the people in the southern counties they came from. The migrants and the blacks they encountered in the poor west side neighborhood of N. Lawndale had roughly the same amount of schooling — an average of about 8 years. ‘There’s no support,’ sociologist Frank Cherry wrote, for the notion of ‘a less well-educated’ pool of migrants entering Chicago ‘than it already has.’

A seminal study that would be published that same year went even further. Across the North as a whole, the post-WWII migrants ‘were not of lower average socioeconomic status than the resident Negro population,’ the Taeubers wrote in their analysis of migrants arriving north from 1955 to 1960. ‘Indeed, in educational attainment, Negro in-migrants to northern cities were equal or slightly higher than the resident white population.”

“By the time Ida Mae and her family arrived, Chicago was a major terminus of the Great Migration of colored people out of the South and of latter-day immigrants from C. & E. Europe. It had first been settled in 1779 by a black man named Jean Baptiste Point DuSable in what was then wilderness. He was a fur trader who built a ‘rude cabin on the sandpoint at the mouth of the river.’

Conditions in the North

Ida Mae found the living conditions not much better than those back home and, in some cases, worse. ‘A few goats and the occasional pig’ roamed alleyways that reeked of rotting vermin. Front doors hung on single hinges. The sun peeked through cracks on the outer walls. Many rooms sat airless and windowless, packed with so many people that some roomers had to sleep in shifts, all of which made a mockery of city codes devised to protect against these very things.

‘Families lived without light, without heat, and sometimes without water,’ observed Edith Abbott, who studied tenement life in the 30s, the time when Ida Mae arrived. ‘The misery of housing conditions at this time can scarcely be exaggerated.’

They were living in virtual slave cabins stacked on top of one another, wives, like Ida Mae, cooking on hot plates and hanging their laundry out the window, if they had a window at all, unable to protect themselves or their children from the screams and conversation and sugar talk and fighting all around them. It was as if all of them were living in 1 room without space for their own thoughts or for their dreams of how best to get out.

Ida Mae soon discovered that there really was no getting out, not right off anyway. ‘Negro migrants confronted a solid wall of prejudice and labored under great disadvantage in these attempts to find new homes,’ Abbott wrote. The color line in Chicago confined them to a sliver of the least desirable blocks between the Jewish lakefront neighborhoods and the Irish strongholds to the west, while the Poles, Russians, Italians, Lithuanians, Czechs, and Serbs, who had only recently arrived themselves, were planting themselves in the SW of the colored district.

With several thousand black southerners arriving each month in the receiving cities of the North and no extra room being made for them, ‘attics and cellars, store-rooms and basements, churches, sheds and warehouses,’ according to Abraham Epstein, were converted to contain all of the new arrivals. There was ‘rarely a place in these rooms for even suitcases or trunks.’

People like Ida Mae had few options, and the landlords knew it. New arrivals often paid twice the rent charged the whites they’d just replaced for worn-out and ill-kept housing. ‘The rents in the South Side Negro district were conspicuously the highest of all the districts visited,’ Abbott wrote. Dwellings that went for $8-$20/month to white families were bringing $12-$45/month from black families, those earning the least income and thus least able to afford a flat at any rent, in the early stages of the Migration. Thus began a pattern of overcharging and underinvestment in black neighborhoods that would lay the foundation for decades of economic disparities in the urban North.”

“[Chicago] was still recovering from the tensions of one of the worst race riots in American history. The riots had set the city on edge and hardened race lines that would persist for generations.

The trouble began after an incident only blocks from the 3-flat at 36th & Wabash where Ida Mae’s family would live exactly 2 decades later. It was the summer of 1919. WWI, the stimulus of the first wave of the Great Migration, was over. Munitions plants had shut down, the factories that lured black southerners were now letting workers go, the country was on the verge of recession, not even able to imagine the actual Depression that was brewing. The migrants, hemmed in and living on top of one another, even as more of them arrived, pressed against the white neighborhoods on their borders and were met with death threats and bombings when they ventured to the other side.

The demilitarized zone was a moving target that no one could see but everyone knew in his bones. Blacks were finding more things off-limits than it would otherwise appear, defined by custom and whites’ discomfort rather than by law. Even the beaches of Lake Michigan were segregated. Everyone was feeling the strain of a declining economy. Whites saw the migrants as competition for a scarcer pool of jobs and took to attacking them along the western boundary of the black belt.

Then on Sunday, July 27, 1919, a 17-year-old black boy named Eugene Williams, swimming along the shore, drifted past an invisible line in the lake to the white side of the 29th St. beach.

As was common in the North, there were no white or colored signs. It was merely understood that whites entered and used the beach at 29th St and blacks were to stay near the 27th St entrance 2 blocks north. The imaginary color line stretched out into the water. Swimming as he was, the boy couldn’t see the line where the white water began because the water looked the same.

Carl Sandburg recounted: ‘A colored boy swam across an imaginary segregation line. White boys threw rocks at him and knocked him off a raft. He was drowned.’

Blacks demanded that the white police officer on the scene arrest the whites they said had hurled rocks at Williams. The officer refused, arresting, instead, a black man in the crowd ‘on a white man’s complaint.’

Within hours, tensions reached a boil on both sides, and a riot was in full cry. Whites dragged black passengers from streetcars and beat them. Blacks stabbed a white peddler and a white laundryman to death. 2 white men were killed walking through a black neighborhood, and 2 black men were killed walking through a white neighborhood. White gangs stormed the black belt, setting houses on fire, hunting down black residents, firing shotguns, and hurling bricks.

All told, the riots coursed through the south and SW sides of the city for 13 days, killing 38 people (23 blacks and 15 whites) and injuring 537 others (342 blacks, 178 whites, the rest unrecorded) and not ending until a state militia subsided them.”

“Riots were often carried out by disaffected whites against groups perceived as threats to their survival. Thus riots would become to the North what lynchings were to the South, each a display of uncontained rage by put-upon people directed toward the scapegoats of their condition. Nearly every big northern city experienced one or more during the 20th century.

Each outbreak pitted 2 groups that had more in common with each other than either of them realized. Both sides were made up of rural and small-town people who had traveled far in search of the American Dream, both relegated to the worst jobs by industrialists who pitted one group against the other. Each side was struggling to raise its families in a cold, fast, alien place far from their homelands and looked down upon by the earlier, more sophisticated arrivals. They were essentially the same people except for the color of their skin, and many of them arrived into these anonymous receiving stations at around the same time, one set against the other and unable to see the commonality of their mutual plight.

Thus these violent clashes bore the futility of Greek tragedy. Yet the situation was even more complicated than the black migrants could’ve imagined. As they made their way north, so did some of the poorer whites from the South, looking not for freedom from persecution but for greater economic rewards for their hard work. Slavery and sharecropping, along with the ravages of the boll weevil and floods, had depressed the wages of every worker in the South. The call of the North drew some of the southern whites the migrants had sought to escape.

Initially, they came to the North in greater numbers, but they were much more likely to return south than colored southerners were — fewer than half of all white southerners who left actually stayed in the North for good, thus behaving more like classic migrant workers than immigrants. Still, many brought their prejudices with them and melted into the white working-class world of ethnic immigrants to make a potent advance guard against black inroads in the North.

As a window into their sentiments, a witness to the Detroit riots in 1943 gave this description of a white mob that had attacked colored people in that outbreak. ‘By the conversation of the men gathered there, I was able to detect that they were Southerners and that they resented Negroes working beside them and receiving the same amount of money,’ the informant said, adding that these southern whites believed that the black migrants ‘ought to be ‘taken down a peg or two.’’”

“Beginning in WWI, as many as 7k people were estimated to be living in a single block in Harlem. The crush of people begging for space forced rents even higher in what became a landlord’s paradise. Cash-strapped renters looked for new ways to make their rent. They began throwing end-of-month parties, ‘where they drank bathtub gin, ate pig knuckles and danced with the lights off,’ as Arna Bontemps wrote. They called them rent parties. They charged 25 cents admission for a few hours of smoke-hazed, gin-juiced, tom-tom caterwauling and poker playing with people from back home and with worldly-wise northerners they didn’t know just to help make that month’s rent.”

“[New arrival from the South] Win got ready for bed and then started calling for his brother.

‘Come help me,’ Win said. ‘I can’t blow this light out.’

George found him standing by the bulb. Win had been blowing on the bulb until he was almost out of breath.”

The Railways

“That day after the train left the station in SC, he began to notice the sound of a slow drip hitting the floor of the railcar and the streets below. He looked up and saw that it was coming from a bag up on the luggage rack. Whatever the liquid was, it was red and looked to be blood, and as he got closer he discovered that it was in fact blood dripping out.

‘They must’ve just killed a hog or something, cut him up and put him in the bag,’ George said. ‘I keep hearing something dripping, and I look up, and here’s this bag with blood just ‘drippin’ all out of this bag. They done butchered up somebody’s chicken or hog and had him in the bag. They must’ve done it on the way to the train, and they didn’t get rid of all the blood, they were still draining in the bag rack.’

George was used to people bringing all kinds of things, live chickens and rabbits, a whole side of a pig. But this was the first time someone brought something they hadn’t even finished butchering. George took the bag and sat it on the floor. He wiped it down and mopped up the blood that had dripped from it. He never did see whose bag it was or what kind of animal was inside it, given all he had to do attending to the train and the other customers. And no passenger claimed the bloody bag for the duration of the trip. In the commotion of arrival at one of the stations up north, the bag just disappeared into the disembarking crowd, its owner having claimed it anonymously.”

Voting

“In 1940, Ida Mae’s new home was a deeply divided swing state, and this was among the tightest of races. It turned out for Roosevelt that it was a good thing the migrants had come. The ballots cast by Ida Mae and other colored migrants up from the South were enough to help give Roosevelt the 2% margin of victory he needed to carry Illinois and, by extension, the US — to return him to the White House.”

Employment

“Somehow the migrants persisted, partly because they had little choice and could only hope that open-minded whites might see past the preconceptions. A Chicago laundry, for instance, reported that when it hired its first colored girl, ‘the white girls threatened to quit. The manager asked them to wait a weekend and, if they still objected, he would let her go.’ As it turned out, the white girls grew to like the colored girl, and she was permitted to stay.

“There emerged several classes of domestics. Those on the lower rung resorted to ‘slave markets’ where colored women gathered on street corners from as early as 6 in the am and waited for white housewives from the Bronx and Brooklyn or from Hyde Park or Pill Hill in Chicago to bid on them for as little as 15 cents an hour.

25 such markets were active in NYC alone by 1940. One was by a five-and-dime in the Bronx, where the lowliest women from Harlem sat on crates waiting to be picked. Another was a few blocks north, the waiting women a little better clothed and slightly less desperate, knowing that the Bronx housewives had to pass them first before getting to the other market. In Chicago, there was a crowded market at 12th and Halsted, where colored women jockeyed over the white housewives who were looking them over, the whole enterprise having the effect of bidding down the colored domestics’ wages. One woman at the Chicago slave market reported making 50 cents a day, what she would’ve made picking cotton in the field.

If she were desperate enough, a colored woman needing work would just show up in a white neighborhood, the wealthier the better, and simply walk down the street. ‘Someone would invariably call out the window,’ wrote sociologist Barbara Clegg Gray, and hire the woman on the spot to clean the toilets or scrub the floors or whatever the housewife discovered she needed for maybe a dollar or two.

In LA, due to the ‘great hordes of jobless domestics, white families in one of the wealthiest cities in the country could hire colored domestics for as little as $5/week,’ in the 30s. For that sum, families got someone who would work 10–12 hours a day doing anything from washing dishes and clothes to cooking and scrubbing floors for not much more than she could’ve made picking cotton back in Texas.

One colored woman in LA said she thought getting her high school diploma would make a difference. She kept trying to find different work. Jobs on assembly lines, running elevators, clerking in stores, filing in offices, were typical jobs open to unskilled women in those days. ‘But everywhere I went,’ she said, ‘they wanted to keep me working as a domestic.’

The randomness of this kind of work, hiring oneself out to total strangers with no standards in duties or wages, opened domestics up to all kinds of exploitation for very little pay. They could never know for sure what they would be asked to do, how long they would be expected to do it, or if they would be paid what was promised.

It seemed everyone was trying to wring the most out of whatever they had, some white housewives even turning back the hands of the clock to keep from paying a domestic for all the hours she actually worked. Older domestics took to forewarning the new ones to take their own clock to work with them and to prepare for any indignity. One housewife ordered a domestic to eat her lunch out of the pet’s bowl, not wanting the help to eat from the same dishes as the family.

In many cases, the housewives were neither accustomed to hired help nor familiar with colored people, harboring assumptions and prejudices of the day due to lack of exposure. The housewives and their domestics brought differing expectations, and frequently each side felt somehow aggrieved. While an employer could go out and hire someone else, some employees, having no legal recourse, took their frustrations out on their madames’ homes when not paid or otherwise exploited, slashing the draperies they’d just ironed or defacing the floors they’d scrubbed.

Aside from these sources of friction, colored domestics couldn’t know what perils they might face from opportunistic sons or husbands assuming that young domestics would do more than just clean. As it was, the very act of walking the streets for work came awfully close in appearance to how prostitutes plied their trade — except that the domestics were working at the whim of Janes rather than Johns.

The expectation that any colored woman walking in the white section of town was available to scrub floors and wash windows would continue into the 60s, such that a colored professional woman appearing in a white neighborhood in the North had to be prepared to be called out to just because she was black. ‘Say, girl,’ a woman called out to my mother in the late 50s when she was on her way, in her tailored suit and heels, to decorate and fit slip covers in a wealthy DC neighborhood, ‘Could you come up here and clean my bathroom?’

‘I’m looking for someone to clean mine,’ my mother yelled back to the woman.”

Lynching

“Between 1882 and 1930, vigilantes in FL lynched 266 black people, more than any other state.”

Housing

“Some neighborhood groups went so far as to buy up properties themselves, ‘even at a financial loss, to prevent blacks from moving in,’ wrote historian Josh Sides.

But the LA suburb of Pacoima got especially creative when a black government worker named Emory Holmes moved in with his family in 1959. The neighbors put their heads together and decided to make calls to every business posing as Holmes or his wife. The first week in the neighborhood, the Holmeses were flooded at odd times of the day with visits from ‘a life insurance sales rep, a milk delivery service, a drinking water company, 3 repair services, several taxis, an undertaker, a newspaper carrier, a vet, a sink repair service, an exterminator, a pool installer,’ Sides wrote. Finally, the neighbors threw rocks through the windows and spray-painted their garage: BLACK CANCER IS HERE. DON’T LET IT SPREAD!”

“With close to half a million colored people overflowing the black belt by 1950, racial walls that had been ‘successfully defended for a generation,’ in the words of historian Allan Spear, were facing imminent collapse, but not without a fight. Chicago found itself in the midst of ‘chaotic urban guerilla warfare’ that rivaled the city’s violent spasms at the start of the Migration, ‘when 1 racially motivated bombing or arson occurred every 20 days,’ according to historian Arnold Hirsch.”

“Harvey Clark was from MS and brought his family to Chicago in 1949 after serving in WWII. Now that they were in the big city, the couple and their 2 children were crammed into half of a 2BD apt. A family of 5 lived in the other half. Harvey was paying $56/month for the privilege, up to 50% more than tenants in white neighborhoods paid for the same amount of space. One-room tenement life didn’t suit them at all. The husband and wife were college-educate, well-mannered, and looked like movie stars. The father had saved up for a piano for his 8-year-old daughter with the ringlets down her back but had no place to put it. He had high aspirations for their 6-year-old son who was bright and whose dimples could’ve landed him in cereal commercials.

The Clarks felt they had to get out. By May 1951, they finally found the perfect apt. It had 5 rooms, was clean and modern, was closer to the bus terminal, and cost only $60/month, $4 more for 5x the space. It was just a block over the Chicago line in the working-class suburb of Cicero. The Clarks couldn’t believe their good fortune.

Cicero was an all-white town on the SW border of Chicago filled with first- and second-generation immigrants — Czechs, Slavs, Poles, Italians. Some had fled fascism and Stalinism, not unlike blacks fleeing oppression in the South, and were still getting established in the New World. They lived in frame cottages and worked for the factories and slaughterhouses. They were miles from the black belt, isolated from it, and bent on keeping their town as it was.

That the Clarks turned there at all was an indication of how closed the options were for colored families looking for clean, spacious housing they could afford. The Clarks set the move-in date for the third week of June. The moving truck arrived at 2:30pm. White protesters met them as the couple tried to unload the truck.

‘Get out of Cicero,’ the protesters told them, ‘and don’t come back.’

As the Clarks started to enter the building, the police stopped them at the door. The police took sides with the protesters and wouldn’t let the Clarks nor their furniture in.

‘You should know better,’ the chief of police told them. ‘Get going. Get out of here fast. There will be no moving in that building.’

The Clarks, along with their rental agent, fled the scene.

‘Don’t come back into town,’ the chief reportedly told the agent, ‘or you’ll get a bullet through you.

The Clarks didn’t let that deter them but sued and won the right to occupy the apartment. They tried to move in again on July 11, 1951. This time, 100 Cicero housewives and grandmothers in swing coats had showed up to heckle them. The couple managed to get their furniture in, but as the day wore on, the crowds grew larger and more agitated. A man from a white supremacy group handed out flyers that said, KEEP CICERO WHITE. The Clarks fled.

A mob stormed the apartment and threw the family’s furniture out of a third-floor window as the crowds cheered below. The neighbors burned the couple’s marriage license and the children’s baby pictures. They overturned the fridge and tore the stove and plumbing fixtures out of the wall. They tore up the carpet. They shattered the mirrors. They bashed in the toilet bowl. They ripped out the radiators. They smashed the piano Clark had worked overtime to buy for his daughter. And when they were done, they set the whole pile of the family’s belongings, now strewn on the ground below, on fire.

In an hour, the mob ‘destroyed what had taken 9 years to acquire,’ wrote historian Stephen Meyer.

The next day, a full-out riot was under way. The mob grew to 4k by early evening as teens got out of school, husbands returned from work, and all of them joined the housewives who had kept a daylong vigil in protest of the Clarks’ arrival. They chanted, ‘Go, go, go, go.’ They hurled rocks and bricks. They looted. Then they firebombed the whole building. The bombing gutted the 20-unit building and forced even the white tenants out. The rioters overturned police cars and threw stones at the firefighters who were trying to pot out the blaze.

Governor Adlai Stevenson had to call in the National Guard, the first time the Guard had been summoned for a racial incident since the 1919 riots. It took 4 hours for 6,000+ guardsmen, police officers, and deputies to beat back the mob that night and 3 more days for the rioting over the Clarks to subside. A total of 118 men were arrested in the riot. A Cook Co grand jury failed to indict any of the rioters.

Town officials didn’t blame the mob for the riot but rather the people who, in their view, should never have rented the apartment to the Clarks in the first place. To make an example of such people, indictments were handed down against the rental agent, the owner of the building, and others who’d helped the Clarks on charges of inciting a riot. The indictments were later dropped.”

“Well into the 20th century, Cicero would remain synonymous with intolerance and corruption. It would come to be seen in the same light as other symbolic places where many blacks dared not think of living and thought twice before even driving through, well into the 90s. By then Cicero was racked by a series of scandals involving a mayor who would ultimately serve prison time on federal corruption charges. Even white immigrant families were leaving Cicero, ceding it to Mexican immigrants. In 2000, just 1% of its residents were black, nearly half a century after the riots that had kept the Clarks from moving in.”

“It was an article of faith among many people in Chicago and other big cities that the arrival of colored people in an all-white neighborhood automatically lowered property values. That economic fear was helping propel the violent defense of white neighborhoods.

The fears weren’t unfounded, but often not for the reason white residents were led to believe, sociologists, economists, and historians have found. And the misunderstanding of the larger forces at work and the scapegoating of colored migrants, those with the least power of all, made the violence all the more tragic.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the decline in property values and neighborhood prestige was a by-product of the fear and tension itself, sociologists found, The decline often began, they noted, in barely perceptible ways, before the first colored buyer moved in.

The instability of a white neighborhood under pressure from the very possibility of integration put the neighborhood into a kind of real estate purgatory. It set off a downward cycle of anticipation in which worried whites no longer bought homes in white neighborhoods that might one day attract colored residents even if none lived there at the time. Rents and purchase prices were dropped ‘in a futile attempt to attract white residents,’ as Hirsch put it. With prices falling and the neighborhood’s future uncertain, leaders refused to grant mortgages or made them more difficult to obtain. Panicked whites sold at low prices to salvage what equity they had left, giving the homeowners who remained little incentive to invest any further to keep up or improve their properties.

Thus many white neighborhoods began declining before colored residents even arrived. There emerged a perfect storm of nervous owners, falling prices, vacancies unfillable with white tenants or buyers, and a market of colored buyers who may not have been able to afford the neighborhoods at first but now could with prices within their reach. The arrival of colored home buyers was often the final verdict on a neighborhood’s falling property value rather than the cause of it. Many colored people, already facing wage disparities, either couldn’t have afforded a neighborhood on the rise or wouldn’t have been granted mortgages except by lenders and sellers with their backs against the wall. It was the falling home values that made it possible for colored people to move in at all.

The downward spiral created a vacuum that spectators could exploit for their own gain. They could scoop up properties in potentially unstable white neighborhoods and extract higher rents from colored people who were anxious to get in and were accustomed to being overcharged in the black belt.”

“By the end of the 20th century, blacks would make up more than 80% of the population of Detroit. Just across the Ford Expressway, the black population of the suburb of Dearborn was 1%.”

“After months of buildup, King went to march against housing segregation in a neighborhood called Marquette Park on the city’s SW side, 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 4,000 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. 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 1,200 police officers and 200 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 800 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 300 jeering white teens sat in the middle of the street to block the marchers’ path. The police dispersed the youth with nightsticks waving, and the march was able to resume. But the teens 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, 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 30 people were injured and 40 were arrested.

Some of King’s aides had warned him not to go. 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 AL but was unprepared for what he was in for in Chicago. ‘I have seen many demonstrations in the South,’ he said that violent day. ‘But I’ve never seen anything so hostile and hateful as I’ve seen here today.’”

The New Underground Railroad

“One of the most desperate souls was a perfectly well man named Arrington High, who’d been consigned to the MS State Hospital for the Insane for protesting the southern order of things. The hospital and its 100 or so outbuildings, originally called the MS Lunatic Asylum, took up some 3,000 isolated acres in the pine woods SE of Jackson, in a place called Whitfield. From the time it opened in 1935, anyone saying, ‘They took him to Whitfield,’ meant nobody ever expected to see the person again.

What got High in trouble was a weekly paper he published that argued for integration. He’d been editor of a 2-page mimeographed broadside, the Eagle Eye, for some 14 years and had made a name for himself protesting the treatment of colored people in C. MS. What got him declared insane, however, was exposing the segregationalists who were consorting with prostitutes at a colored brothel that catered only to white politicians. It was a death wish of a crusade that actually may have fit the legal definition of insanity for a colored man in MS at the time.

High was taken into custody and committed to the insane asylum in Oct 1957. It was a sentence that would shut him off, at age 47, from the rest of the world and his wife and 4 children for the remainder of his life. He was held in confinement deep in the woods, surrounded by guards and hospital personnel, a good 15 miles from the nearest city. It amounted to a total silencing of a revered dissident of the MS order of things and a slow death in a crazy place where he’d be subjected to whatever indignities his keepers devised.”

“The asylum put patients to work in the dairy and truck farms and the orchards run by the state. Some of the patients had to be up at dawn to work the farms. High got up at 5am on 2/7/1958, a Friday, to milk the cows, one of his chores.

It was still dark outside, and instead of heading to pasture, he scurried down a deserted path on the hospital grounds and came upon a row of cars that were parked on the side of a quiet stretch of road.

A door in the second car opened, and he got inside the only car with a colored driver. That car and the 4 other cars, driven by white men, inched their way to the exit so as to not kick up any dust or engine noise. There, the white man driving the lead car in the caravan motioned to the hospital guard at the front gate. The guard waved the processional through.

High was out of the asylum but not out of danger. The motorcade took the highway, careful not to drive too fast or too slow as to attract attention. They drove 105 miles to the Alabama line. It would take them 2+ hours to get there, and they had to watch for cars tailing them and sheriffs hunting them, as surely by now the asylum officials knew that High had gone missing.

At the AL line, the drivers took no chances. They didn’t cross the state border themselves with their MS license plates. Instead, they took High to the state line and instructed him to get out of the car and walk over into AL. There a caravan of 5 other cars, all with AL plates, were waiting for him. As before, there were 4 white drivers and 1 colored driver. The caravan would attract less attention if 2 colored men were driving together than it would if High were riding with a white man.

He was in AL, but still not safe. He was still in the South and within siren call of any MS sheriff. The cars took him to a predetermined location. There waiting for him was a pine coffin. He was told to get inside. The coffin had breathing holes in it for him to get air. The men sealed him in the coffin and loaded it onto a hearse. On top of the coffin, the men placed a load of flowers so that it would appear that the coffin had just been driven from a funeral.

The hearse drove to the railway station, where the coffin was loaded on a train bound for Chicago. He lay still and quiet, unable to turn over or adjust himself for the 15-hour ride.

The moment the train pulled out of the station in AL bearing High’s coffin, Dr. Howard, waiting word in Chicago, got a long-distance call.

‘The Eagle has flown the coop,’ the voice on the line said.”

“The morning of March 29, 1849, the friend carried the box, with Brown folded inside with a few small biscuits to the express office. There, it was later placed upside down, which left Brown sitting on his head, even though the box explicitly said, THIS SIDE UP WITH CARE. From the express office, the box went to the train depot and ‘tumbled roughly into the baggage car’ where it happened to fall right side up, only to be put on a steamboat upside down again and left that way for closer to 2 hours.

Brown was in agony but dared not moan. He waited for death and prayed. Then he heard the men say, ‘We have been here 2 hours and traveled 20 miles. Let us sit down and rest ourselves.’ In so doing, the men happened to turn the box over.

The box then arrived at the depot in DC. There he heard a voice say, ‘There’s no room for this box. It will have to remain behind.’

Brown, stiff and contorted and now fearful, had to keep silent. He felt a man’s hands reach for the box and squeeze it onto the railcar, his head pointing down again, until someone righted it at the next stop. He arrived in Philly at 3 in the morning. He’d been doubled up in the box for 26 hours.

Before daylight, a wagon drove up and a white man got out and inquired about the box. He carried it to an office. Several abolitionists had gathered to witness the opening of the parcel.

They locked the door behind them. But once the box was placed before them, the men seemed afraid to open it. Finally one said, ‘Let us rap upon the box and see if he’s alive.’

‘Is all right within?’ the voice asked, trembling.

‘All right,’ Brown replied.

The people were joyful. And Brown was free. He’d go on to Boston, which was judged to be safer, and for the rest of his life he’d go by the name of Henry Box Brown, in light of how he gained his freedom.”

“How many people fled the South this way during the Great Migration is impossible to know, due to the very nature of the mission. For the operation to work, it required the highest level of secrecy, coordination and planning worthy of the Secret Service, the active and willing participation of sympathetic white southerners, the cooperation of funeral homes in both the departure and receiving states, the complete trust of the person being ferried out by friends and loved ones willing to put themselves in danger to save a single soul, and a good measure of courage and faith on everyone’s part.

It would appear from the precision of the Arrington High escape that this wasn’t the first time the people involved in its execution had carried out an operation such as this. To this day, many funeral directors refuse to discuss the matter, admit their involvement, or bring unwanted attention to it — in case, it would seem, it might need to be used again.”

Homecoming

“At holidays and in summer, the migrants came home. They had prepared all year for this moment of glory, and there were times when in some church parking lots in Grenada or Greenville, there were more Illinois license plates than those from MS.

They’d gone off to a new world but were still tied to the other. Over time, the language of geographic origin began to change; the ancestral home no longer the distant Africa of unknown forebears but the more immediate South of uncles and grandparents, where the culture they carried inside them was pure and familiar.

The homesick migrants loaded up their sleepy children in the dark hours of the morning for the long drive to the mother country when there was a death in the family or a loved one needing tending or just to show off how well they were making out up north. When they saw the cold airs of the New World seeping into their northern-bred children, they sent them south for the summer so the children would know where they came from. The migrants warned their children to be on their best behavior, especially when it came to white people they might encounter.

But the children didn’t have the internalized deference of their southern cousins. They got into scrapes with the other children and couldn’t remember all the rules. One migrant’s son, Emmett Till, on a visit from Chicago to MS in 1955, was killed for breaking protocol in some way that will probably never be known for sure, except that everyone agreed it involved something he’d said to a white woman, which only served to remind those who left of the rightness of their decision and those who stayed how foolhardy it could be to forget for a moment where you were when you crossed into the very different country of the South.”

Conclusion

“When, in 1996, a young lawyer and community activist from Hyde Park ran for the IL State Senate seat in District 13, Ida Mae, voting her usual straight Democratic ticket, would become among the first people ever to have voted for the man.”

“On August 14, 1997, Barack Obama makes an appearance. He is introduced as the state senator for the district, which not everyone in the room could be expected to know, as he has only been in office since January He’s tall, slight of build, formal in speech and attire, looks like a college student, and arrives without lights, camera, or entourage.

He stands before them and gives a minilecture to those these bus drivers, secretaries, nurse’s aides, and pensioners about what state legislators do. He says that while the state legislature isn’t responsible for the police department, it passes laws that the police have to enforce. He describes the role of the legislators in education policy and in healthcare. And he invites the assembled to call his office anytime.

Ida Mae and the rest listen politely and with appreciation. But, as this is just another meeting, they sit in anticipation of the reason they’re here tonight: the discussion with police about the latest shootings, stabbings, and drug deals, the immediate dangers they’ll face just getting back home.

That night, as Obama bounded up the steps and out of the church basement, nobody in the room could’ve imagined that they’d just seen the man who, a decade from now, would become the first black president.”