The Warmth of Other Suns (90 page)

P
ART
I: I
N THE
L
AND OF THE
F
OREFATHERS

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

L
EAVING

  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.

T
HE
G
REAT
M
IGRATION
, 1915–1970

  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.