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.
13 “Oftentimes, just to go”: John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1937), p. 302.
14 In Chicago alone: U.S. Census Bureau, Census 2000 Redistricting Data (Public Law 94-171) Summary File, Table PL1. In 2000, the black population was 1,084,221 in the city of Chicago and 1,033,809 in the state of Mississippi.
15 “folk movement”: McMillen, “The Migration and Black Protest in Jim Crow Mississippi,” p. 81.
16 Farragut: Union naval officer David G. Farragut, who rose to admiral, led the capture of the South’s largest city during the Battle of New Orleans in April 1862.
17 ten thousand: Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 209.
18 “I went to the station”: Scott, Negro Migration During the War, p. 41.
19 into the words of: Lawrence R. Rodgers, Canaan Bound: The African-American Great Migration Novel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), pp. x, xiii. The author notes that, among scholars, “the Great Migration, for many years, remained primarily an academic sideshow displaying only limited signs of penetrating the realm of national popular discourse and culture.” However, in the arts, the Great Migration and the resulting issues of “movement and identity have, over the entire history of published black literature, occupied the center of African American consciousness.” On p. 3, he adds, “As one of the most widely shared experiences of black America, migration, whether through force or volition, has remained a central subject of black literature and folklore.” Blyden Jackson, professor of literature emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, wrote that “no event, large or small, … has had an impact equal in mass or gavity upon the consciousness of black writers.” Blyden Jackson, “Introduction,” in Black Exodus, p. xv.
20 “Less has been written”: Gregory, The Southern Diaspora, p. 5.
21 the language changes: Writers navigating the language of intolerance often struggle with how to convey old attitudes and norms with the authenticity the work demands but with the grace and sensitivity required to reach current and future generations. On issues of race and ethnicity, the debate often centers on how best to describe black Americans when the names for the group change with the political fashions of the times and with the origins and intentions of the speaker regarding whatever term is at issue. Based on my many interviews with people from the era, the term “colored” was the most common word they used among themselves. This is not to say that prominent blacks of the day did not use the term “Negro,” many arguing that its capitalization bestowed greater status on a group hungry for recognition. But ordinary blacks seemed to wince at how the word could be so easily corrupted by the ruling class, coming out “nigra” instead of the more formal-sounding “Negro,” and thus they tended to use the term somewhat derisively in everyday conversation. As for the N-word itself, I have chosen to use it only where required for context, which turned out to be rarer than might be assumed. I chose to use great care out of an acknowledgment of the violence and loss of life that often accompanied its utterance. On the whole, I found that people who had most felt the sting of the word and the violence that undergirded it were less likely to use the word in casual speech than people who had never had to step off a sidewalk because of the color of their skin.
22 “Compared with northern-born”: Stewart E. Tolnay, “The African American ‘Great Migration’ and Beyond,” Annual Review of Sociology 29 (2003): 219.
PART II: BEGINNINGS
1 This was the culture: Richard Wright, Black Boy (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 303.
IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY
2 From the open door: Unless otherwise indicated, all references to Ida Mae Gladney are based on continual interviews and conversations with her from May 1996 to August 2004.
3 Calhoun City, Mississippi: Interview with Jarvis Enoch, Ida Mae’s nephew and a professor at Tennessee State University, in September 1998 in Nashville, about his experiences growing up in Calhoun City, Mississippi, in the 1940s and 1950s.
4 “hardware of reality”: Carrie Mae Weems, Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment, a film directed and narrated by Weems (Atlanta: Savannah College of Art and Design with the National Black Arts Festival, 2008).
THE STIRRINGS OF DISCONTENT
5 Everybody seems to be: Macon Telegraph, Editorial, September 15, 1916, p. 4.
6 One of the earliest: “Race Labor Leaving,” Chicago Defender, February 5, 1916, p. 1. Though this is what scholars have cited as the earliest known reference to a group of colored people leaving the South during World War I, it can logically be assumed that other parties left before them in the early stages of the war without telling anyone of their intentions. The full headline was “Race Labor Leaving. Much Concern over Possible Shortage of Labor—Exodus Steady—Treatment Doesn’t Warrant Staying.” The paragraph read: “Selma, Ala., Feb. 4—The white people of the extreme South are becoming alarmed over the steady moving of race families out of the mineral belt. Hundreds of families have left during the past few months and the stream is continuing. Every effort is being made to have them stay, but the discrimination and the race prejudice continues as strong as ever. Not many years ago there was a dearth of labor in this part of the country and the steerage passengers from Europe were sought. They cannot do the work of the race men, as they do not understand. Local editorials in white papers are pleading with the business men to hold the race men if possible.”
7 “treatment doesn’t warrant staying”: Ibid.
8 the long and violent hangover: Some historians have termed the period between Reconstruction and the early twentieth century the Nadir. See Rayford Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought, The Nadir: 1887–1901 (New York: Dial Press, 1954).
9 “I find a worse state”: Robert Preston Brooks, The Agrarian Revolution in Georgia, 1865–1912, doctoral dissertation (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1914; reprinted New York: AMS Press, 1971), pp. 413–14.
10 “They will almost”: “Laborers Wanted,” Southern Cultivator, March 1867, a letter from a writer identified by the initials G.A.N. of Warrenton, Georgia, dated February 2, 1867, APS Online, p. 69.
11 The fight over: Harvey Fireside, Separate and Unequal: Homer Plessy and the Supreme Court Decision That Legalized Racism (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004).
12 Fourteenth Amendment: The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, of 1868, enac
ted to establish the rights of freed slaves after the Civil War, reads as follows: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
13 Fifteenth Amendment: The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, of 1880, granting freed slaves the right to vote, reads: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
14 “If it is necessary”: Ray Stannard Baker, Following the Color Line (New York: Doubleday and Page, 1908), p. 245 for Hoke Smith quotation, p. 246 for Vardaman remark on lynching.
15 “The only effect”: Jackson (Mississippi) Weekly Clarion-Ledger, July 30, 1903, quoted in The Oratory of Southern Demagogues, ed. Calvin McLeod Logue and Howard Dorgan (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), p. 73.
16 Fifteen thousand: “Summary Punishment Administered by Mob,” Hobart (Oklahoma) Republican, May 16, 1916, p. 1.
17 “My son can’t learn”: “Waco Horror Stirs to Action,” Savannah Tribune, July 8, 1916, page 4. “Supreme Penalty for Murder Paid by Negro Ghoul,” Monroe News-Star, March 5, 1935, p. 1—an example of newspaper headlines of the Migration era in the town where Pershing Foster grew up.
18 someone was hanged: Arthur F. Raper, The Tragedy of Lynching (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933), p. 36.
19 “insult to a white person”: Ibid.
20 stealing seventy-five cents: Baker, Following the Color Line, p. 176.
21 “perhaps most”: Herbert Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), p. 32.
22 Soon Klansmen: Documented History of the Incident Which Occurred at Rosewood, Florida, in January 1923, an investigation submitted to the Florida Board of Regents, December 22, 1993, p. 2. This seventy-nine-page report, commissioned by the State of Florida and conducted by a team of historians from the University of Florida, the State University of Florida, and Florida A&M University, provides a detailed account of the mob attack on the colored town of Rosewood and of the political and racial climate leading to the massacre, including the rebirth and rise to prominence of the Klan.
23 “was much less”: Wilbur J. Cash, The Mind of the South (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1941), pp. 124–25.
24 White citizens, caught up: The years and locations of the major riots of this era were: Wilmington, North Carolina (1898); Atlanta (1906); Springfield, Illinois (1908); East St. Louis, Illinois (1917); and Charleston; Nashville; Omaha; Elaine, Arkansas; Longview, Texas; Chicago; and Washington, D.C., among other places, in 1919, the year following the end of World War I.
25 “I hope and trust”: Frederick Douglass, “The Lessons of the Hour,” an address to the Metropolitan A.M.E. Church, Washington, D.C., delivered January 9, 1894 (Baltimore: Press of Thomas & Evans, 1894), p. 23.
26 It was during that time: See Gilbert Thomas Stephenson, “The Separation of the Races in Public Conveyances,” The American Political Science Review 3, no. 2 (May 1909): 181 on the origins of the term “Jim Crow” and the first Jim Crow laws in Massachusetts, 1841. See also Ronald L. F. Davis, “Creating Jim Crow,” http://www.jimcrowhistory.org/history/creating2.htm, as well as David Hinckley, “Natural Rhythm: Daddy Rice and the Original Jim Crow,” New York Daily News, May 27, 2004. Mississippi, in 1865, required separate seating for all colored people except those “traveling with their mistresses, in the capacity of nurses.” Florida, in 1865, made no such allowances and punished people of either race with standing in a “pillory for one hour” or a whipping “not exceeding thirty nine stripes.” Texas, in 1866, simply required every railroad company to “attach to each passenger train run by said company one car for the special accommodation of Freedmen.”
27 Streetcars: C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 97–102.
28 “The measure of”: Howard Thurman, The Luminous Darkness: A Personal Interpretation of the Anatomy of Segregation and a Ground of Hope (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), pp. 70–71. Thurman, a prominent theologian in the mid–twentieth century and a migrant himself, was born in Daytona Beach, Florida, in 1899. He was the dean of Rankin Chapel at Howard University and later the dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University, where he became a mentor of Martin Luther King, Jr., while King was a seminary student at the university.
29 “his fate”: David L. Cohn, God Shakes Creation (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1935), p. 156.
30 “a premature”: Philip S. Foner, ed., The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, vol. 4, specifically from “The Negro Exodus from the Gulf States, an Address Before Convention of the American Social Science Association, Saratoga Springs, New York, September 12, 1879” (New York: International Publishers, 1955), p. 336.
31 “The Negroes just quietly”: U.S. Department of Labor, Division of Negro Economics, Negro Migration in 1916–17 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1919), p. 95.
32 “You tell us”: Ibid., p. 31.
33 “stabbed the next day”: Ibid., p. 95.
34 “The sentiment”: Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of Alabama, 1901, 4, p. 4441.
35 “It is too much”: U.S. Department of Labor, Negro Migration in 1916–17, p. 13.
36 These were the facts: See Baker, Following the Color Line, pp. 29–36, for description of segregated elevators, waiting rooms, libraries, parks, and saloons and streetcar protocols. See Bertram Wilbur Doyle, The Etiquette of Race Relations in the South: A Study in Social Control (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1937), p. 147 (rules on amusement parks, theaters, and playhouses); p. 148 (rules on boarding and exiting streetcars); pp. 149–150 (rules on waiting rooms at depots and the protocol of colored people being served at ticket windows); p. 151 (different hours at colored and white schools, segregated ambulances); p. 152 (segregated hearses and cemeteries). See William H. Chafe, Raymond Gavins, and Robert Korstad, eds., Remembering Jim Crow (New York: New Press, 2001), p. 110, on separate windows for car license plates in Indianola, Mississippi.
37 In 1958, a new: Cal Brumley, “Segregation Costs: Dixie Firms Find Them More a Burden as Racial Tension Grows,” The Wall Street Journal, December 17, 1957, p. 1.
38 separate tellers: See Chicago Defender, March 21, 1931, p. 3, on separate teller for colored people at an Atlanta bank.
39 Colored people had: Stetson Kennedy, Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1959), p. 227.
40 the conventional rules: Charles S. Johnson, Patterns of Negro Segregation (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1943), pp. 124–26. Johnson devoted an entire section to racial etiquette on the highway. “When driving their own cars,” he wrote, “they were expected to maintain their role as Negros and in all cases to give whites the right-of-way.” He later added, “If there is any doubt about whose turn it is to make a move in traffic, the turn is assumed to be the white person’s.”
41 If he reached: Hortense Powdermaker, After Freedom: A Cultural Study of the Deep South (New York: Viking Press, 1939), p. 49. See also Kennedy, Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A., pp. 221–23.
42 In everyday interactions: Hugh Stephen Whitaker, “A Case Study in Southern Justice: The Emmett Till Case,” unpublished dissertation for the Graduate School of Florida State University, August 1963. See p. 11 for description of taboos between blacks and whites in the South through the 1960s.
43 The consequences: James C. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 213.
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br /> 44 It was against the law: Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, pp. 117–18, on Arkansas law on segregated racetrack betting and Birmingham ban on integrated playing of checkers.
45 At saloons in Atlanta: Baker, Following the Color Line, p. 36.
46 There were white parking spaces: “Confusion with Jim Crow Bible,” The Raleigh Evening Times, March 29, 1906, p. 1. The story describes an incident during the trial of a black schoolteacher accused of disposing of a mule on which there was a mortgage. A defense witness, who was colored but looked white, took the stand and was being sworn in when the judge told the sheriff the man had been given the wrong Bible. “That one over this is the one for the use of the white people,” Judge Amistead Jones said. “Not that I am a stickler about such matters, but if there are to be different Bibles kept for the races, then you must not get them mixed that way. Have a different place for them, and keep them there. Then such mistakes as this will not be made.” Also practiced in Atlanta, and thus likely elsewhere in the South, as described by Baker in Following the Color Line, p. 36.
GEORGE SWANSON STARLING
47 His world is the basement: Unless otherwise indicated, all references to George Starling are based on numerous interviews and conversations with him from June 1995 to June 1998.
48 “the caste barrier”: John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1937), p. 65.
49 “The question of: J. W.” Johnson, Along This Way (New York: Viking Press, 1933), p. 56.
The Warmth of Other Suns Page 65