White Rage
Page 5
A lynch mob had already snatched her husband, Hayes, strung him from a tree, and let his body rot, dangling from that limb all weekend. Eight months pregnant with two small children, whom she had to send into hiding, she was enraged that he had been killed for no good reason. Feisty, strong-willed, and stubborn, Mary Turner threatened that “if she knew the parties who were in the mob she would have warrants sworn out against them.”4 She would never get the chance. On Sunday, the lynchers came for her.
They dragged Mary to a tree, stripped her, tied her ankles together, and strung her upside down. The men ran to their cars, brought back gasoline, and began “to roast her alive.” Then they saw her naked, eight-month-pregnant stomach convulsing. That only sent the mob, made up of several of Hampton Smith’s brothers, as well as a clerk in the post office, an auditor for Standard Oil, a furniture salesman, and several farmers, into a deeper frenzy, as one man took out his knife and sliced away at her charred flesh until the baby, now ripped out of the womb, fell to the ground and gave two cries. Someone in the lynch party then stepped forward and smashed the child’s head into the red Georgia dirt with the heel of his boot.5
In one form or another, this scene was repeated over and over again throughout the South, including the lack of consequences: no arrests, trials, convictions, or prison sentences for murdering black people, even in broad daylight.6 The economic, political, and legal vulnerability meant that no one, not even an eight-month-old fetus, was safe. Blacks in southern Georgia knew it. Within two months of Mary Turner’s lynching, more than five hundred had already moved away.7 They joined more than one million African Americans who were determined to leave the stultifying air of Jim Crow and, as one group fleeing Louisiana and heading North confided to W.E.B. Du Bois, “run any risk to get where they could breathe freer.”8
The risks they took were, indeed, great. It required an unfathomable amount of courage. It required as well a level of cunning and guile that many, consistently underestimating African Americans, didn’t believe they had. The states and their supporters had erected a series of traps, sinkholes, and barriers both legal and extralegal, to contain this clearly oppressed population. Yet, like those in Mary Turner’s Georgia, they plotted their exodus. Southerner and novelist Richard Wright evoked perhaps most succinctly the desperation and the determination fueling it all: “I’ve got to get away; I can’t stay here.”9
They would soon find out that the stories of the North as the promised land, where drive, hard work, and ambition would be rewarded regardless of color, had little to no relationship whatsoever to the actual conditions above the Mason-Dixon Line.10 Robert S. Abbott, owner of the Chicago Defender, the premier black newspaper, had experienced “firsthand just how cruel the North could be” as his education and ambition translated into nothing more than years of closed doors and poverty.11 Still, the mirage of the promised land coupled with the reality of conditions in the South fueled the drive to leave.
Migration is the story of America. It is foundational. From Pilgrims fleeing oppression in Europe, to the millions who took advantage of the Homestead Act to “go West,” to the erection of the Statue of Liberty in New York’s harbor, all the way up to the U.S. Congress tying Most Favored Nation status to the human right of Soviet Jews to emigrate, the movement of people fleeing tyranny, violence, and withered opportunities is sacrosanct to Americans. In fact, “freedom of movement” is a treasured right in the nation’s political lexicon.
Yet, when more than 1.5 million African Americans left the land below the Mason-Dixon Line, white Southern elites raged with cool, calculated efficiency. This was no lynch mob seeking vengeance; rather, these were mayors, governors, legislators, business leaders, and police chiefs who bristled at “the first step … the nation’s servant class ever took without asking.”12 In the wood-paneled rooms of city halls, in the chambers of city councils, in the marbled state legislatures, and in sheriffs’ offices, white government officials, working hand in hand with plantation, lumber mill, and mine owners, devised an array of obstacles and laws to stop African Americans, as U.S. citizens, from exercising the right to find better jobs, to search for good schools, indeed simply to escape the ever-present terror of lynch mobs. In short, the powerful, respectable elements of the white South rose up, in the words of then-secretary of labor William B. Wilson, to stop the Great Migration and interfere with “the natural right of workers to move from place to place at their own discretion.”13
The Great Migration had been spurred initially by Northern industries’ desperate need for labor. World War I, which began in August 1914, had exponentially increased orders for manufactured goods—guns, battleships, steel, etc.—while simultaneously reducing the traditional workforce of European immigrants responsible for producing those goods. The flow of immigrants dropped from more than 1.2 million in 1914 to just over 300,000 in 1915.14 Business leaders, looking for an untapped source of labor, soon realized that there was a vast pool of African Americans who previously had been shut out of the industrial workforce. Corporations like the Pennsylvania Railroad Company hired labor agents to go below the Mason-Dixon Line and convince black people to abandon Dixie and come north.15 For African Americans, this was a chance to escape, as Du Bois said, the “Hell” of the South.16
The inferno was nearly unbearable. In the wake of the Civil War, government and judicial officials had decimated the right to vote, the economic provisions of forty acres and a mule, the chance for good public schools, and equality before the law. Despite the Thirteenth Amendment, African Americans had virtually no protection from a system that came painfully close to re-creating the exploitation and brutality of chattel slavery.17 In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, white Southerners had saturated the old Confederacy in black blood. By 1920, in fact, there had been more than a thousand lynchings per decade; and in the rebel South, almost 90 percent of those killed were African American. Five states—Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, Alabama, and Louisiana—accounted for more than half of all lynchings in the nation. One of the most macabre formats for the murders was a spectacle lynching, which advertised the killing of a black person and provided special promotional trains to bring the audience, including women and children, to the slaughter. These gruesome events were standard family entertainment; severed body parts became souvenirs and decorations hung proudly in homes. And while African American women were not spared, they were particularly vulnerable to systematic sexual violence as rape became part of a white man’s “rite of passage.” All the while, the newly freed found themselves subject to barren education deserts, and barely (if at all) remunerated labor.18 Ambition was forbidden.
African Americans knew all too well the “ ‘Dixie limit’ beyond which no black could advance.” “Whenever the colored man prospered too fast in this country,” complained Ned Cobb, a black farmer and former sharecropper, “they worked every figure to cut you down, cut your britches off you.” He understood that his success, indeed, the fact that he had acquired some land and managed to not be in debt to local whites, made him a threat. “They looked hard, didn’t stop lookin … they didn’t like to see a nigger with too much; they didn’t like it one bit and it caused ’em to throw a slang word about a ‘nigger’ havin all this, that, and the other.” Whites, Cobb explained, just “hated to see niggers livin like people.” Similarly, an Alpharetta, Georgia, farmer, who just wanted to “be free … and vote free,” explained that the South was no place for an honest, hardworking, ambitious man. “Better not accumulate much,” he warned, because “no matter how hard and honest you work for it, as they—well, you can’t enjoy it.” In that stammer lay the bone-chilling truth that signs of prosperity could attract nightriders and the bloodletting, torture, and land seizure that inevitably followed.19 Equally vicious was the practice of “whitecapping,” which, since the horrors of Bosnia and Srebrenica, we now recognize as ethnic cleansing: In several Georgia and Mississippi counties, where plantations did not dominate the economy, local white
s maimed, murdered, and terrorized African Americans and, as the persecuted fled, seized all the land until one could “ride for miles and not see a black face.”20
In other areas dependent on the sharecropping system, a different type of persecution prevailed: peonage.21 Fewer than 20 percent of all sharecroppers ever made a profit at the end of the year, with the rest consigned to an ever-widening cavern of debt slavery. The sharecropping system required those who worked a farm to purchase all their supplies and foodstuffs from the landowner, regardless of price or the staggering interest rates charged. At the end of the year, the accrued “debts” would be deducted from whatever amount the harvest had brought and the difference paid to the sharecropper. It was a system designed for abuse. The landowner having, as often as not, rigged the accounting, charged inflated prices for goods that were commonly never received, and engaged in systematized fraud. Most sharecroppers, therefore, never saw a penny and instead owed the employer. Thus, they would start the next year in the hole paying off debts they had never actually incurred. Those who did make a profit earned only between nine and forty-eight cents a day for a year’s hard labor in the fields.22 To challenge the system, however, could easily result in another lynching, spectacle or otherwise. The point was to send a powerful signal to the larger African American community that speaking up for one’s rights and demanding appropriate compensation was a death sentence.23
These were the conditions that finally led the Chicago Defender to exclaim that African Americans “are going north to get some real freedom.” Under no illusions about the conditions in Chicago and elsewhere above the Mason-Dixon Line, but with the labor shortage crisis growing because of the war in Europe, editor Robert Abbott deduced, “Now is our opportunity.” Therefore, the Chicago Defender exhorted that the region where 90 percent of blacks currently lived should be considered uninhabitable. African Americans, the newspaper insisted, “are tired of lynchings and burnings in the south” and, equally important, “the lack of education.”24
The latter grievance cut particularly keenly. Southern whites’ belief that education spoiled the slave remained virtually unchanged well into the twentieth century.25 In one county in Mississippi, 350 black children had only three teachers among them. The low priority the government placed on schools for African American children was reflected not only in the paucity of resources but in the truncated school year as well. The academic term for black children in Dawson County, Georgia, was six weeks. In Mississippi, because children were essential for picking cotton and would not be released until the last harvest was in, African Americans’ schools routinely opened as late as mid-November.26 Beyond sick and tired of the anemic and inadequate public education designed for blacks, African Americans were willing to go north to find good schools for their children.27
And so they collected what pennies they had to buy train tickets out of the South. They accepted free passes from labor agents for train rides. They waited anxiously for fare sent from relatives who had already made it north. They hid their Sunday best beneath their work clothes so as not to tip off their employers that they were leaving that night. They abandoned their tools in the fields and even their final paychecks to avoid alerting the bosses to their escape plans. They hitched rides on freight trains. They scoured the Chicago Defender for information on housing and jobs. All told, the Great Migration moved nearly 10 percent of the black population out of the South.28
When five hundred thousand moved above the Mason-Dixon Line between 1917 and 1918, the South became alarmed.29 As more and more fled, the Georgia Bankers Association, citing a figure of more than twenty-seven million dollars in losses, described “the exodus as comparable only to Sherman’s march to the sea in its damage to agriculture in the state.”30 It is easy to see why. Black labor was the foundation of the region’s economy, and African Americans were also the sine qua non of the South’s social and political structure.31 Chattel slavery had marked blacks at the bottom—economically, politically, socially, culturally, physically, and intellectually. The base. If blacks extricated themselves from the region, as they were clearly doing—and without the approval of whites—then the entire socioeconomic structure of the South dependent on the support of that base was in danger of collapsing.
Thus, while African Americans understood the exodus as grabbing at a chance for freedom and equality, white Southerners saw black advancement and independence as a threat to their culture and, indeed, their economy. For years, political and economic elites had deluded themselves into believing that African Americans were somehow satisfied with the brutal inequality of the status quo; comfortable with having their wages stolen year after year; pleased to be trapped in debt slavery; OK with black women having absolutely no right to their bodies; and happy to have their children illiterate, uneducated, and futureless. They, therefore, had no framework by which to understand the Great Migration, no grasp of what could lead a black man like Shreveport, Louisiana’s Isaac West to assert that he would “just as soon be in hell” as remain in that state.32
Given African Americans’ supposed contentment with Jim Crow, officials throughout Dixie were initially certain that this flight north could happen only at the instigation of outside agitators. Clearly, “somebody … had to be stirring up local blacks and causing them to leave the South.”33 One of the most influential newspapers in the region, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, singled out “unscrupulous … labor agents from the North” as the culprit. Sounding the alarm because “the movement has reached immense proportions,” the newspaper declared that “the drain has, of late, become so great … as to call for action.”34
White reaction, with its veneer of legality and respectability, answered, rising up to stop African Americans from controlling their own destiny. Soon the South was blanketed with anti-enticement statutes reminiscent of the Black Codes that again leveled exorbitant licensing fees and chain-gang prison sentences for those “luring” blacks away from their employers. In Macon, Georgia, policymakers “exacted $25,000 for a labor recruiting license,” while also requiring “recommendation by ten ministers, ten manufacturers, and twenty-five other businessmen.”35 Not only was it highly unlikely that forty-five pillars of the community would vouch for a labor agent, but also the mandatory licensing fee—the equivalent in 2014 of $2.76 million—was pure extortion.36 Jacksonville, Florida’s city council required a thousand-dollar license. Failure to pay while recruiting the town’s black workers to leave could result in a six-hundred-dollar fine and sixty days in jail.37 The Georgia legislature considered it a felony punishable by three to seven years in prison for any labor agent who sought to entice blacks out of the state to work elsewhere.38 In September 1916, the Montgomery City Commission enacted a law “that any person who would entice, persuade or influence any laborer or other person to leave the city of Montgomery for the purpose of being employed at any other place as a laborer” would be fined one hundred dollars and face six months’ hard labor, or both.39
These were not idle threats. Suspected labor agents were arrested routinely whenever a trainload of African Americans left or when the fields were empty and there was no one to work the land.40 The Reverend D. W. Johnson, a black labor agent in Mississippi, barely escaped detection, the sting of the whip, or worse for handing out free railroad passes north to African Americans. “About twelve o’ clock,” he recounted:
that door swung open and there was two great big, three great big red-faced guys … Now they had a bullwhip on they shoulder and a rope and a gun in each of their hands. And those pistols, them barrels looked like shotguns, you know? They gonna kill every so-and-so Negro that they found had a pass. Well, so they searched us one by one and they searched me … Had they pulled off my shoe, that’d been it for me. Because they swo’ they was gonna kill the one who had it. Yeah, it was in the toe of my shoe.41
City councils, state legislatures, and police forces were determined to punish those, who, in a capitalist economy, offered African Americans a bet
ter employment opportunity. The legalistic language about fines and prison sentences masked a barely contained fury at the dawning realization that blacks believed they could leave the South or the rural areas for decent wages, functioning schools, and more freedom. African Americans simply did not have that right: That was the message as white authorities went after labor agents.
When it became clear, however, that the exodus showed no signs of slowing down, the white elites searched for yet another outside agitator and found the most unapologetic, viscerally anti-South black newspaper published, the Chicago Defender.42 Central to the Great Migration, the Chicago Defender served as one of the primary conduits of information about opportunities up north. Using a far-flung distribution system of African American railroad porters, the paper extended its influence well beyond Chicago and deep into the Mississippi Delta. The Defender’s stridency, its unrelenting embrace of blackness, and its open contempt for white racist regimes turned a simple newspaper into a symbol of African American pride and defiance. Though its circulation figures may have been in the hundreds of thousands, its impact was even greater as the illiterate and barely literate listened intently in churches, diners, shacks, and barbershops as the paper was read aloud.43
The message was revolutionary. Whereas Booker T. Washington, once the most powerful African American in the nation, and then his successor at Tuskegee Institute, Robert Moton, had openly accommodated Jim Crow, declaring that blacks would have to prove themselves worthy of rights, the Defender demolished that narrative.44 Over and over again, the newspaper pounded on the idea that Dixie was going to have to prove that it deserved the presence of African Americans, not the other way around.45 And, the Defender argued, what the region’s governments and employers had delivered so far left but one option: “Get out of the South.”46