The Warmth of Other Suns (104 page)

Joella Burton

Madison James Foster II

Faroker Johnson

Clara Poe

B. D. Robinson

Rosalie Taylor

Florence Todd

Clyde Walker

Marcelle Barr

Doretta Boston

Gilbert Elie

Aubrey Enochs

Gloria Enochs

Jessie Gladney

Isolena Harris

David McIntosh

George Swanson Starling

Dees Abraham

Nathaniel M. Baker

Maxie Broughton

Bennie Brown

Gary Byrd

Franklin Caldwell

John Carter

Christine Chambers

Virginia DeBreaux Hall

Petite Bell Hammond

Reverend Henry V. Harrison

James Hobbs

Clarence Jerrell

Julia Johnson

Gardenia Joyner

Aurilla Moore

Ulysses Morris

Amjad “Kenny” Mujaahid

Onie Bell Carter Norwood

Donald Payne

Delphine Smith Peterman

Henry Roberts

Ruth Rudder

Jerry Ward

Robert K. Watts

Monifa White

Manier E. Webber

Eva Mae Williams

Richard Jarvis Enochs

Jerome Hervey

Freddie Knox

Manley Thomas

P
ARTIAL LIST OF ORGANIZATIONS THAT OFFERED SUPPORT AND ACCESS TO MIGRANTS

Betty Hill Recreation Center, Senior Line Dancing

East Texas Club of Los Angeles

Estelle Van Meter Senior Center

Grambling Alumni Association, Los Angeles

Independent Square Senior Center

Jefferson Council

Jim Gilliam Senior Center

Lake Charles, Louisiana, Club

LA–LA (Louisiana to Los Angeles), Inc.

Monroe, Louisiana, Club

Mount Carmel Senior Center

People Coordinated Services

St. Andrew’s Senior Group

St. Bernadette Senior Center

Slauson Senior Recreation Center

Theresa Lindsay Senior Center

Vineyard Recreation Senior Center

Watts Senior Center

Xavier College Alumni Club of Los Angeles

Gethsemane Baptist Church, Eustis

NAACP, South Brevard Chapter

National Funeral Directors and Morticians Association

Ada S. Niles Senior Center

African-American Police League

Afro-American Genealogical and Historical Society of Chicago

AFSCME, Chicago District Council

Atlas Senior Center, Chicago Area Agency on Aging

Bethel Terrace Senior Center

Brookhaven, Mississippi, Club

Carter Funeral Home

Chicago Housing Authority Senior Housing

Chicago Pensioners Club

Chicago Urban League

Chicago Usher Board

Cotton Plant, Arkansas, Club

DuSable High School

Fourth District, Beat 414, South Chicago

Greater St. John’s AME Church

Greenville, Mississippi, Club

Greenwood, Mississippi, Club

Grenada, Mississippi, Club

Happy Action Seniors, St. Joachim Church

Historic Pullman Foundation

Latney Funeral Home

Leak and Sons Funeral Home

Local 241/Chicago Transit Authority Bus Drivers Union

Metro Seniors in Action

National Alliance of Postal and Federal Employees, Chicago Branch, Retirees’ Division

Neptune Seniors

Newton, Mississippi, Club

Old Friends of Chicago

Pastors of Englewood, Seventh District

Police Beat 713, Boulevard Arts Center

Prince Hall Masonic Lodge of the State of Illinois

Senior Advisory Committee, Third District

Senior Advisory Committee, Fourth District

Senior Steppers’ Set at Mr. G’s

Tabernacle Baptist Church

Third District, Beat 312, Grand Crossing

Third District, Beat 322, Grand Crossing

Third District, Beat 323, Grand Crossing

UBA A. Philip Randolph Center

Vicksburg, Mississippi, Club

Willa Rawls Manor

WBEZ-FM

WGCI-AM

WVON-AM

African American Quilting Club, Brooklyn

Baptist House of Prayer, Harlem

Bridge Street Baptist Church, Brooklyn

Central Harlem Senior Center

First Baptist Church, Brooklyn

Lagree Baptist Church, Harlem

Metropolitan A.M.E. Church, Harlem

New York City Department of Aging

Wilson Major Morris Senior Center, Harlem

WLIB-AM

  1
I was leaving the South:
Richard Wright,
Black Boy
(New York: HarperCollins, 1993, a reissue of Wright’s autobiography, originally published in 1945 by Harper and Brothers). This passage is from a last-minute insertion in a restructuring of the book, which originally had been titled
American Hunger
. For its release in 1945, the title was changed to
Black Boy
and the second half of the book, describing Wright’s adjustment in the North, was deleted at the behest of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Wright chose to insert this passage as a compromise ending to the revised autobiography. Because this passage was not part of the original manuscript, it is not included in the text of the modern-day version. The passage instead appears in the footnotes of the 1993 reprint, p. 496.

  1
Our mattresses were made:
Mahalia Jackson with Evan McLeod Wylie,
Movin’ On Up
(New York: Hawthorn Books, 1966), pp. 22, 25.

  2
The land is first:
David L. Cohn,
God Shakes Creation
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1935), pp. 32, 33.

  3
They fly from the land:
W. H. Stillwell, “Exode,”
Chicago Inter-Ocean
, March 12, 1881. The stanza reads: “They fly from the land that bore them, as the Hebrews fled the Nile; from the heavy burthens
[sic]
o’er them; from unpaid tasks before them; from a serfdom base and vile.”

  4
A man named Roscoe Colton:
Jonathan Rosen, “Flight Patterns,”
The New York Times Magazine
, April 22, 2007, pp. 58–63.

  5
In our homes:
“The Negro Problem,”
Independent
54: 2221. The colored Alabama woman interviewed for this 1902 article requested that her name not be used, fearing retribution for expressing a desire to leave. The fear of being identified was common among southern black letter writers to the
Chicago Defender
inquiring about opportunities in the North and others discussing or considering migration. Often they explicitly pleaded that their identities not be revealed.

  6
“They left as though”:
Emmett J. Scott,
Negro Migration During the War
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1920), p. 44.

  7
Over the course:
Estimates vary for the number of blacks who left the South during the Great Migration. Some have put the number at well over six million. The historian Jeffrey S. Adler writes that “the total for the three-decade period after 1940 exceeded 4.3 million” alone. David R. Colburn and Jeffrey S. Adler, eds.,
African-American Mayors: Race, Politics, and the American City
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), p. 4. Definitions vary as to which states make up the South, with the border states of Maryland, Delaware, and the District of Columbia often included. This book uses a definition based on the states that made up the Confederacy and the definitions and perceptions of the migrants who left the South. The migrants’ decision to escape to those border regions and those states’ participation in the Civil War on the Union side suggest that politically, psychologically, and demographically they were not southern but rather part of the North to which the migrants fled. Those states had net inflows of blacks in a dramatic departure from the states the migrants perceived of as the South. The estimate, just over five and a half million, used in this book is a conservative one and derives from data compiled from Public Use Micro-data Sample (PUMS) Tapes of U.S. Census figures for out-migration of African Americans from the former Confederate states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, along with Kentucky and Oklahoma, to the former Union states that attracted the bulk of the migrants, namely, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Kansas, California, Nevada, Oregon, and the District of Columbia, along with the border states of Delaware, Maryland, and Missouri and the state of Washington, which was not admitted to the Union until after the Civil War. The number is considered to be an underestimate. “One estimate places the net under-enumeration of Negro males [alone] at about 20 per cent,” wrote the sociologists Karl E. Taeuber and Alma F. Taeuber in “The Changing Character of Negro Migration,”
The American Journal of Sociology
70, no. 4 (January 1965), p. 433.

  8
“receiving station”:
Carl Sandburg,
The Chicago Race Riots, July 1919 (
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1919), p. 60.

  9
Over time:
See Nicholas Mirkowich, “Recent Trends in Population Distribution in
California,”
Geographical Review
31, no. 2 (April 1941), pp. 300–307, for a general discussion of Gold Rush and Dust Bowl migrations.

10
for far longer:
Blacks were enslaved in this country for 244 years, from 1619 to 1863. As of 2010, they have been free for 147 years.

11
“The story of”:
Neil R. McMillen, “The Migration and Black Protest in Jim Crow Mississippi,” in
Black Exodus: The Great Migration from the American South
, ed. Alferdteen Harrison (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991), p. 81.

12
By then nearly half:
U.S. Bureau of the Census,
Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Part 1
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975), table A, pp. 177–194; 1970 State Form 2 IPUS sample. From James N. Gregory,
The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). See also Reynolds Farley and Walter Allen,
The Color Line and the Quality of Life in America
(Washington, D.C.: Russell Sage Foundation, 1987), pp. 112–13. Cited by Dernoral Davis in “Portrait of Twentieth-Century African-Americans,” in
Black Exodus
, ed. Harrison, p. 12. See also John D. Reid, “Black Urbanization of the South,”
Python
35, no. 3 (1974), p. 259, for reference to the South’s being 53 percent black in 1970, the end of the Migration.

13
“Oftentimes, just to go”:
John Dollard,
Caste and Class in a Southern Town
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1937), p. 302.

14
In Chicago alone:
U.S. Census Bureau, Census 2000 Redistricting Data (Public Law 94-171) Summary File, Table PL1. In 2000, the black population was 1,084,221 in the city of Chicago and 1,033,809 in the state of Mississippi.

15
“folk movement”:
McMillen, “The Migration and Black Protest in Jim Crow Mississippi,” p. 81.

16
Farragut:
Union naval officer David G. Farragut, who rose to admiral, led the capture of the South’s largest city during the Battle of New Orleans in April 1862.

17
ten thousand:
Allan H. Spear,
Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 209.

18
“I went to the station”:
Scott,
Negro Migration During the War
, p. 41.

19
into the words of:
Lawrence R. Rodgers,
Canaan Bound: The African-American Great Migration Novel
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), pp. x, xiii. The author notes that, among scholars, “the Great Migration, for many years, remained primarily an academic sideshow displaying only limited signs of penetrating the realm of national popular discourse and culture.” However, in the arts, the Great Migration and the resulting issues of “movement and identity have, over the entire history of published black literature, occupied the center of African American consciousness.” On p. 3, he adds, “As one of the most widely shared experiences of black America, migration, whether through force or volition, has remained a central subject of black literature and folklore.” Blyden Jackson, professor of literature emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, wrote that “no event, large or small, … has had an impact equal in mass or gavity upon the consciousness of black writers.” Blyden Jackson, “Introduction,” in
Black Exodus
, p. xv.

20
“Less has been written”:
Gregory,
The Southern Diaspora
, p. 5.

21
the language changes:
Writers navigating the language of intolerance often struggle with how to convey old attitudes and norms with the authenticity the work demands but with the grace and sensitivity required to reach current and future generations. On issues of race and ethnicity, the debate often centers on how best to describe black Americans when the names for the group change with the political fashions of the times and with the origins and intentions of the speaker regarding whatever term is at issue. Based on my many interviews with people from the era, the term “colored” was the most common word they used among themselves. This is not to say that prominent blacks of the day did not use the term “Negro,” many arguing that its capitalization bestowed greater status on a group hungry for recognition. But ordinary blacks seemed to wince at how the word could be so easily corrupted by the ruling class, coming out “nigra” instead of the more formal-sounding “Negro,” and thus they tended to use the term somewhat derisively in everyday conversation. As for the N-word itself, I have chosen to use it only where required for context, which turned out to be rarer than might be assumed. I chose to use great care out of an acknowledgment of the violence and loss of life that often accompanied its utterance. On the whole, I found that people who had most felt the sting of the word and the violence that undergirded it were less likely to use the word in casual speech than people who had never had to step off a sidewalk because of the color of their skin.

22
“Compared with northern-born”:
Stewart E. Tolnay, “The African American ‘Great Migration’ and Beyond,”
Annual Review of Sociology 29
(2003): 219.