The Warmth of Other Suns

by Isabel Wilkerson

  All day, the heavy front door opened and closed with the arrival of supplies, and the telephone rang on and off, people just landing at LAX, people needing directions. Dusk fell, and the time drew near. Robert began to feel sick. The thunderstorm grew worse in his stomach. He felt weak and exhausted. His knees gave way. He fell back, collapsed. He had to be helped upstairs, lie down, gather himself. He lay there staring at the yellow walls in the master bedroom, fretting and unable to face the possibility of imperfection.

  He closed his eyes. He tried to rest. Soon, outside his window, he could hear the rumble of car engines rounding St. Charles Place and turning up South Victoria. The screeching came to a stop. The creak of the passenger door of a Cadillac opening and the thud of its closing. The engine shutting down and the valet taking the keys. The first guests had arrived and were walking down the red-carpeted sidewalk he conceived of months ago.

  Round the corner and down the stairs, he could hear muffled conversation, a party being born. He reminded himself why he had spent the better part of a year and really all of his life planning for this moment. He got up, steadied himself. He checked himself in the mirror, practiced his smile, and straightened his crushed-velvet tie.

  “Let’s get on with it,” he said to himself, liking what he saw. “It’s on.”

  He is wearing mutton-chop sideburns, flecked gray, and an Afro shaped like a mushroom cap. Hip as you got in those days. He greets his guests with a cigarette between his fingers and his legs purposely slew-footed, as if he were posing for Esquire. It will make better pictures for the photographer he has hired to trail him and the guests all night.

  Soon the set piece begins to take shape. There’s Joe Luellen, who hit town back in the thirties and played in The Great White Hope. And three men standing together in velvet suits that forewarn the fashion crimes of the seventies.

  On a foot-high stand above the crowd, Sweets Edison is on trumpet under the green-striped tent over the patio. Hampton Hawes is playing piano with his head reared back. Everybody has a glass of something in one hand and a cigarette in the other like jewelry.

  There’s his mother-in-law near the hot pink tulip-upholstered love seat, in a four-hundred-dollar gown and a solid gold bracelet he bought her and which he complained she never gave him credit for. And she’s greeting and upstaging as if she paid for the whole shebang. (“I ignored it, I ignored it,” he would say years later, betraying that he most certainly had not.)

  There are two or three wet bars, help everywhere, dressed in maid’s uniforms and monkey suits, people checking coats, people parking cars, people pouring martinis, people picking up dishes before they have a chance to clink the top of an end table.

  There’s Bunny sticking her tongue out at the camera. And Ray Charles under the tent over the patio by the band. And Robert’s bookie. And a judge. A postmaster. And a dentist. Robert’s sister, Gold, in pink chiffon on a barstool, holding a pack of Marlboros. Keisha Brown, a gospel rock singer, sweating on stage in blood-red velvet. Madison, in a three-piece suit that thankfully met Robert’s approval, doing the funky chicken with a woman in white bell-bottoms. Alice in her cat-eye glasses, posing for pictures, calm and dignified in that heavy beaded dress by the staircase.

  The following Thursday, December 31, 1970, a breathless review ran on page C2 of the Los Angeles Sentinel, declaring it “certainly ‘The Party of the Year,’ without a doubt” (phrasing that unwittingly introduced the very doubt it sought to dispel). The column ran without pictures and began like this:

  One of the Angel City’s most fabulous parties to date was given by the Robert Fosters on Christmas Day, at their home on Victoria Avenue. The prominent physician and his wife, who is president of the L.A. Chapter of the Links, had their large back yard area tinted [sic] for the occasion, and the View Park decorators had a field day.…

  For her party, Alice wore a Malcolm Star original that fairly sparkled with jewels.… Mrs. Rufus E. Clement, formerly of Atlanta, and Louisville, Ky., now makes her home in L.A. with her daughter and son-in-law, and assisted in receiving the 400 guests.

  Who was there? Well, we could easily say the Who’s Who of L.A. Society.… And believe it or not, at times there were as many as 200 beautiful people, milling, sipping, and just having a marvelous time on Christmas Day at the Robert Fosters.… This was certainly “The Party of the Year,” without a doubt.

  Robert had a photo album made of the night’s festivities. It was made of brown leather, and etched onto the front was “Robert’s Birthday” in gold italics. Over the succeeding decades, he would pull out the party album before he would his wedding pictures or his medical degree. The brown leather got worn in spots from the viewing. Usually, he would not bother to mention the Sentinel story nor the party itself so much as what went into it.

  “For some reason, it drops,” he told me years later when I asked him about the particulars. “It’s not any less valuable or delicious. But for some reason, it didn’t seem as important as when I was putting it together.”

  Some of the guests he never saw again. Some died. Some lost touch. It was a wrap, and everyone was marvelous.

  He took comfort in any sign of the night’s immortality. One day he passed the stationery department at Bullock’s. The invitations to his party were mounted and on display. “I went in once and told the lady, ‘That’s mine,’ ” he said. “She looked at me like I was a fool. I just smiled.”

  Talking about it kept the party going, and so it never really ended in his mind. He did not wait for reviews, he solicited them. He called Jimmy Marshall, one of his oldest friends from back in Monroe, right after the party.

  “Jimmy, did I wig ’em?” he asked.

  “Yeah, you hit it,” Jimmy said.

  What are they saying, what are they thinking? Robert asked Jimmy. Everyone was bowled over, of course. Jimmy didn’t want to say it, but the Monroe people thought he had gone too far. The black maid in the black-and-white dress and white bow in the foyer was over the top even for Robert.

  “We’ve been maids long enough,” Jimmy told Robert. “People didn’t go for that.”

  Robert didn’t take it too well. “Either he answered or cussed,” Jimmy said decades later, “which I didn’t care, in either case.”

  As long as the two had known each other, Robert’s fixations never made sense to Jimmy. “He always sought approval,” Jimmy said. “And I never understood it because he had it all.”

  PART FIVE

  AFTERMATH

  The migrants were gradually absorbed

  into the economic, social, and political life of the city.1

  They have influenced and modified it.

  The city has, in turn, changed them.

  —ST. CLAIR DRAKE AND HORACE H. CAYTON,

  Black Metropolis

  IN THE PLACES THEY LEFT

  The only thing

  we are proud of

  in connection with

  the South

  is that we left it.2

  —JEFFERSON L. EDMONDS, THE PUBLISHER OF The Liberator, ONE OF THE FIRST COLORED NEWSPAPERS IN LOS ANGELES

  CHICKASAW COUNTY, MISSISSIPPI, 1970

  IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY

  THE RAW WOOD CABINS and gravel roads that broke the clearings in the bottomlands of Chickasaw County did not change much in the thirty years after Ida Mae and millions of other black people left the South in a migration that was now slowing down as Mississippi began fitfully opening up. Mr. Edd, whose land Ida Mae and her husband had sharecropped, died of a heart attack back in 1945, a few years after Ida Mae went north.3 Willie Jim, who came with Mr. Edd looking for Joe Lee that night all those years ago over the missing turkeys, was still alive. He ran a thousand-acre plantation with up to two hundred hoe hands and forty sharecropper families well into the 1960s.

  The land was still devoted to cotton, but big combines and mechanical harvesters now did most of the work. The people who had not gone north now worked in factories, textile mills, and hardware plan
ts, factories that made poly foam and felt for the manufacture of furniture, and factories that made trailers, sewer pipes, corrugated boxes, shipping crates.4

  The county and the rest of Mississippi and the old Confederacy had come out on the other side of a second civil war, the war over civil rights for the servant caste of the South. Chickasaw County had not been in the middle of it, had not been a focus of Martin Luther King or the freedom riders. It was too sparsely populated and too out of the way. But it was no less resistant to change, especially when it came to black people voting (where “intemperate individuals of both races created incidents best forgotten,” the Chickasaw County Historical and Genealogical Society wrote dismissively of the era), and when it came to the integration of the schools, which had been segregated for longer than most anyone had been alive.5

  It was in 1954 that the Supreme Court ruled on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, declaring segregated schools inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional. In a subsequent ruling in 1955, the Court ordered school boards to eliminate segregation “with all deliberate speed.”

  Much of the South translated that phrase loosely to mean whenever they got around to it, which meant a time frame closer to a decade than a semester. One county in Virginia—Prince Edward County—closed its entire school system for five years, from 1959 to 1964, rather than integrate.

  The state funneled money to private academies for white students. But black students were left on their own. They went to live with relatives elsewhere, studied in church basements, or forwent school altogether. County supervisors relented only after losing their case in the U.S. Supreme Court, choosing finally to reopen the schools rather than face imprisonment.

  It would take more than fifteen years before most of the South conceded to the Brown ruling and then only under additional court orders.

  “This was passionately opposed,” wrote the Chickasaw Historical Society, “not only by most of the whites—but by some of the blacks as well.” That sentiment, if true, would have been explained away by the blacks who left as an indication that the blacks who stayed may have been more conciliatory than many of the people in the Great Migration.

  It wasn’t until the 1970–71 school year that integration finally came to Chickasaw County, and then only after a 1969 court order, Alexander v. Holmes, that gave county and municipal schools in Mississippi until February 1970 to desegregate. But even that deadline would be extended for years for particularly recalcitrant counties.

  All the marching and court rulings did little to change some southerners’ hearts. A 1968 survey found that eighty-three percent of whites said they preferred a system with no integration. And they acted on those preferences. By 1970, 158 new white private schools had opened up in Mississippi. By 1971, a quarter of the white students were in private schools, the white families paying tuition many could scarcely afford. Mothers went back to work to help cover tuition, “spent all their savings and forfeited luxuries and necessities in life,” some splitting their children up and enduring the “expense and inconvenience of transporting the children long distances to and from school,” according to the Mississippi-born scholar Mark Lowry, to avoid having their children sit in the same classroom with black children.6

  In the meantime, in the middle of the turmoil over what would become of the children of Mississippi, dozens of school districts forwent federal funding rather than integrate their schools.7 During the worst of things, at least one school superintendent, Lowry wrote, committed suicide.

  EUSTIS, FLORIDA, 1970

  GEORGE SWANSON STARLING

  LAKE COUNTY, FLORIDA, began to join the rest of the free world in the late 1960s and early 1970s, six decades into the Great Migration, when black children and white children, for the first time in county history, began sitting in the same buildings to learn their cursive and multiplication tables.

  Change did not come without incident. The first sign of trouble was a fight at the newly integrated high school between a white boy and a black boy. It fell to the black assistant principal, who had been demoted from principal of the colored high school to an assistant at the reconstituted school, to intervene. It was unclear who started what, but the black assistant principal ruled in favor of the white student to the outcries of reverse favoritism from the black parents.

  “The black people could not understand why he should discipline this black kid that had an altercation with the white kid, and they been dogging us all our lives,” George Starling, who had been keeping close contact, said years later. The assistant principal was his stepbrother in that small world of Eustis, Florida.

  The black parents felt the white student had started the fight by provoking the black student and that the assistant principal should have ruled accordingly. But in the tinderbox of what was still very much an experiment in caste integration, he had little choice.

  “We’re crying out against prejudice and mistreatment,” George said. “If you want it eliminated, you have to do unto others as you want them to do unto you.”

  When the next big fight broke out, Willis McCall rode up with his police dog to go after the black student. This time, the black parents rose up and protested. A church load of them, emboldened by the civil rights gains and the counterbalancing effect of all the people they knew up north, rode over to the county seat of Tavares, got a Reverend Jones to speak for them, and protested to the Lake County School Board.

  “The people let Willis McCall know that they weren’t scared of him or his dog,” Viola Dunham, a long-time resident with three boys in school at the time, remembered. “We let him know he does not run the school system. We let them know we didn’t want Willis McCall raising our children. And we did not back down that time.”

  Since the 1940s, Willis McCall had cast a long shadow over Lake County. His handling of the Groveland case, in which a white woman accused four black men of raping her back in 1949, had made national headlines and put Lake County on the map as a symbol of racial injustice. McCall had shot two shackled defendants while transporting them the night before their second trial. One of the men, Walter Irvin, actually survived the shooting and lived to tell how McCall had taken the backwoods, stopped in a remote location, told them to get out, and shot them.

  After being hospitalized for his wounds, Irvin was retried, reconvicted, and once again sentenced to death. A few years later, a new governor, LeRoy Collins, reviewed his case and, in 1955, commuted Irvin’s death sentence to life imprisonment. It was a stunning decision at that time in the Jim Crow South and one handed down against the vehement opposition of Sheriff McCall and other white Floridians.

  The governor, a segregationist but otherwise a moderate by southern standards, was disturbed by the many shortcomings in the case. “My conscience told me it was a bad case, badly handled, badly tried and now, on this bad performance, I was asked to take a man’s life,” Collins later said.8 “My conscience would not let me do it.”

  His death sentence commuted, Walter Irvin would be imprisoned for eighteen years for a crime he maintained his whole life he had not committed. DNA testing was not yet in use to prove or disprove his claim. In 1969, he was paroled on the condition that he never set foot in Lake County again. But the following year, he was granted permission to visit his family there for a single day. Soon after he got there, “he dropped dead while sitting on a front porch.”9 He was forty-two years old. Officials like McCall said he had a heart attack. But after all that had preceded Irvin’s death, some black people in town believed it was no accident.

  Into the early 1970s, Willis McCall was still the sheriff of Lake County. He was still wearing his ten-gallon hats. The Groveland case had made him something of a celebrity among Florida segregationists. He would become the center of case after case of alleged abuse and misconduct against black people in the county. He would be investigated forty-nine times and survive every one of them.

  As the world began to change around him, he stood his ground in defense of the old order
of things. When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, “the only public building in the United States that refused to lower its flag to half-staff was McCall’s jail in Tavares,” the Lake County seat, according to the author Ben Green.10

  COLORED ONLY and WHITE ONLY signs were coming down all over the South during the 1960s. But Sheriff McCall did not take down the COLORED WAITING ROOM sign in his office until September 1971, and then only under threat of a federal court order.11 He may have been the last elected official in the country to remove his Jim Crow sign, Green said.

  McCall was reelected seven times, that is, until 1972, when Florida Governor Reubin Askew stepped in and suspended him after yet another violent assault on someone in his custody.12 This time, McCall was indicted for second-degree murder for allegedly kicking a black prisoner to death. The prisoner was in jail for a twenty-six-dollar traffic ticket. McCall was acquitted.

  But he lost the election that November. Blacks were now able to vote, and they turned out in force to defeat him the first chance they got.

  “We sent cars out and taxicabs,” Viola Dunham, a longtime resident and a sister-in-law of George Starling, remembered. “We started getting these people out to vote.”

  Then, too, a new generation of whites had entered the Florida electorate, the younger people who may have identified with the young freedom riders in Mississippi and Alabama even if they would not have participated themselves, and the snowbirds, the white northerners who were buying up vacation homes or retiring to central Florida with the boom that came with the arrival of Disney World and who couldn’t relate to the heavy-handedness of a small-town southern sheriff. And now it seemed that even the most steadfast traditionalists had finally tired of the controversies and felt it was time for him to go.