AMERICA, 1915–1970
A SERIES OF UNPREDICTABLE EVENTS and frustrations led to the decisions of Ida Mae Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Pershing Foster to leave the South for good. Their decisions were separate and distinct from anything in the outside world except that they were joining a road already plied decades before by people as discontented as themselves. A thousand hurts and killed wishes led to a final determination by each fed-up individual on the verge of departure, which, added to millions of others, made up what could be called a migration.
If there was a single precipitating event that set off the Great Migration, it was World War I. After all, blacks had tried to escape the South with limited degrees of success from the time the first slaves arrived in Virginia in 1619. The Underground Railroad spirited hundreds of slaves out of the South and as far north as Canada before the Civil War. Later, in 1879, Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, a former slave who made coffins for colored lynching victims and was disheartened by the steadiness of his work, led a pilgrimage of six thousand ex-slaves, known as Exodusters, from the banks of the Mississippi River onto the free soil of Kansas.113
In the ensuing decades, a continuous trickle of brave souls chanced an unguaranteed existence in the unknown cities of the North. The trickle became a stream after Jim Crow laws closed in on blacks in the South in the 1890s. During the first decade of the twentieth century, some 194,000 blacks left the coastal and border states of the South and settled in relative anonymity in the colored quarters of primarily northeastern cities, such as Harlem in New York and in North Philadelphia. Some were domestics for wealthy northerners; others were musicians, intellectuals, and exiled politicians of the Reconstruction era who would inspire colored people in the South by their very existence.
But the masses did not 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 World War I. 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 ninety percent, from 1,218,480 in 1914 to 110,618 in 1918, when the country needed all the labor it could get for war production.114 So the North turned its gaze to the poorest-paid labor in the emerging market of the American South.115 Steel mills, railroads, and packinghouses sent labor scouts disguised as insurance men 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.116” 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 555,000 colored people left the South during the decade of the First World War—more than all the colored people who had left in the five 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 did not care. “As the North grows blacker, the South grows whiter,” the New Orleans Times-Picayune happily noted.117
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, as southerners began to confront the reality observed by the Columbia State of South Carolina: “Black labor is the best labor the South can get.118, 119 No other would work long under the same conditions.”
“It is the life of the South,” a Georgia plantation owner once said.120 “It is the foundation of its prosperity.… God pity the day when the negro leaves the South.”
“With all our crimes of omission and commission, we still retain a marked affection for the Negro,” wrote David L.121 Cohn in the 1935 book God Shakes Creation. “It is inconceivable to us that we should be without him.”
The Macon Telegraph put it more bluntly: “We must have the negro in the South,” it said.122 “It is the most pressing thing before this State today. Matters of governorships and judgeships are only bagatelle compared to the real importance of this negro exodus.”
Yet as reality sank in, nobody could agree on what to do about it, debating to the point of exasperation. “Why hunt for the cause when it’s plain as the noonday sun?” wrote a white reader in the Montgomery Advertiser.123 “He doesn’t want to leave but he knows if he stays here he will starve. They have nothing to eat, no clothes, no shoes, and they can’t get any work to do and they are leaving just as fast as they can get away.… If the Negro race could get work at 50 cents a day he would stay here.”
And a newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina, put this question to the ruling caste: “If you thought you might be lynched by mistake,” the paper asked, “would you remain in South Carolina?”
When the South woke up to the loss of its once guaranteed workforce, it tried to find ways to intercept it.124 Southern authorities resurrected the anti-enticement laws originally enacted after the Civil War to keep newly freed slaves from being lured away, this time, however, aimed at northern companies coveting the South’s cheapest and most desperate workers.
“Conditions recently became so alarming—that is, so many Negroes were leaving,” wrote an Alabama official, that the state began making anyone caught enticing blacks away—labor agents, they were called—pay an annual license fee of $750 “in every county in which he operates or solicits emigrants” or be “fined as much as $500 and sentenced to a year’s hard labor.”125
Macon, Georgia, required labor agents to pay a $25,000 fee and to secure the unlikely recommendations of twenty-five local businessmen, ten ministers, and ten manufacturers in order to solicit colored workers to go north.126 But by the middle of World War I, those laws were useless. Northern industries didn’t need to recruit anymore. Word had spread, and the exodus took on a life of its own. “Every Negro that makes good in the North and writes back to his friends, starts off a new group,” a Labor Department study observed.127
So the South tried to choke off the flow of information about the North. The chief of police in Meridian, Mississippi, ordered copies of the Chicago Defender confiscated before they could be sold, fearing it was putting ideas into colored people’s heads.128
When the people kept leaving, the South resorted to coercion and interception worthy of the Soviet Union, which was forming at the same time across the Atlantic. Those trying to leave were rendered fugitives by definition and could not be certain they would be able to make it out. In Brookhaven, Mississippi, authorities stopped a train with fifty colored migrants on it and sidetracked it for three days.129 In Albany, Georgia, the police tore up the tickets of colored passengers as they stood waiting to board, dashing their hopes of escape.130 A minister in South Carolina, having seen his parishioners off, was arrested at the station on the charge of helping colored people get out. In Savannah, Georgia, the police arrested every colored person at the station regardless of where he or she was going. In Summit, Mississippi, authorities simply closed the ticket office and did not let northbound trains stop for the colored people waiting to get on.131
Instead of stemming the tide, the blockades and arrests “served to intensify the desire to leave,” wrote the sociologists Willis T.132 Weatherford and Charles S. Johnson, “and to provide further reasons for going.”
To circumvent the heavy surveillance, some migrants simply bought tickets to cities two or three stations away where they would not be recognized or where there was less of a police presence.133 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, Mississippi, for Chicago in the 1940s.134
Chastened by their los
ses, 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.135 (The sharecroppers showed no interest and instead took the opportunity to complain about being cheated and whipped while in their employ.) In the 1920s, the Tennessee Association of Commerce, the Department of Immigration of Louisiana, the Mississippi Welfare League, and the Southern Alluvial Land Association all sent representatives north to try to bring colored workers back.136 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. “Owing to the scarcity of labor,” the Labor Department reported, “a Georgia farmer near Albany this year laid aside his whip and gun, with which it is reported he has been accustomed to drive his hands, and begged for laborers.”137
Oblivious to the hand-wringing, trainloads of colored people took their chances and crowded railroad platforms. Men hopped freight trains and hoboed out of the South in grain bins.138 Women walked off cotton fields in Texas, hiding their Sunday dresses under their field rags, bound for California. A granite quarry in Lithonia, Georgia, had to shut down because its workers had vanished. “One section gang left their tools on the spot, not stopping to get their pay,” Arna Bontemps wrote of one work site.139
All the while, in the places they left, the weeds grew up over the cotton, the rice and tobacco lay fallow and unpicked, and the mules wandered the pastures because, as the historian James R.140 Grossman noted, there was no one to hitch them to a plow.
BREAKING AWAY
I was leaving without a qualm,
without a single backward glance.141
The face of the South that I had known
was hostile and forbidding,
and yet out of all the conflicts
and the curses …,
the tension and the terror,
I had somehow gotten the idea
that life could be different.…
I was now running more away
from something than toward something.…
My mood was:
I’ve got to get away;
I can’t stay here.
—RICHARD WRIGHT, Black Boy
CHICKASAW COUNTY, MISSISSIPPI, OCTOBER 1937
IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY
IN A DAY, the world had changed. Everything was in a commotion, but George and Ida Mae could not let it show. Joe Lee had been beaten half dead over a false accusation about some turkeys that had run off. He had been left in a jail cell, barely conscious, his clothes sticking to his bloodied skin, and nothing was done about it. Ida Mae and George bent their heads and prayed for light. Then they went out in the field the next day. They picked long and hard and more urgently than before. They decided they would leave as soon as they got the cotton out of the ground. They would give Mr. Edd no cause to suspect their intentions or to withhold their pay. They needed whatever was due at settlement to get out of Mississippi.
They could not risk telling anyone but Saint and Miss Theenie and the one or two other relatives they needed to help them get out. And so they continued to gather the cotton. The land went from white to brown as they made their way across it. They began selling off their possessions, one by one, so as not to attract attention. The cows. The hogs. The chickens. The feather beds and quilts. The tin tub. The wash pots. The rusted old Model T Ford. The double-blade axes Ida Mae used to chop wood and kill snakes with. They went into town and sold what livestock was theirs and not Mr. Edd’s. What they didn’t sell they gave away or left with Saint to dispense with.
And if anybody asked what was going on, they knew to say, “We just running out of room.”
For some reason, Ida Mae was dragging more than usual. But there was so much to do and so little time, there was no point in mentioning it. They needed to get out before people started speculating about what it was they were doing. The way people talked, it wouldn’t take long to get back to Mr. Edd. Someone would love 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 two. Planters did not 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.
If George and Ida Mae didn’t get out, life could be harder than it already was. The quicker they got the cotton out of the ground, the better off they would be.
It was already late in the season, and before long they had picked their last bale. George had to figure out how best to leave. He decided first to get off Mr. Edd’s land. They quietly gathered up what little they were taking and carried it over to Miss Theenie’s after the cotton was picked. They would leave from the house where George had courted Ida Mae.
George wanted to settle with Mr. Edd as soon as possible and prepared to go see him. After what happened to Joe Lee, Ida Mae worried whenever George went out.
“George, be careful,” she said.
“I ain’t gon’ be careful. I ain’t done nothing to him.”
George went up to Mr. Edd like it was any other end-of-the-season settlement. He gave no indication that it was his fervent hope never to see him again in life or ever again to set foot in the state of Mississippi.
He looked over the list of credits and debits Mr. Edd had tallied—the bales of cotton he and Ida Mae had gathered, the seed and cornmeal they had consumed. It didn’t matter what he thought of it. He couldn’t dispute it no matter what it said. At the bottom of the page was a figure that showed he had a few dollars coming to him for a year’s worth of labor.
It was not much, but it was more than many sharecroppers got. Fewer than one out of five sharecroppers ever saw a profit at the end of the year. Of the few who got anything, their pay came to between $30 and $150 in the 1930s for a year of hard toil in the field, according to a leading Yale anthropologist of the era, or between nine and forty-eight cents a day.142 The remaining eighty percent either broke even, meaning they got nothing, or stayed in debt, which meant they were as bound to the planter as a slave was to his master.
There was no place to appeal. “How a man treats his tenants is not felt to be a matter of public concern,” the anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker wrote, “but is as much his private affair as what brand of toothpaste he uses.”143
George did the math in his head and saw that, along with what he had managed to save up to this day, it was enough for four tickets north on the Illinois Central Railroad.
Mr. Edd handed him the bills, and George completed the transaction without so much as a smile, which was his way. He tucked the money in his pocket and thought about what next to say. There before him stood his boss man and overseer of close to ten years. Mr. Edd was a man a full head taller than George and partial to ten-gallon hats. Whatever he may have done to other colored people in the name of the white man’s law, Mr. Edd had been honorable in his dealings with him. He had never raised a hand to him or Ida Mae, and George gave him no cause to do so.
George could have left after settlement without saying a word. It was a risk to say too much. The planter could rescind the settlement, say he misfigured, turn a credit into a debit, take back the money, evict the family or whip the sharecropper on the spot, or worse. Some sharecroppers, knowing they might not get paid anyway, fled from the field, right in midhoe, on the first thing going north.
The planters could not conceive of why their sharecroppers would want to leave. The dance of the compliant sharecropper conceding to the big planter year in and year out made it seem as if the ritual actually made sense, that the sharecropper, having been
given no choice, actually saw the tilted scales as fair. The sharecropper’s forced silence was part of the collusion that fed the mythology.
And so it came as a shock to many planters when their trusted sharecroppers expressed a desire to leave. Like one planter in Florence, Alabama.144 Year after year, he would go down the list of staples he said his sharecropper, Jack Fowler, owed:
1 LB FLOUR
1 LB RICE
1 LB CORN MEAL
1 LB COFFEE
The planter scanned the page and decided to add a few more pounds of coffee, increasing Fowler’s debt to him. One year, the sharecropper finally spoke up, careful not to suggest the planter was a liar or an outright cheat.
“Mr. Perry, you know I don’t drink coffee.”
With that, the planter added another pound of coffee to the list. The sharecropper could do nothing but watch.
One year, the planter’s son happened to come in during settlement and spoke up himself.
“Pa, you know Jack don’t drink coffee.”
And, for once, the sharecropper didn’t have to pay for something he had never consumed in the first place.
Sometime after settlement, he went to tell his boss man he was leaving for a place called Lake Forest, Illinois. The planter had already settled with Jack Fowler and had no rational excuse to keep the sharecropper on his plantation, which didn’t mean he couldn’t have if he wanted to. Instead, the planter tried to scare the sharecropper out of leaving.
“Jack, you gonna go up there and freeze your brains,” the planter told his sharecropper. “And who is going to handle my horses when you leave?”
Knowing the dangerous and arbitrary rules of the world he was in, George stood before Mr. Edd and weighed what he should say. Mr. Edd had already paid him, so George thought he was safe. They had agreed that George did not owe him and was not in the planter’s debt. Mr. Edd had always been a man of his word, and George trusted him to keep it now. George made the calculation that the truth would serve him better than if he were later caught in a knowing omission. He prayed and breathed deep before speaking.
The Warmth of Other Suns Page 20