The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

by Isabel Wilkerson

  “See, they got lots of time before they get on the table,” Robert remembered. “They can think a whole lot. They can get another consultation. They’d be quick to say, ‘I’ll get another consultation.’ Or somebody would say, ‘What you tryin’ to do? Buy a mink coat for Alice?’ Now, that slaps you. People can be little.”

  The rejection hurt him and gnawed at him. It stayed with him for decades. He set out to prove he could make it without them. He would be the very best doctor he knew how. He would focus not on the grudging people from Monroe but on the people who wanted him as their doctor. He would put on a show so they wouldn’t forget him. He would pull in more of the cooks and laborers from Texas and the Mardi Gras–celebrating people from New Orleans and Baton Rouge, who would appreciate his loud suits and stingy-brim hats and folksy, one-of-the-people bedside manner.

  The people from Monroe would learn how wrong they had been.

  TO BEND IN STRANGE WINDS

  I was a Southerner, and I had the map of Dixie on my tongue.93

  —ZORA NEALE HURSTON, Dust Tracks on a Road

  CHICAGO, LATE 1938

  IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY

  THERE WAS A KNOCK on the door at Ida Mae’s tiny flat one afternoon when she was at home alone taking care of the children. It was a neighbor lady who had taken notice of the new family just up from Mississippi, seen that the young mother was by herself with the little ones much of the time, the husband likely off to work somewhere, and the neighbor lady was saying she had come to introduce herself.

  Ida Mae thought it was awfully nice of the lady to drop by. She hadn’t been in Chicago long, as the woman likely knew. George had secured the apartment while Ida Mae was in Mississippi giving birth to Eleanor.

  On days when there was no work to be had, Ida Mae was cooped up in the kitchenette apartment, far from home, in a big, loud city she didn’t yet know. She was used to wide-open spaces, trees everywhere, being able to see the sun set and rise and the sky stretched out over the field. She was used to killing a chicken if she needed one, not lining up at a butcher and paying for it in pieces with money she didn’t have. As much as she hated picking cotton, she missed her sisters-in-law and the other families on the plantation and her mother and younger sister. She didn’t know too many people in Chicago yet and was isolated with only little James and Eleanor with her during the day, as Velma was off in grade school.

  So Ida Mae welcomed the neighbor lady and invited her in to sit a while. The lady had brought something with her. It was a bottle of homemade wine. Ida Mae had never had wine before. George didn’t believe in it, and Ida Mae never had occasion to try it.

  The woman opened the bottle and poured some for the two of them to drink while they talked. Ida Mae took a few sips and started feeling woozy as the woman asked her how she’d gotten there. The woman learned all about how Ida Mae’s family first tried Milwaukee and how Ida Mae went back to Mississippi to have the baby when George told her he was going to try Chicago. The woman poured more wine, and Ida Mae got giddy and light-headed. She had never felt this way before.

  The woman was from Mississippi but had been in Chicago for some time, had gotten to know the city’s virtues and vices and how a city resident, which Ida Mae now was, should comport oneself. She told Ida Mae that now that she was in the North, she shouldn’t wear her head scarf out in public—that was for back when she was in the field; that she shouldn’t hang her wet laundry out the front window, even though there was no place else to let the linens dry out in the open sun like back home; that she should make sure the kids had shoes on when they went out, even though the kids hated shoes and shoes cost money they didn’t have.

  Ida Mae told the lady she appreciated that advice, but soon she wasn’t comprehending much of anything the neighbor lady was saying. When the bottle of wine was finished, the lady said she’d better be heading back home.

  George came home soon after the neighbor lady left. He found Ida Mae giggling and slurring her words, talking gibberish, and the children needing to eat and get their diapers changed. She told him that a nice neighbor lady had stopped by and that she had tried some of the wine the lady brought.

  George was furious. The devilment of the city had come right into his home, as hard as he tried to protect his family from it. Ida Mae was too sweet-natured to recognize when someone might be taking advantage and wasn’t wise to the machinations of the people who had preceded them to Chicago. She wouldn’t have noticed if they made fun of them, looked down on them, or took pleasure in seeing the simple country people fall under the city’s spell. He had to make it clear to Ida Mae that she was not to just let anybody in—this was Chicago, after all. He told her he didn’t want that lady coming around anymore and that Ida Mae wasn’t to drink any more wine, which was a sin in his estimation anyway.

  When Ida Mae came to her senses, she was shamefaced about what had happened. She was waking up to the ways and the people of the North. She soon learned that the colored people who had gotten there before her and had assimilated to the city didn’t look too kindly upon her innocent country ways.

  In the receiving cities of the North and West, the newcomers like Ida Mae had to worry about acceptance or rejection not only from whites they encountered but from the colored people who arrived ahead of them, who could at times be the most sneeringly judgmental of all.

  The northern-born colored people and the long-standing migrants, who were still trying to keep their footing in the New World, often resented the arrival of the unwashed masses pouring in from the very places some of the old-timers had left. As often happens with immigrant groups, some of the old-timers would have preferred to shut the door after they got there to protect their own uncertain standing.

  The small colony of colored people already in the New World had made a place for themselves as an almost invisible minority by the time the Migration began. Many were the descendants of slaves the North had kept before Abolition or of slaves who fled the South on the Underground Railroad or were among the trickle of pioneers who had migrated from the South in the decades after the Civil War.

  A good portion were in the servant class—waiters, janitors, elevator operators, maids, and butlers to the wealthiest white families in the city. But some had managed to create a solid though tenuous middle class of Pullman porters, postal workers, ministers, and businessmen who were anxious to keep the status and gains they had won. The color line restricted them to the oldest housing in the least desirable section of town no matter what their class, but they had tried to make the best of it and had created a world within a world for themselves.

  From this group came the letters and newspaper stories about the freedoms of the North that helped inspire blacks to leave the South in the first place. The Great Migration brought in many a northerner’s sweetheart, aunts, uncles, siblings, nieces, nephews, parents, and children. It also delivered hundreds of thousands of new customers, voters, readers, patients, and parishioners to the black institutions that stood to profit and be forever changed by the influx.

  “They have been our best patrons,” a colored physician in Chicago told researchers studying the Migration in the 1930s.94 “We have increased from five to two hundred and fifty doctors. We are living in better homes, and have more teachers in the schools; and nearly every colored church has benefitted.”

  Businessmen jumped at the opportunity.95 They opened restaurants serving hog maws and turnip greens. A man named Robert Horton opened Hattiesburg Shaving Parlor in a five-block stretch along Rhodes Avenue where some 150 families from that Gulf Coast town were huddled together. A few blocks away, there sat the Mississippi Coal and Wood Company, the Florida East Coast Shine Parlor to pull in the Floridians, and the Carolina Sea Island Candy Store for those who’d made it from there.

  The Migration made giddy landlords of some of the old-timers. It gave them the chance to get extra money and bragging rights, too, by renting their spare rooms and garages to the new people. In Los Angeles and Oakland, it be
came a status symbol to have the wherewithal to take in roomers.

  “I got a sharecropper,” a woman in Los Angeles was heard boasting.96

  “Honey, I got me three sharecroppers!” another one said.

  The churches stood to gain the most, and did. They ran notices in the Defender proclaiming, “Strangers welcome.”97 Walters African Methodist Episcopal Church in Chicago tripled in membership. The city’s Olivet Baptist Church got five thousand new members in the first three years of the Migration, making it one of the largest Baptist churches and one of the first megachurches in the country. A migrant from Alabama said she couldn’t get in the first time she went. “We’d have to stand up,” she said. “I don’t care how early we’d go, you wouldn’t get in.”

  But soon the cultural and class divisions between the newcomers and the old-timers began to surface. Many of the migrants, seeking the status and security they could not get back home, filled the stained-glass sanctuaries of the mainline churches. Others were overwhelmed by the size of the congregations and the austerity of their services. One migrant said she “couldn’t understand the pastor and the words he used” at Olivet and couldn’t get used to the singing. “The songs was proud-like,” she said.

  A migrant from Louisiana felt out of place at Pilgrim Baptist, another big, old-line church. “Nobody said nothing,” the migrant said. “But there were whispers all over the place.”

  The migrants did as much moving around from church to church as they did from flat to flat. They tended to favor smaller storefront churches opened up by ministers fresh from the South, where they could sing the spirituals, catch the spirit, and fan themselves like they were used to. The reason one woman left a mainline church was because it was “too large—it don’t see the small people.”

  The migrants brought new life to the old receiving stations. But by their sheer numbers, they pressed down upon the colored people already there. Slumlords made the most of it by subdividing what housing there was into smaller and smaller units and investing as little as possible in the way of upkeep to cash in on the bonanza. It left well-suited lawyers and teachers living next to sharecroppers in head scarves just off the Illinois Central. The middle-class and professional people searched for a way out.

  “They tried to insulate themselves by moving further south along the narrow strip that defined the gradually expanding South Side Black Belt,” wrote the historian James Grossman.98 “But the migrants inevitably followed.”

  Unlike their white counterparts, the old settlers had few places to go and were met with hostility and violence if they ventured into white neighborhoods. The color line hemmed them in—newcomers and old-timers alike—as they all struggled to move up. “The same class of Negroes who ran us away from Thirty-seventh Street are moving out there,” a colored professional man said after moving further south to Fifty-first Street ahead of the migrants.99 “They creep along slowly like a disease.”

  The fate of the city people was linked to that of the migrants, whether they liked it or not, and the city people feared that the migrants could jeopardize the status of them all. A colored newspaper called Searchlight chastised them for boarding the streetcars in soiled work clothes after a day at the stockyards and accused them of threatening the freedoms colored people had in the North.100 “Don’t you know that you are forcing on us here in Chicago a condition similar to the one down South?”

  A survey of new migrants during World War II found that an overwhelming majority of them looked up to the people who were there before them, admired them, and wanted to be as assured and sophisticated as they were.101 But a majority of the colored people already in the New World viewed the newcomers in a negative light and saw them as hindering opportunities for all of them.

  The anxious old settlers were “like German Jews who in the late nineteenth century feared that the influx of their coreligionists from eastern Europe would endanger their marginal but substantial foothold in gentile Chicago,” wrote the historian James R.102 Grossman.

  “Those who have long been established in the North have a problem,” the Chicago Defender acknowledged.103 “That problem is the caring for the stranger within their gates.”

  It turned out that the old-timers were harder on the new people than most anyone else. “Well, their English was pretty bad,” a colored businessman said of the migrants who flooded Oakland and San Francisco in the forties, as if from a foreign country.104 To his way of looking at it, they needed eight or nine years “before they seemed to get Americanized.”

  As the migrants arrived in the receiving stations of the North and West, the old-timers wrestled with what the influx meant for them, how it would affect the way others saw colored people, and how the flood of black southerners was a reminder of the Jim Crow world they all sought to escape. In the days before Emancipation, as long as slavery existed, no freed black was truly free. Now, as long as Jim Crow and the supremacy behind it existed, no blacks could ever be sure they were beyond its reach.

  One day a white friend went up to a longtime Oakland resident named Eleanor Watkins to ask her what she thought about all the newcomers.

  “Eleanor,” the woman said, “you colored people must be very disgusted with some of the people who have come here from the South and the way they act.”105

  “Well, Mrs. S.,” Eleanor Watkins replied. “Yes, some colored people are very disgusted, but as far as I’m concerned, the first thing I give them credit for is getting out of the situation they were in.… Maybe they don’t know how to dress or comb their hair or anything, but their children will and their children will.”

  In the early years of the Migration, the Chicago Defender took it upon itself to help correct the country people it had helped lure to the North to better fit the city people’s standard of refinement. “It is our duty,” the Defender wrote, “to guide the hand of a less experienced one, especially when one misstep weakens our chance for climbing.”106

  The Defender ran periodic lists of “do’s and don’ts” that recirculated over time and were repeated to newcomers like Ida Mae:

  DON’T HANG OUT THE WINDOWS.107

  DON’T SIT AROUND IN THE YARD AND ON THE PORCH BAREFOOT AND UNKEMPT.

  DON’T WEAR HANDKERCHIEFS ON YOUR HEAD.

  DON’T USE VILE LANGUAGE IN PUBLIC PLACES.108

  DON’T ALLOW CHILDREN TO BEG ON THE STREETS.

  DON’T APPEAR ON THE STREET WITH OLD DUST CAPS, DIRTY APRONS AND RAGGED CLOTHES.

  DON’T THROW GARBAGE IN THE BACKYARD OR ALLEY OR KEEP DIRTY FRONT YARDS.

  The Chicago Urban League, which helped direct migrants to temporary shelter, rental options, and jobs, was the closest the migrants got to Customs in the North. It held what it called “Strangers Meetings” to help acclimate the newcomers, and its members went door-to-door, passing out leaflets advising the migrants as to their behavior and comportment. To the Defender’s do’s and don’ts, the Urban League distributed cards adding the following admonishments:

  DO NOT LOAF. GET A JOB AT ONCE.109

  DO NOT LIVE IN CROWDED ROOMS. OTHERS CAN BE OBTAINED.

  DO NOT CARRY ON LOUD CONVERSATIONS IN STREET CARS AND PUBLIC PLACES.

  DO NOT KEEP YOUR CHILDREN OUT OF SCHOOL.

  DO NOT SEND FOR YOUR FAMILY UNTIL YOU GET A JOB.

  Ida Mae didn’t take it personally when people pointed these things out to her, like the neighbor lady who had brought the wine. Ida Mae wouldn’t likely have seen her again because the family moved so much in those early months in Chicago. But she thanked people like her and a lady who mentioned her head scarf on the bus one day. She was grateful for the advice and, in fact, took most of it.

  But there were some things she was not ever going to do. She was never going to change her name to something citified and highfalutin. She was never going to take on northern airs and name-drop about the pastor she knew from this or that church or the alderman who stopped to greet her at the polls, even though she would come to know famous people who made good up in
the North because she had known their kin people back in Mississippi. She was never going to forget the folks back home and how she loved them so. She was never going to change her Mississippi drawl, not in the least, not even after she had spent more of her life in the North than in the South, not even when some northerners still had trouble understanding her decades after she’d been there; though she wasn’t trying to be difficult and was just being herself, she simply didn’t care what anybody thought. It didn’t matter, because people seemed to love her for it.

  She decided to keep the things that made her feel like home deep within herself, where nobody could judge her, and inside the walls of their kitchenette apartment where she made turnip greens and peach cobbler and sweet potato pie flecked with nutmeg and sang spirituals like in Mississippi as often as she liked.

  NEW YORK, JANUARY 1947

  GEORGE SWANSON STARLING

  IT TOOK EIGHT YEARS OF MARRIAGE, broken by fearsome silences and fitful separations due to George’s work on the railroad and the circumstances under which he had to migrate north. But finally George and Inez had a baby. It was a boy. He was born in January 1947, and they named him Gerard. There were already enough Georges in the family, and Gerard was close enough.

  “I was the happiest man in the world when this boy came,” George said. “I thought we weren’t gonna never have no children.”

  George couldn’t stop taking pictures of the baby. And the arrival of their son gave Inez a new purpose. She threw herself into motherhood. That was a good thing, because, soon after the baby was born, George had to take to the road again to care for his growing family.

  In no time George was back on the rails, working the legendary trains that followed the East Coast route of the Great Migration. His job put him in the middle of one of the biggest population shifts in the country’s history. He saw firsthand the continuing stream of people pouring out in front of him. He helped them carry their cardboard boxes tied with string, the hand-me-down suitcases, the hatboxes and steamer trunks. Some came north with only a cotton sack or a paper bag with all they owned or were able to get out with.