The Warmth of Other Suns (98 page)

196
“I fought the good fight”:
Ibid., p. 147.

197
“It was like sitting around”:
Ibid., p. 120.

198
“It was like having”:
Ibid., p. 26.

199
Mahalia Jackson:
Mahalia Jackson and Evan McLeod Wylie,
Movin’ On Up
(New York: Hawthorne Books, 1966), p. 119.

200
“Shall we sacrifice”:
Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy,
Anyplace but Here
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1945), p. 176.

201
The top ten cities:
Isabel Wilkerson, “Study Finds Segregation in Cities Worse than Scientists Imagined,”
The New York Times
, August 5, 1989, an article on the findings of a five-year study of 22,000 census tracts conducted by University of Chicago sociologists Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton.

202
kept a card file:
“The Extracurricular Clout of Powerful College Presidents,”
Time
, February 11, 1966, p. 64.

203
“in addition to his widow”:
“Dr. Rufus Clement of AU Dies Here,”
New York Amsterdam News
, November 11, 1967, p. 45.

204
The evening was unusually cool:
Earl Caldwell, “Martin Luther King Is Slain in Memphis; White Is Suspected; Johnson Urges Calm: Guard Called Out; Curfew Ordered in Memphis, but Fires and Looting Erupt,”
The New York Times
, April 5, 1968, p. 1.

205
“About 74 percent”:
Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders
(New York: Bantam Books, 1968), p. 6.

T
HE
F
ULLNESS OF THE
M
IGRATION

206
And so the root:
Langston Hughes, “For Russell and Rowena Jelliffe,”
Cleveland Call and Post
, April 6, 1963, p. B1.

207
There were two sets:
Stanley Lieberson,
A Piece of the Pie: Blacks and White Immigrants Since 1880
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 32–33.

208
white immigrants:
Ibid., p. 34.

209
“called for blacks”:
Ibid., p. 35.

210
fertility rates for black women:
Ibid., pp. 193–97. See also Clyde Vernon Kiser,
Sea Island to City
(New York: AMS Press, 1967), pp. 204, 205. This study from the 1930s found that the Migration “significantly reduced” fertility rates. In New York, “twenty-four out of forty wives married 1–10 years had borne no children. Five of the fourteen married 10–20 years were childless, as were the two wives married 20–30 years.”

211
blacks were the lowest paid:
Lieberson,
A Piece of the Pie
, pp. 292–93; Gilbert Osofsky,
Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto
(New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 16. 418
“There is just no avoiding”:
Ibid., p. 369.

P
ART
V: A
FTERMATH

  1
The migrants were gradually absorbed:
St. Clair Drake and Horace H. Cayton,
Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945, reprinted 1993), p. 75.

I
N THE
P
LACES
T
HEY
L
EFT

  2
The only thing:
Lonnie G. Bunch III, “The Greatest State for the Negro: Jefferson L. Edmonds, Black Propagandist of the California Dream,” in
Seeking El Dorado: African Americans in California
, ed. Lawrence B. de Graaf, Kevin Mulroy, and Quintard Taylor (Los Angeles: Autry Museum of Western Heritage in association with University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2001), p. 132. Jefferson Lewis Edmonds was a farmer, teacher, and state legislator in Mississippi during Reconstruction. He left Mississippi for Los Angeles in 1886, shortly after an incident in which whites, fearing that a group of colored residents were about to walk into the Carrollton County courthouse, opened fire on the unarmed people, killing twenty of them. Edmonds became editor of
The Liberator
, a colored newspaper in Los Angeles.

  3
Mr. Edd, whose land:
Chickasaw County Historical and Genealogical Society,
Chickasaw County History
, vol. 2 (Dallas: Curtis Media, 1997), p. 430 on Willie Jim Linn and p. 497 on Edd Monroe Pearson.

  4
The people who had not gone:
Ibid., p. 10.

  5
“intemperate individuals”:
Ibid.

  6
“spent all their savings”:
Mark Lowry II, “Schools in Transition,”
Annals of the Association of American Geographers
63, no. 2 (June 1973): pp. 173, 178.

  7
In the meantime:
Ibid., p. 176.

  8
“My conscience told me”:
Ben Green,
Before His Time: The Untold Story of Harry T. Moore, America’s First Civil Rights Martyr
(New York: Free Press, 1999), pp. 206–7.

  9
“he dropped dead”:
Ibid., p. 207.

10
“the only public building”:
Ibid., pp. 206–8.

11
But Sheriff McCall did not:
Ibid., p. 207.

12
McCall was reelected:
Ibid., p. 208. See also Ramsey Campbell, “Lake’s Willis McCall Is Dead,”
Orlando Sentinel
, April 29, 1994, p. A1.

13
The new high school:
Contributors of Ouachita Parish: A History of Blacks to Commemorate the Bicentennial of the United States of America
(The Black Bicentennial Committee of Ouachita Parish, 1976), p. 10.

L
OSSES

14
It occurred to me:
Jacqueline Joan Johnson,
Rememory: What There Is for Us
, cited in Malaika Adero,
Up South
(New York: New Press, 1993), p. 108.

15
“one of Los Angeles’ ”:
“Rites Held for L.A. Socialite Mrs. Alice Clement Foster, 54,”
Chicago Defender
, December 17, 1974, p. 4.

M
ORE
N
ORTH AND
W
EST
T
HAN
S
OUTH

16
I could come back:
Mahalia Jackson with Evan McLeod Wiley,
Movin’ On Up
(New York: Hawthorne Books, 1966), p. 117.

17
“Platters Full of Plenty Thanks”:
An advertisement appearing in
Chicago Metro News
, November 26, 1977, p. 18.

18
“personal isolation”:
Based on an undated, registered letter written by Robert Foster to Edward Bounds, director of the U.S. Labor Department in San Francisco, as part of a workers’ compensation claim filed as a result of a dispute with the West Los Angeles Veterans Administration Medical Center in Brentwood.

A
ND
, P
ERHAPS, TO
B
LOOM

19
Most of them care nothing:
James Baldwin,
Notes of a Native Son
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 21.

T
HE
W
INTER OF
T
HEIR
L
IVES

20
That the Negro American:
Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
The Negro Family: The Case for National Action
(Washington, D.C.: United States Department of Labor, Office of Policy Planning and Research, 1965), p. 23.

21
“I know everybody”:
“Why Do You Live in Harlem? Camera Quiz,”
New York Age
, April 29, 1950.

E
PILOGUE

22
“there is not one family”:
Allen B. Ballard,
One More Day’s Journey
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984), p. 13.

23
“Masses of ignorant”:
E. Franklin Frazier,
The Negro Family in the United States
(New York: Dryden Press, 1948), p. 285. Originally published by the University of Chicago Press, 1939.

24
“in such large numbers”:
Sadie Tanner Mossell, “The Standard of Living Among One Hundred Negro Migrant Families in Philadelphia,”
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
98 (November 1921): 216.

25
better educated:
Stewart E. Tolnay, “Educational Selection in the Migration of Southern Blacks, 1880–1990,”
Social Forces
(December 1998): 489–508. “The educational differences between southern migrants and native northerners were considerably smaller than the corresponding difference between migrants and their relatives and neighbors remaining in the South,” Tolnay writes. Because a disproportionate number of educated blacks migrated out of the South, the number of years of schooling for migrants on the whole was higher than might otherwise have been expected and not far from the educational levels of blacks already in the North, a difference of one and a half years by 1950. The quality of their southern education, however, was generally considered inferior.

26
“The Southerners had their eye”:
Allen B. Ballard,
One More Day’s Journey
(New York: McGraw Hill, 1984), p. 191.

27
John Coltrane:
Lewis Porter,
John Coltrane: His Life and His Music
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), p. 33.

28
“Upon their arrival”:
Stewart E. Tolnay and Kyle D. Crowder, “Regional Origin and Family Stability in Northern Cities: The Role of Context,”
American Sociological Review
64 (1999): 109.

29
“Compared with northern-born blacks”:
Stewart E. Tolnay, “The African American ‘Great Migration’ and Beyond,”
Annual Review of Sociology 29
(2003): 219. See also Larry H. Long and Lynne R. Heltman, “Migration and Income Differences Between Black and White Men in the North,”
The American Journal of Sociology
80, no. 6 (May 1975): 1395–1407.

30
Something deep inside:
Long and Heltman, “Migration and Income Differences Between Black and White Men in the North,” p. 1395.

31
“Instead of thinking”:
Tolnay and Crowder, “Regional Origin and Family Stability in Northern Cities,” p. 109.

32
“led to higher earnings”:
Reynolds Farley, “After the Starting Line: Blacks and Women in an Uphill Race,”
Demography
25, no. 4 (November 1988): 477.

33
“Black migrants who left”:
Larry H. Long and Kristin A. Hansen, “Selectivity of Black Return Migration to the South,”
Rural Sociology
42, no. 3 (Fall 1977): 325. Based on a paper presented at the annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, Atlanta, March 30–April 2, 1977.

34
“Black school principals”:
Allen B. Ballard,
One More Day’s Journey
, p. 186.

35
“Since 1924”:
“4,733 Mob Action Victims Since ’82, Tuskegee Reports,”
Montgomery Advertiser
, April 26, 1959.

36
The mechanical cotton picker:
Donald Holley,
The Second Great Emancipation: The Mechanical Cotton Picker, Black Migration, and How They Shaped the Modern South
(Fayetteville: University of Arkansas, 2000), pp. 38–40.

37
Still, many planters:
Ibid., p. 101.

38
“Much of this labor”:
Harris P. Smith, “Late Developments in Mechanical Cotton Harvesting,”
Agricultural Engineering
, July 1946, p. 321. Smith, the chief of the division of agricultural engineering at the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station, presented this paper at a meeting of the American Society of Agricultural Engineers at Fort Worth, Texas, in April 1946. See also Gilbert C. Fite, “Recent Changes in the Mechanization of Cotton Production in the United States,”
Agricultural History
24 (January 1950): 28, and Oscar Johnston, “Will the Machine Ruin the South?”
Saturday Evening Post
219 (May 31, 1947): 37.

39
“If all of their dream”:
“Our Part in the Exodus,”
Chicago Defender
, March 17, 1917, p. 9.

40
Toni Morrison:
Toni Morrison’s parents migrated from Alabama to Lorraine, Ohio. Diana Ross’s mother migrated from Bessemer, Alabama, to Detroit, her father from Bluefield, West Virginia. Aretha Franklin’s father migrated from Mississippi to Detroit. Jesse Owens’s parents migrated from Oakville, Alabama, to Cleveland when he was nine. Joe Louis’s mother migrated with him from Lafayette, Alabama, to Detroit. Jackie Robinson’s family migrated from Cairo, Georgia, to Pasadena, California. Bill Cosby’s father migrated from Schuyler, Virginia, to Philadelphia, where Cosby was born. Nat King Cole, as a young boy, migrated with his family from Montgomery, Alabama, to Chicago. Condoleezza Rice’s family migrated from Birmingham, Alabama, to Denver, Colorado, when she was twelve. Thelonious Monk’s parents brought him from Rocky Mount, North Carolina, to Harlem when he was five. Berry Gordy’s parents migrated from rural Georgia to Detroit, where Gordy was born. Oprah Winfrey’s mother migrated from Kosciusko, Mississippi, to Milwaukee, where Winfrey went to live as a young girl. Mae Jemison’s parents migrated from Decatur, Alabama, to Chicago when she was three years old. Romare Bearden’s parents carried him from Charlotte, North Carolina, to New York City. Jimi Hendrix’s maternal grandparents migrated from Virginia to Seattle. Michael Jackson’s mother was taken as a toddler from Barbour County, Alabama, by her parents to East Chicago, Indiana; his father migrated as a young man from Fountain Hill, Arkansas, to Chicago, just west of Gary, Indiana, where all the Jackson children were born. Prince’s father migrated from Louisiana to Minneapolis. Sean “P. Diddy” Combs’s grandmother migrated from Hollyhill, South Carolina, to Harlem. Whitney Houston’s grandparents migrated from Georgia to Newark, New Jersey. The family of Mary J. Blige migrated from Savannah, Georgia, to Yonkers, New York. Queen Latifah’s grandfather migrated from Birmingham, Alabama, to Newark. Spike Lee’s family migrated from Atlanta to Brooklyn. August Wilson’s mother migrated from North Carolina to Pittsburgh, following her own mother, who, as the playwright told it, had walked most of the way.