Now people who overemphasize the importance of race are somewhat dumbfounded not only by Obama’s popularity since he has become president but by the popularity of Michelle Obama as well. According to the opinion polls, Obama’s popularity is higher than that of the previous five incoming presidents at this point in their presidency—almost three months after entering office. And Michelle Obama’s popularity, as first lady, is significantly higher at this point than either that of Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush, Hillary Clinton, or Laura Bush. And the Obamas’ popularity cuts across party lines and even includes a notable percentage of voters who voted for John McCain. Having good information matters. Americans are concerned about the economic crisis and therefore they are paying attention and are better informed as a result. And they are indeed impressed with the performances of both Barack and Michelle Obama, regardless of their race.
SOURCE: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “A Conversation with William Julius Wilson on the Election of Barack Obama,” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 6, no. 1 (2009): 15–23. Copyright © 2009 W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. Reprinted with permission of Cambridge University Press.
A CONVERSATION WITH ISABEL WILKERSON
On America’s Great Migration
ISABEL WILKERSON IS the author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (2010), which has won numerous awards, including the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and the NAACP Image Award for best literary debut. Wilkerson won the Pulitzer Prize for her work as Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times in 1994, becoming the first black woman to win the prize in journalism and the first African American to win for individual reporting. She is Professor of Journalism and Director of Narrative Nonfiction at Boston University.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: Isabel, thanks so much for doing this interview. I love your book. Your book is historic. Congratulations.
Isabel Wilkerson: Thank you so much.
Gates: What is the Great Migration? When did it start, when did it end, how many people were involved, and why is it important?
Wilkerson: The Great Migration was an outpouring of six million African Americans from the South to the North and West. It was, in many ways, what I call a defection from the Jim Crow caste system; the system that ruled the lives of all people—even White people—who were living in the South. This caste system held everyone in a fixed place. And so there was an outpouring of people who left the South for all points North and West from 1915 to 1970, when the initial reasons for the migration were no longer in effect—meaning the caste system essentially came to an end, legally.
Gates: Well, we have all heard various interpretations and explanations for this defection. I love the metaphor of the defection. That’s very original and very profound. You interviewed over 1000 people, you spent fifteen years thinking about and writing this book. What do you think the ultimate reasons for this defection were?
Wilkerson: I think one ultimate reason was a kind of seeking of political asylum, which we don’t often think about when you look at the North and West and the cities that came to be, and that people just happened to be there. My questions were: How did they get there? Why did they leave? What were the circumstances that propelled them to leave? What was life like for them in the South and what was life like for them, ultimately, in the North and West? And what was it that gave them that drive, that perseverance, that restlessness to make the decision of their lives: to leave the only place that they had ever known for a place that they had never seen and hope that life would be better? I really wanted to understand that. That is the reason why I set out to find three people who would represent the three streams of the Great Migration, and get to know them, hear their stories, and then recount their stories in a narrative that would interweave their experiences with the larger tableau, what was going on around them, from the beginning of their lives until the end of the Migration and beyond.
Gates: When you say “defection,” that suggests that you think the prime cause was political. People fleeing Jim Crow and anti-Black racism. When I was an undergraduate, it was the boll weevil. People fled the fact that the cotton crop failed because of the boll weevil epidemic, and so they had to find jobs in the North. Economics caused migration. This was during World War I, you know the drill. But you disagree?
Wilkerson: I think it was too large. We’re talking about six million people. So six million different reasons, six million precipitating events for each one of them. The South is huge; it goes from Texas to Virginia and down to Florida. Not all of those states are cotton-producing states. So cotton could not be the reason for all of the people who might have been participating in this migration. Also, even those who might have been from the cotton-producing states might not have been leaving for that reason. There are many, many reasons why people leave.
I did a lot of research on migration itself. I became obsessed with the idea of why people do this. America is made up of people who came from someplace else. I mean, even the Native Americans came over the Bering Strait. So there is a history to this phenomenon; I mean, America is what it is because people came from someplace else. And I love to see the comparisons between what these people did—why they left where they were—and the people who might have come over from Europe or across the Atlantic in steerage, or across the Rio Grande, or the Pacific Ocean. People leave when life becomes untenable wherever they are, for many different reasons. When it comes to the motivation for the Great Migration, I think the overarching desire was to escape a caste system that controlled their lives from the moment that they awoke in the morning to the time that they went to sleep; that determined, for example, that it was illegal for a Black person and a White person to play checkers together. Even for White people who might have wanted to play checkers with somebody who was of a different race, they couldn’t do it. That system was controlling of everybody.
Gates: It was ridiculous.
Wilkerson: It was ridiculous. Somebody actually sat down and wrote that as a law. Across the South, in many courtrooms, there was a Black Bible and a White Bible to swear to tell the truth on. That gets to the level of extremism and detail and forethought that went into making sure that there was no opportunity for people to ever cross paths or get to know one another. In South Carolina, it was the custom that Black people and White people could not go up the same staircase in many workplaces. How do you logistically even do that?
Gates: How do you think of it?
Wilkerson: How do you think of it, and how do you make that work? I mean, what happens when a Black person wants to go up the steps and they have to wait for the White person because they can’t be on the staircase at the same time? It was that kind of insanity, when you think about it, that they were fleeing.
Gates: And a rational person would flee that.
Wilkerson: A rational person would flee. Everybody, every African American in those states had to make a decision as to whether they would stay or whether they would go. I do not make any judgment as to which was the better decision. The people that left ended up feeling that they could not stay under those circumstances. And I find it really fascinating to know that there is something different about people who leave, in all parts of human migration.
Gates: Let’s follow this, because this is one of your several original contributions in this book. You are the first scholar that I know of to treat migrants like immigrants. The immigrant mentality—though we tend to stereotype it with certain ethnic groups—we all know and respect. But the only group of (im)migrants I know of who were not admired in the literature were the Black people from the South. E. Franklin Frazier famously said, these people are uncouth. And many of us don’t realize the class tensions that manifested themselves within the Black community as early as the Harlem Renaissance, when the old Negroes, who had been free, descended from free Negroes in the North, saw all of these sharecroppers coming up. They despised them. They wanted to give t
hem, as Booker T. Washington said, a toothbrush and a bar of soap.
Wilkerson: And send them back.
Gates: And send them back. But you say, no. That they had been stereotyped. And people like E. Franklin Frazier were wrong, that they didn’t have a higher immorality rate, they didn’t have a higher out-of-wedlock birthrate, that they weren’t people who eschewed education. In fact, the fact that they migrated showed that they were motivated.
Wilkerson: At a certain point, I was reading a book a day, and journal article after journal article after journal article. There is so much data now that disproves the stereotypes and mythologies about those migrants. One statistic is that they were more likely to be married than the people they encountered in the North. They had a lower divorce rate; they were more likely to remain married, in other words. They were more likely to be raising their children in two-parent households, which is what I actually grew up around in my own parents’ migration experience. The adults around us, when I was growing up, did all the things that the data show. They were more likely to be making more money than the people in the North that they encountered; not because they were making more per hour, but because they were working longer hours and multiple jobs. This is typical immigrant behavior. They also were more likely to be doubled and tripled-up in housing, which is why you’ve got this incredible amount of overcrowding that first attracted the scholars that began looking at it. Sociologists were naturally looking at what was going on with overcrowding, with the children, and with the spread of disease. And that is how this migration began to become calcified in our minds as something that was a problem. People were not looking at the migrants and what they were striving to do. Of course there was a transition period, they had come from farms, they had come from small towns, they had very thick accents, they didn’t have the citified clothes of the people . . .
Gates: “Call me country” [laughter].
Wilkerson: They were country people, country folk. When they got to the North, they stood out; they didn’t easily blend in with the people who were already there. But that didn’t mean that they didn’t come to work hard. That was all they knew, if you think about it. Particularly in the South, when you’re talking about World War I, the depression years, World War II—these were sharecroppers who often were merely working for the right to stay on the land that they were farming. So they were used to working very hard and not being paid at all. And even those who were working and had jobs as janitors, maids, domestics, yard boys, whatever they might have been, were underpaid. Even the professionals were being woefully underpaid. Most of the teachers in the South at that time were being paid forty percent of a full salary, openly without apology by the powers that be, for doing the same thing that their White counterparts were doing as teachers. So they were being woefully underpaid for their work, and they came to these cities in order to survive, in order to make it, and make life better for themselves and their children. Many of them were not going to be able to truly benefit from the advantages of being in the North because it was maybe in some ways too late for them. They could not go back and get the education that they hadn’t gotten, if they had only completed the eighth grade. Here they were, thirty years old, and they were not going to be able to truly take advantage of all of the culture that they would be exposed to. But their children might. And isn’t that what all immigrants are doing this for?
Gates: That’s what we’re all supposed to be doing it for.
Wilkerson: So much of the mythology does not represent the reality of these people’s lives. And my goal was to get a sense of what their lives were really like.
Gates: But why were they demonized this way in the sociological literature?
Wilkerson: Well, I think it also gets to what you were saying about the stratification that they met once they arrived. People who were there before them did not want them there. Industries wanted them there because, actually, they were recruited. They did not just show up out of nowhere. The migration began because the Northern industry needed labor during World War I. World War I cut off, to a great degree, immigration from Europe, which had been providing the labor for Northern industry. Many of the Europeans who were in the United States had to go back to Europe and immigration was cut off. And Northern industry began looking to find where they could get cheap labor to fill the spaces left over by the immigrants. They were looking for the cheapest labor available, and they found African Americans and began recruiting them. But that did not mean that other people there wanted them. That meant that the people who would be competing against them were not welcoming them at all.
Gates: And you’re talking about Black people.
Wilkerson: I’m talking about Black people, I’m talking about recent immigrants from other parts of the world, and that was because there was a potential for the new migrants to drive down the wages of everybody else. Many of the black migrants were not permitted to join unions, for example. Many of them were actually brought in as strike-breakers. They had no concept of a union, because unions would not have been accepted in the South at all. That was out of the question. So they had no idea what they were getting themselves into. Think about all the barriers and challenges that they had to face upon arrival. They faced hostility from Black people who were already there. They faced hostility from immigrants who had just arrived themselves from all parts of Europe or other parts of the world, who were scuffling to try to make it themselves—because a migrant or an immigrant cannot fail. As an immigrant, you are far away from home, you have made this great leap of faith, you have left all that you know, and you know the people back home are talking about you, just saying, “I know they’re not going to be able to make it.”
Gates: “They’ll be back.”
Wilkerson: So an immigrant cannot fail. Failure is not an option. They have to take whatever challenges and barriers there are. They have to bear up under them. I came to have such great empathy and understanding of what they had to endure.
Gates: As you know, I have spent the last five years being obsessed with genealogy; my genealogy and the genealogy of lots of well-known Americans. In a sense, as I hear you talking, it occurs to me that you’re recuperating your own genealogical story.
Wilkerson: When the migration began in 1915, ninety percent of all African Americans were living in the South. By the end of the Great Migration in 1970, forty-seven percent—nearly half—were living outside of the South. Between 1915 and 1970, there was this great arc of migration. People went everywhere, from Washington to New York to Boston, to Chicago, Detroit, to the West Coast. So it was a total redistribution of an entire people. The majority of African Americans that you meet in the North and the West now, even to this day, have roots in the South. When they want to look at their genealogy, ultimately they want to get back to Africa. But to get there, you have to go through the South.
And that is a beautiful thing, when you think about the connection between North and South. In other words, when this migration occurred, the people were not just carrying themselves and their hopes and dreams, they were carrying the South with them. And as they were carrying the South, they were carrying the folkways, the language, the food, and the values of the South, which often are not recognized and appreciated. In some ways, they were transporting that with their luggage tied with string.
Gates: Culture.
Wilkerson: And when that cultural exchange made it to the North, it created whole new art forms.
Gates: Art forms like classic blues. Like jazz.
Wilkerson: Like jazz, and Motown. Motown would not even exist had there been no Great Migration. And that’s because the founder of Motown, Berry Gordy’s parents were born and raised in Georgia. They went to Detroit as part of this Great Migration, raised their son there, he got to be a grown man, looked around, wanted to go into music, but didn’t have the money to go scouting all over the country. He looked right around him in the neighborhoods of Detroit. There was Diana Ross, a child of the Migration. Her mot
her had come up from Alabama, her father from West Virginia, and they met in Detroit. And then you have The Jackson 5; their mother had come from Alabama, their father had come from Arkansas, and they met in the North. They wouldn’t have even existed had there not been this Great Migration.
Gates: So Black people cross-pollinated through the migration.
Wilkerson: I call them mixed marriages.
Gates: That’s what they were. And that’s a really great metaphor. You have a gift for metaphors; it makes your narrative even more powerful. For example, you characterize the Great Migration as “the leaderless revolution.” Could you explain what you mean by that?
Wilkerson: I love that idea. When you think of it being a leaderless revolution, it gives power to everyone, whatever their background. No one set a time and a date. Though, yes, Robert S. Abbott, the Editor of the Chicago Defender, did encourage people to leave. But there was no one who had to tell all of those six million people that on this day, at this hour, we will leave. It was an unfurling of all of these people over time. And they left on their own. They made individual, private decisions that this was the best thing for them. And in fact, they defied their leaders. Booker T. Washington didn’t live to see the migration itself, but of course he would have encouraged people to stay. Frederick Douglass famously said that a defection or a departure from the South would be a “disheartening surrender.” There were many ministers in the South who encouraged people to stay. They could see their flock disappearing. One story is the case of a minister who preached from the pulpit in Tampa, Florida. One Sunday, encouraging his flock to stay, he said, “our roots are here, we should stay here, this is where the forefathers are.” The next day, he was stabbed for what he said. And then they left. These were church-going people.
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