Gates: Amazing. But, it was more common for ministers to just pick up and follow the flock.
Wilkerson: Well, actually, they had to follow their flock. Barbers had to follow their customers. Teachers went where the students were going. There are clubs that exist to this day in major cities that represent these lost communities. In Los Angeles, for example, there’s a Monroe, Louisiana, club. There’s a Lake Charles, Louisiana, club. There are multiple clubs representing people from New Orleans and many, many Texas clubs. In other words, they picked up and left but recreated their communities in the new world. And I like the language of “the new world”—the idea of people who left with the same immigrant heart. And the fact that they doubled up once they arrived. There’s a case in New York where it go so crowded that people actually had to rent a share of a bed. They rotated use of the bed because it was so overcrowded there weren’t even enough places for people to live. So that meant that the night shift would come in the morning and tap the shoulder of the person who was getting ready to go to work and say “It’s my turn. You’ve got to get up. Time for me to go to sleep.” It gives a whole new meaning to the idea of timeshare.
Gates: Gives a whole new meaning to the idea of clean sheets [laughter].
Wilkerson: I hadn’t even thought about that. But you know, there are so many stories about immigrants who sacrifice everything. Double-up and live.
Gates: This experience is so unlike my own family history. I’m from Piedmont, West Virginia, which is halfway between Pittsburgh and Washington DC. All of the branches of my family, for 250 years—all the Black people are within a thirty-mile radius of where I was born.
Wilkerson: They stayed?
Gates: They stayed. A few of us left to go to college. My brother is an oral surgeon in New Jersey. But the family, all branches, they all stayed. So this migration experience is alien to my own family. Was telling your family story the motivation for writing this book?
Wilkerson: In a way it was to answer questions that I had always had growing up. People didn’t talk about it. When people left, they left for good, didn’t look back. And I found that my parents hadn’t really talked about it. My mother in particular didn’t talk very much about it. It’s almost as if they were starting with a clean slate, as immigrants often do, and they didn’t share the difficult things with their children. Maybe they didn’t want to burden them with the pain that they had experienced.
Gates: It is the same with the memory of slavery. People didn’t want to talk about that.
Wilkerson: There are some parallels between the last slaves who were interviewed in the 1930s and this last group of people who experienced Jim Crow. They truly experienced the worst of Jim Crow and they did not want to talk about it. The Jim Crow caste system didn’t end until the 1960s; it was quite firmly in place until then. It was violently enforced to the degree that for the decades leading up to the Great Migration and the early decades of the migration, there was a lynching somewhere in the South every four days. That shows you how very real the fear had to have been for people who were living in those circumstances. It was said by one historian of the era that lynching was so common that almost every Black American in the South would have known someone directly who had been lynched or would have heard of a lynching near them. So they were fleeing something that was quite real: real fear.
I wanted to understand what it was that led to my existence. The majority of African Americans, as I said, wouldn’t even be alive had this cross-pollination not occurred, had people not migrated to Detroit, to Chicago, to Cleveland, met people that they never would have met. In my family’s case, my mother migrated from Rome, Georgia, to Washington, DC. My father migrated from southern Virginia to Washington, DC, in a different decade. They would never have met otherwise.
Gates: In what years did they migrate?
Wilkerson: My mother in the mid-1940s and my father in the 1950s. They both went and got a second degree at Howard, which is how they ultimately met. My father had been a Tuskegee Airman and my mother was a teacher. My father became a civil engineer. But they would never have met had there been no Great Migration. And that’s the story of so many people.
To speak to your story, places like West Virginia, like Washington, DC, are in some ways on the border. It’s the beginning of Jim Crow going South.
Gates: That’s right. Washington, for us, was so close, but it was the South.
Wilkerson: It was the South for many people. But not if you were from Mississippi, it wasn’t. For people familiar with the history of the Confederacy, it would not at all have been considered the South because it was the capital of the Union. So there’s a complicated history when it comes to Washington, DC. But there is a sense of longevity when it comes to the border places. The border places allow you a little bit of both so that the drive to leave would not be the same, from my perspective. If you were in Georgia, if you were in Florida, if you were in Mississippi, Alabama, there was this great drive to leave and that’s why they did.
Gates: Absolutely. There was no need for slaves in the hills of West Virginia. Many of us who are from that area descend from people who were freed long before the Civil War. This is completely unlike the overwhelming experience for Black people in the South.
Wilkerson: It is an unusual history. It’s almost as if you are a protected group there, in an odd kind of way. But for the vast majority of African Americans, the Great Migration is the story that led to the existence of so many people all over the country being spread out as they are.
Gates: There is a special issue of the North American Review from 1884 and I love it because all the great thinkers of the race—T. Thomas Fortune, Frederick Douglass—they all write essays on the future of the Negro. One person said not only will the Negro never leave the South, but if we stay long enough we will have Black states. Like maybe Mississippi, or maybe Alabama, will become a Black state, so it behooves us to stay. And now, as you know, there are more Black people in Chicago than the whole state of Mississippi. So the Great Migration was completely unexpected. The leaders of the race had no idea that these Negroes were going to up and leave over a fifty-five-year period to the tune of six million people.
Wilkerson: I think that W. E. B. Du Bois might have. He spent time in the South. He spent time in Atlanta and was there during the 1906 riots. He was flabbergasted and dismayed, to say the least, by what he experienced. He also had some difficult experiences when he interacted with long-time southerners who were in the South, who were the leadership there. He was not part of the migration, per se, but he went back and forth, back and forth. And I have the sense that he could see that this was not a tenable situation. He might have been one of the few leaders who could have seen that.
Gates: Well, his anguish voiced in his litany for Atlanta, the poem he wrote after the 1906 riots, expresses that. And he couldn’t imagine that it would ever change.
Wilkerson: No. And I think that he would have been clearly, as he did himself, ready to leave.
Gates: I would like to talk about your very interesting and effective narrative strategy. You focus on three people. Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster. You have six million people to choose from and you picked these people. Tell me why you decided on this tripartite narrative strategy and why these three people?
Wilkerson: Well, I went out in the beginning with a great sense of urgency because of the people advancing in years; I had to go and hear as many stories as I could before it was too late. I interviewed over 1200 people—I stopped counting after that—in what I might call an audition or casting call for the people who would ultimately be the protagonists in my book.
Gates: You’re totally crazy [laughter].
Wilkerson: I get obsessed. I went to senior centers, AARP meetings. I went to Baptist churches in New York where everybody is from South Carolina. I went to Catholic mass in Los Angeles where everybody was from New Orleans. I went to all these different places in
order to find these people. And that served a really useful purpose because I could get a sense of the overarching themes. What were the concerns? What was the heart’s desire of the people as they were preparing to leave? And what happened to them? I had several things that were going to be required of the people that I would end up with. One is that they had to be the people in the front driving the car, not the children in the back seat. And by that I mean that I wanted to have people who had made the decision to leave, not the people who were observing and helpless, basically going along with what their parents had decided. I also needed to have people who were willing to talk about their experiences, because a lot of people did not want to talk. I also needed to have people who were characters unto themselves.
These three people, in many ways, are just interesting, fascinating people apart from the migration. Dr. Foster, for example, was a surgeon who became the private physician to Ray Charles. He was also an inveterate gambler. There were times when I would finish interviewing him and he wanted me [to] drop him off at the casino, or drop him off at the track. They’re just fascinating people, in and of themselves.
I needed people with whom readers could identify. I chose not to do famous people because they can tell their own story, and often do write autobiographies. I wanted people to be able to see themselves in these protagonists and to be able to ask themselves “What would I have done if I had been in this caste system? How would I have borne up under that? Would I have stayed or would I have gone? And how would I have made the transition to this other new place that I’ve never seen before?”
Gates: Because half stayed.
Wilkerson: Yes, half stayed. There was a decision everybody had to make and I wanted to pull the reader into the moment where they had to face the idea of leaving or staying and making a decision that would be life-altering. This is before cell phones and GPS systems and Skype. Sometimes there would be no guarantee that you would ever see your mother again. It is a huge sacrifice, one that many immigrants have made throughout the course of history in the United States. I wanted to show that we have so much more in common than we have been led to believe.
Gates: You have internationalized the migrant experience.
Wilkerson: Yes. I believe that you can look at these individuals and you can imagine, no matter what your background is, that somebody in your experience had to go through something like this. Psychologically, if not even physically, they had to go through the transition of leaving a place—the only place they had ever known for a place they had never seen.
The other thing about the three people I chose is that I wanted each to represent one of the three major streams of the migration. One stream was up the East Coast from Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas up to Washington, DC, New York, Philadelphia, Boston. The middle stream was from Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas to Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, the whole Midwest.
Gates: The one that we stereotypically think about as a migration.
Wilkerson: Yes, we hear so much about that one. And generally to Chicago alone, not even the other cities. And then the final stream, which has been written about the least, is the one from Texas and Louisiana to California and the entire West Coast. Each person represents one stream. I also wanted them to represent the three different decades within this three-generational, fifty-five-year period of time.
So to get the breadth and the scope of the migration, each of the three left in a different decade. Ida Mae Gladney was a sharecropper’s wife whose family left in the 1930s and they went from Mississippi to Chicago ultimately. In the 1940s, George Starling, who was a citrus picker who had gone to college and was agitating for better wages and working conditions in central Florida, fled for his life and went to Harlem, where he became a railroad porter. Robert Joseph Pershing Foster was a surgeon who had served in the army in the Korean War and he left Monroe, Louisiana, his hometown, where he was not permitted to perform surgery in the hospital. He ended up taking a somewhat perilous journey from Louisiana to California in 1953.
Gates: As a writer what was the principal challenge of pulling off this great achievement?
Wilkerson: I think the main challenge was dealing with the massive amount of material that I was exposed to. For one thing, I have hundreds and hundreds of pages of transcripts on each one of the individuals that I’m writing about. It is really three books in one; three biographies. Then there is a fourth book, which is the biography of the migration itself. So the greatest challenge was just dealing with this massive amount of information.
And then, on a more personal level, the idea that I was reaching out to people who were up in years. Many of them got sick. I might arrive to interview them and I’d have to go to the hospital instead of their home. Then finally, just the perseverance that it took to work on something for fifteen years. This one project for fifteen years meant that I had to maintain the momentum within myself somehow and remain as committed to it in year nine as I was in year one. That was a challenge.
Gates: Why are you the first person to write about the Great Migration between its beginning and true end? All these other books about the Great Migration are about 1910, 1915, 1930, 1940 and then they say “Oh yeah, it continued.” Why do you think this is the first one to see it as the full historic phenomenon that it was?
Wilkerson: I think that having been a national correspondent and a bureau chief for the New York Times made a big difference. I had the opportunity to travel all over the country for my job. I was doing all kinds of stories on any number of topics, but when I was doing something that involved African Americans, I would see that there were connections. Every time I would interview someone in LA they would talk about how they needed to go back to Texas for something. In Detroit, people were talking about going back to a family reunion in Alabama or a funeral in Tennessee. So I began to make the connection that this was not just my people in Washington, DC—people coming up from the Carolinas or Georgia. This was huge. Of course I had done a lot of reading but when I was reporting all over the country for the New York Times, in every place there was a connection to the South. And that was one of the things that helped me to look at it from a national perspective.
Gates: What is your take on the South today? You have taught at Emory. As you write, the migration ended and now there is reverse migration. The people from the North are moving back.
Wilkerson: I think that it is the same migration.
Gates: But the flow is different.
Wilkerson: The direction is different, but I think it’s the same searching. The title of the book, The Warmth of Other Suns, comes from an obscure passage in the footnotes to the reprint of Richard Wright’s autobiography Black Boy on page 496. It talks about how he was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains and bend in strange winds and respond to the warmth of other suns.
Gates: So is it a good thing? Is it exciting? Is it as exciting? Fifty years from now will someone be interviewing another scholar saying “six million Black people moved from the North to the South between 1970 and 2030”?
Wilkerson: I’m going on the record, taking a great leap to say I believe it’s a sea change that occurred with the Great Migration. I think that the reverse migration is kind of an echo migration of the children. The children, no longer tethered and burdened by all of the pain that their grandparents and parents had experienced, can now return to a world that is made different because there was a Great Migration. This Great Migration is one of the precipitating events, I argue, that helped to create the atmosphere for the Civil Rights Movement.
And the reason I say that is three-fold. One, the Great Migration provided an opportunity for the people who were the lower caste, cheapest labor in the South, and thus the country, to say “it looks like we have options and we’re going to take them.” That was revolutionary because until the Great Migration, even though there had been an Emancipation Proclamation, people had
not left in the same numbers as the Great Migration. They had stayed because they didn’t have the option to leave. There was no option in the North at that time. The North had not opened its doors in any way or shown any interest.
Gates: And they were neo-slaves.
Wilkerson: They were neo-slaves so they were still stuck. And the Great Migration was proof that, given the chance to leave, they would be willing to take that chance. And they would leave.
Secondly, once they got to the North, their relatives would come to visit. The people who were in the South had the opportunity to get exposed to freedoms in the North that they might not have known about before. Or they might have known about them and dreamt about them, but now they could actually see them in operation. They could get on a streetcar and sit wherever they wanted. They could go and buy a meal at a restaurant and be served. That exposed them to the possibilities, even when they went home. You are a changed person once you have been exposed to freedoms like that.
Finally, the people in the North were making more money and, as with any immigrant group, they were sending money back home to the people in the South. And they were helping to finance what would become the Civil Rights Movement. So in multiple ways, the Civil Rights Movement was precipitated by the Great Migration. The Great Migration helped to create the atmosphere. It is so interesting to look at what was going on in the beginning of the Great Migration where there were no opportunities to even protest. All the protest marches and movements that took place toward the end of the migration, would not have been possible—for anybody to walk down the streets of Selma. It was barely possible when it did occur, the March on Selma.
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader Page 83