The Warmth of Other Suns

by Isabel Wilkerson

  50 In some parts: Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (New York: Knopf, 1977), p. 83; original citation: Henry Adams, Senate Report 693, 2, p. 104.

  51 only a quarter: Hortense Powdermaker, After Freedom: A Cultural History of the Deep South (New York: Viking Press, 1939), p. 86.

  52 “The Negro farm hand”: “The Negro Exodus,” Montgomery Advertiser, a letter from J. Q. Johnson, pastor of St. Paul A.M.E. Church in Columbia, Tennessee, April 27, 1917, p. 4.

  53 “One reason for preferring”: Powdermaker, After Freedom, p. 86.

  54 “in a hurrying time”: Theodore Dwight Weld, American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (New York: The American Anti-Slavery Society, 1839), p. 38.

  55 Florida went farther: See Julia Floyd Smith, Slavery and Plantation Growth in Antebellum Florida, 1821–1860 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1973), p. 102, on punishment for slaves; p. 121 on law requiring free blacks to register or face arbitrary reenslavement.

  56 Florida, in the early winter: The southern states did not all secede at the same time. There were two waves of secession following the November 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln and a Republican majority in Congress, portending abolition of a state’s right to, among other things, maintain or expand slavery. The first wave of secession included seven slave states, beginning with South Carolina on December 20, 1860, followed by Mississippi on January 9, 1861; Florida on January 10, 1861; Alabama on January 11, 1861; Georgia on January 19, 1861; Louisiana on January 26, 1861; and Texas on February 1, 1861. The second wave of secession came after the outbreak of war at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, in April 1861. In the second wave were the marginally more moderate, previously fence-sitting slave states of Virginia, April 17, 1861; Arkansas, May 6, 1861; Tennessee, May 7, 1861; and North Carolina, May 20, 1861. The Confederacy also claimed portions of modern-day Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona, as well as the support of Missouri and Kentucky, slaveholding border states that did not formally secede.

  57 “the great truth”: “The Southern Confederacy. Slavery the Basis of the New Government, An Official Manifesto. Speech of Vice-President Stephens,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 28, 1861, p. 1. Stephens delivered this extemporaneous speech in Savannah, Georgia, on March 21, 1861, after the first Confederate states had seceded from the Union and drafted the Confederate Constitution. That document was largely based on the U.S. Constitution, setting forth three branches of government with duties nearly identical to those in the Union. The Confederate Constitution states in Part 4, Section 9: “No bill of attainder, ex-post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.” The constitution was adopted by what was known as the Congress of the Confederate States (at the time, South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas) at a joint meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, on March 11, 1861, precisely one week after Lincoln took the oath of office on March 4, 1861.

  58 “if any negro”: Gilbert Thomas Stephenson, “The Separation of the Races in Public Conveyances,” The American Political Science Review 3, no. 2 (1909): 181.

  59 “anything that was black”: Documented History of the Incident Which Occurred at Rosewood, Florida, in January 1923 (submitted to the Florida Board of Regents, December 22, 1993), p. 19.

  60 single worst act: James R. McGovern, Anatomy of a Lynching: The Killing of Claude Neal (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), pp. 52–66.

  61 It was the early morning: “Group Kills Negro; Disappoints Crowd,” Associated Press, October 28, 1934; appeared in The New York Times, October 28, 1934.

  62 The crowd grew so large: See The Lynching of Claude Neal (New York: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1934), p. 2, for an account of the lynching. Also McGovern, Anatomy of a Lynching, pp. 79–90, for details of mob behavior, the lynching, and the rioting by whites after Neal’s death.

  63 Soon afterward: “Lynch Victim’s Innocence Apparent as Father of Girl Is Sentenced,” Pittsburgh Courier, June 15, 1935, p. A4. The Neal lynching cast a lingering cloud over race relations in Jackson County, Florida, decades after the killing. James R. McGovern, a historian examining the case in the early 1980s, found people who had clear memories of the lynching and its aftermath but were reluctant to speak about it out of fear of reprisal. This was especially true of black residents, one of whom, in finally relenting to give an interview, said, “Well, if I am going down, it will be for a good cause.” McGovern, Anatomy of a Lynching, p. xi.

  64 “never had a negro”: Ben Green, Before His Time: The Untold Story of Harry T. Moore, America’s First Civil Rights Martyr (New York: Free Press, 1999), p. 244.

  65 “he might be accused”: McGovern, Anatomy of a Lynching, p. 6.

  ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER

  66 The paneled door: Unless otherwise indicated, all references to Robert Pershing Foster are based on numerous interviews and visits with him from April 1996 to July 1997.

  67 1,139 pupils: See “Louisiana States,” Chicago Defender, October 10, 1931, p. 19, regarding the number of students at Monroe Colored High.

  68 the church broke into an uproar: “Two Murdered in Baptist Church Riot: Four Others Wounded During Free for All Fight,” Chicago Defender, September 17, 1932, p. 1.

  69 “the doors of the church”: “Eight Wounded, One Killed in Church Fight,” Atlanta Daily World, September 8, 1932, p. 2.

  70 In Louisiana in the 1930s: D. T. Blose and H. F. Alves, Biennial Survey of Education in the U.S., Statistics of State School Systems, 1937–38, U.S. Office of Education Bulletin, 1940, no. 2, p. 137. Cited in Charles S. Johnson, Patterns of Negro Segregation (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1943), p. 16.

  71 The disparity in pay: Thomas M. Shapiro, The Hidden Cost of Being African-American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 47.

  72 lopsided division of resources: W. D. Weatherford and Charles S. Johnson, Race Relations: Adjustment of Whites and Negroes in the United States (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1934), pp. 358–59, on disparity of investment in white schools and colored schools in the South.

  73 “The money allocated”: Robert A. Margo, Race and Schooling in the South, 1880–1950: An Economic History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 44, citing Carleton Washburne, Louisiana Looks at Its Schools (Baton Rouge: Louisiana Educational Survey Commission, 1942), p. 111.

  74 “If these Negroes become”: see Ray Stannard Baker, Following the Color Line (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1908), p. 295, for quote lamenting the effect of education for black southerners.

  75 Sherman, Texas: Arthur F. Raper, The Tragedy of Lynching (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933; reprinted Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2003), pp. 319–55.

  76 And I’d whisper: Mahalia Jackson with Evan McLeod Wylie, Movin’ On Up (New York: Hawthorne Books, 1966), p. 36.

  77 Gilbert and Percy Elie: Interview with Gilbert Elie, who migrated from Grenada, Mississippi, to Akron, Ohio. Conducted in Grenada, Mississippi, May 29, 1996.

  78 Hundreds of miles away: Interview with Virginia Hall, a migrant from North Carolina, in Brooklyn, New York, February 22, 1998.

  A BURDENSOME LABOR

  79 “one of the most backbreaking”: Donald Holley, The Second Great Emancipation: The Mechanical Cotton Picker, Black Migration and How They Shaped the Modern South (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000), p. xii.

  80 It took some seventy: See ibid., p. 9, for a description of the basic mechanics of picking and the number of bolls per pound of seed cotton.

  81 “begin to dream”: Rupert B. Vance, Human Factors in Cotton Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1929), p. 135, quoting the author Henry K. Webster from “Slaves of Cotton,” American Magazine, July 1906, p. 19.

  82 “The first horn”: Ulrich B. Phillips, in Vance, Human Factors in Cotton Culture, p. 47.

  83 Sometime in
the 1930s: Interviews with Lasalle Frelix, a migrant from Brookhaven, Mississippi, in Chicago, 1996.

  84 A bale of cotton: William C. Holley and Lloyd E. Arnold, Changes in Technology and Labor Requirements in Crop Production: Cotton, National Research Project Report no. A-7 (Philadelphia: Works Progress Administration, September 1937), pp. 19–54. Also Ronald E. Seavoy, The American Peasantry: Southern Agricultural Labor and Its Legacy: A Study in Political Economy, 1850–1995 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998), pp. 37–47, cited in Holley, The Second Great Emancipation, p. 56.

  85 The other brother: Interviews with Reuben Blye in Eustis, Florida, July 1997 and July 1998.

  86 In North Carolina: Gilbert Thomas Stephenson, “The Separation of the Races in Public Conveyances,” The American Political Science Review 3, no. 2 (May 1909): 200–201.

  87 standing in the way: David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), pp. 491–92.

  88 “The result of this action”: Ibid., p. 495; Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 22; W. E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (New York: International Publishers, 1968), p. 323.

  89 “There was no earthly”: Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, pp. 493–95.

  90 His northern friends thought: Ibid., p. 495, citing Shirley Graham Du Bois, His Day Is Marching On: A Memoir of W. E. B. Du Bois (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1971), p. 71.

  91 In the winter of 1919: Richard Panek, “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cosmologist,” The New York Times, July 25, 1999, available at www.nytimes.com.

  92 It would confirm: Alexander S. Sharov and Igor D. Novikov, Edwin Hubble, the Discoverer of the Big Bang Universe, trans. Vitaly Kisin (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 9, 10, 29–35.

  THE AWAKENING

  93 You sleep over a volcano: Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 132–33. Gilmore recounts a debate on a summer night in 1901 in Charlotte, North Carolina, between two well-educated young women, Addie Sagers and Laura Arnold, on the topic “Is the South the Best Home for the Negro?” Sagers argued against going north, where, she said, the only jobs open to blacks were “bell boy, waiter, cook or house maid,” and where northern unions excluded blacks from their ranks. Arnold, her debate opponent, railed against the violence, segregation, and disenfranchisement of blacks in the South. She agreed that “the unknown was frightening,” but added, “if the Puritans could cross the oceans in small boats, surely North Carolina’s African-Americans could board northbound trains.” Gilmore notes that Arnold’s “received more points than any other speech that night.” Two weeks later, Arnold “took her own advice and moved to Washington, D.C.”

  94 I am in the darkness: Emmett J. Scott, “Additional Letters of Negro Migrants, 1916–1918,” The Journal of Negro History 4, no. 4 (October 1919): 412–45, quote on p. 440. This letter, dated May 13, 1917, was one of several hundred letters from anxious black southerners, written primarily to the Chicago Defender and collected and published by Emmett Scott in two series of articles at the end of World War I.

  95 a fight broke out: Alfred McClung Lee and Norman D. Humphrey, Race Riot (New York: Dryden Press, 1943), p. 26.

  96 The Detroit riots: Ibid., p. 28.

  97 A colored teacher: William H. Chafe, Raymond Gavins, and Robert Korstad, eds., Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South (New York: New Press, in association with Lyndhurst Books of the Center for Documentary Studies of Duke University), p. 201.

  98 Enlisting widespread interest: “Alice Clarissa Clement to Wed Robert Foster: She Is a Spelman 1941 Graduate,” Chicago Defender, June 21, 1941, p. 18.

  99 The Atlanta Daily World: “Miss Clement Is Wed to Robert P. Foster Tuesday,” Atlanta Daily World, December 25, 1941, p. 3.

  100 “because they were taking”: Baker, Following the Color Line, p. 250.

  101 In the spring of 1919: “Army Uniform Cost Soldier His Life,” Chicago Defender, April 5, 1919, p. 1.

  102 Pitocin: The use of pitocin, a synthetic form of the hormone oxytocin, has grown more controversial in the decades since the Korean War, as more women seek natural childbirth with as few artificial inducements as possible. The emphasis on natural childbirth was not the prevailing view during the time of Pershing Foster’s army service and was in fact considered the slower, more natural, and perhaps more progressive alternative to the cesareans preferred and commonly performed by many doctors of the era.

  103 fifty million dollars a year: Citrus Growing in Florida, Bulletin no. 2, New Series, State of Florida, Department of Agriculture, October 1941, p. 5.

  104 It was an illegal form: Terrell H. Shofner, “The Legacy of Racial Slavery: Free Enterprise and Forced Labor in Florida in the 1940s,” The Journal of Southern History 47, no. 3 (August 1981): 414–16. The case against the Sugar Plantation Company in the Everglades was ultimately unsuccessful in the southern court system, which was sympathetic to the planters and hostile to the federal government, and may have in fact emboldened some planters to continue forcing colored people to work against their will. But it offered evidence and made public the extent of the alleged abuses. The company managed to evade prosecution when a Florida judge quashed the indictment.

  105 Willis Virgil McCall: John Hill, “A Southern Sheriff’s Law and Disorder,” The St. Petersburg Times, November 28, 1999. See also Greg Lamm, “Willis V. McCall: Blood, Hatred, Fear: The Reign of a Traditional Southern Sheriff,” Leesburg (Fla.) Commercial, May 20, 1987, p. A1.

  106 In February: Shofner, “The Legacy of Racial Slavery,” pp. 421–422.

  107 McCall struck: “Terrorism Being Used to Frustrate Justice,” The Atlanta Daily World, June 30, 1945, p. 1.

  108 “leaving all their possessions”: “Harlem Pair Tells of McCall’s Acts,” New York Amsterdam News, November 24, 1951, p. 1.

  109 “returns to the grower”: “Lake County Growers Shown Management Theories in Grove Tour,” The Sunday Orlando Sentinel Star, December 21, 1941, p. 22.

  110 four dollars and forty cents: Ibid., pp. 30–36.

  111 2.6 million citrus trees: “Citrus Shipments Up 15% over Last Week; Tangerines in Van,” The Sunday Orlando Sentinel Star, November 30, 1941, p. 10. See also “Growing Conditions,” The Sunday Orlando Sentinel Star, December 28, 1941, p. 19. For ranking of citrus industry by county, see Fruit and Vegetable Crops of Florida: A Compendium of Information on the Fruits and Vegetables Grown in Florida (Tallahassee: Florida State Department of Agriculture, August 15, 1945).

  112 “the killing of a Negro”: Wilbur J. Cash, The Mind of the South (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1941), p. 129.

  113 Later, in 1879: Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas After Reconstruction (New York: Knopf, 1977), pp. 109–10, 184–85.

  114 Immigration plunged: Florette Henri, Black Migration: Movement North, 1900–1920 (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1975), p. 52. Original data on immigration of 1,218,480 in 1914 plunging to 110,618 in 1918 from the U.S. Census.

  115 So the North: David L. Cohn, God Shakes Creation (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1935), p. 335.

  116 The recruiters would stride: James R. Grossman, Land of Hope (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 70.

  117 “As the North”: “Why the Negroes Go North,” Literary Digest 77, no. 7 (May 19, 1923): 14, quoting The Times-Picayune (New Orleans). Appears in Grossman, Land of Hope, p. 43.

  118 “Where shall we get”: Montgomery Advertiser, quoted in “Negro Moving North,” Literary Digest 53, no. 15 (October 7, 1916): 877; from Grossman, Land of Hope, p. 40.

  119 “Black labor”: Columbia State, quoted in Emmett J. Scott, Negro Migration During the War (
New York: Oxford University Press, 1920), p. 156, and Grossman, Land of Hope, p. 40.

  120 “It is the life”: Report of the Industrial Commission on Agriculture and Agricultural Labor, vol. 10 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1901), pp. 382–83, 518; cited in Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), p. 27.

  121 “With all our crimes”: Cohn, God Shakes Creation, p. 205.

  122 “We must have”: The Macon Telegraph, September 15, 1916, p. 4.

  123 “Why hunt for the cause”: Montgomery Advertiser, a letter in response to “Exodus of the Negroes to Be Probed,” September 1916.

  124 “If you thought”: George Brown Tindall, Emergence of the New South, 1913–1945 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), p. 149; cited in Henri, Black Migration, p. 75.

  125 “Conditions recently”: U.S. Department of Labor, Division of Negro Economics, Negro Migration in 1916–1917 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1919), p. 63.

  126 Macon, Georgia, required: St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945), p. 59.

  127 “Every Negro”: U.S. Department of Labor, Negro Migration in 1916–1917, p. 12.

  128 The chief of police: Grossman, Land of Hope, p. 44.

  129 In Brookhaven, Mississippi: Scott, Negro Migration During the War, p. 77.

  130 In Albany, Georgia: U.S. Department of Labor, Negro Migration in 1916–17, p. 110.

  131 In Summit, Mississippi: Grossman, Land of Hope, p. 48, from Junius B. Wood, The Negro in Chicago (Chicago: Chicago Daily News, 1916), p. 9; Scott, Negro Migration, p. 73; Chicago Defender, August 26, 1916; Emmett J. Scott, “Additional Letters of Negro Migrants of 1916–1918,” Journal of Negro History, October 1919, p. 451; William F. Holmes, “Labor Agents and the Georgia Exodus,” South Atlantic Quarterly 79 (1980), pp. 445–46, on dispersal of Georgia migrants at train station.