Gates: At the turn of the century they would have just been crushed. They would have been killed.
Wilkerson: Right. It was a totalitarian regime that they were living under. My goal would be for people, especially young people, to be able to see how very limited the options were. John Dollard said that when the options are so limited, when there’s no other opportunity to do anything, the one thing that you can do is leave. And that’s what they did. They did the one thing that they could do.
Gates: Well I think that one reason for the reverse migration, too, is the nostalgia of the grandchildren. Many of my friends from the North, who were descended from migrants, were sent back for a week or two weeks or a month, and what they remember when I ask them what was it like, is that “Oh man, it was great. We’d milk the cow and slop the hogs.” But it was life in the South in a romantic way with Grandma eating biscuits every day. They were shielded from some of the harsh experiences. So in a way it is the tail coming around.
Wilkerson: I do believe that it is a circular thing. I think that as African Americans begin looking at the genealogy, as in the work that you are doing, and they want to share that with their own children, where do they have to go in order to find it? Returning to the place of the ancestors is a way to reclaim one’s history, one’s culture. And it is a more welcoming place than it was at the time. In some ways it is more welcoming and certainly more livable than many parts of the harsher, anonymous northern cities that have become very challenging for people.
Gates: The South was, effectively, the total Black experience. Even in 1860, there were more free Negroes living in the southern states, states in which slavery was legal than free Negroes living in the North. And most of us don’t even realize that. So all the slaves were there and more farm or free Negroes lived in the South then than lived in the North. It was quite dramatic when that shifted.
Just a few more questions. Between 1990 and 2000, more Africans came to the New World. More Africans willingly migrated to the United States than came in the entire slave trade. Do you have any plans in your next book to deal with the migration from Africa? It is just as remarkable, in its way, as the Great Migration in a shorter span of time. Do you have any interest in talking about the West Indian and the African migration in subsequent work?
Wilkerson: I do. I feel that it is all one. This whole approach and focus on migration feels like it is one expression of yearning to be free. And I feel a connection with all of them. When you think of people coming in from the Caribbean, who form a significant part of the African American community in the country now, it was an accident of where the boat happened to arrive that determined that your people ended up in South Carolina instead of Cuba. I think that this migration to the United States—how we all came to be here, one way or the other—it is all a similar yearning to be free here in this country, whether you came up from Georgia to get to New York, or you came from the Bahamas to get to New York.
I also think of the Great Migration as helping to precipitate, to create an environment in which things were opening up for people of color who were coming from all over. I really believe that it has been misunderstood as a singular event that happened in a particular year or a particular city. And I wanted to open it up so people can realize how huge and massive it was. In other words, many of the institutions and structures related to African Americans that exist in the northern cities today are there because of this Great Migration.
As you said before, there were more freed slaves in the South than there were in the North. So where is the population in Harlem? In New York? In Detroit? In Chicago? In Boston? In Washington? Where are they coming from? This is because of the Great Migration. Why are they here? It’s because of the Great Migration. So when other groups come, there is a pre-existing structure that was the result of the Great Migration.
Gates: You spend a lot of time writing about the effect of the migration on the North. But what was the effect of the Great Migration on the South?
Wilkerson: The Great Migration meant that the South lost some of its most ambitious African Americans, by definition. You had to have great resolve and some level of resources in order to leave. There is something different about migrants in general. Migrants often have less patience for the status quo, so you have people who would likely be agitators for change overall. I think you are losing a certain kind of person when you lose people in a migration experience.
The South still lags the North on so many levels, when it comes to wages, education, values of the land and property, health considerations. So there are many ways that the South is still lagging and part of it would have to be because of the loss of this brain power and the workers—the most ambitious people who went off to do great things.
Look at the people who are the legacies of the Great Migration. The true legacy of any immigrant experience is the children. You’re looking at Toni Morrison, August Wilson, Lorraine Hansberry. You’re looking at Richard Wright, Louis Armstrong. And jazz. Jazz wouldn’t even be what it is if it were not for the Great Migration.
Gates: But on the other hand, we have old established Black middle class, upper-middle class families who stayed in the South. Like the King family. Or the people who founded the Black insurance companies and the Black banks. So it’s complicated.
Wilkerson: It is complicated. You could have businesses that were dependent upon, and built their clientele around, the caste system. In other words, they were serving that level of the caste system. But when it came to creativity and the ability to express oneself, the cultural contributions that African Americans have been able to provide to this country, and thus the world, came out of the Great Migration. Toni Morrison’s parents migrated from Alabama, where it would have been illegal for African Americans to walk into a library and just take out a library book. How do you become a writer if you don’t have access to books? So many modes of expression became possible when people left the South and their children had the opportunity to be able to grow and thrive in the North.
Jazz wouldn’t be what it is, just thinking about Miles Davis. His parents migrated from Arkansas to Illinois. How would he ever have had the opportunity? He came from a fairly well-off family. However, would he have had the luxury of going to schools where he could take music, for example? It would not have been as easy. Thelonious Monk’s parents migrated from North Carolina to Harlem when he was five years old, where he had the luxury, the ability, to indulge his genius in a way that he would not have been able to in the tobacco country of North Carolina.
Gates: Romare Bearden from North Carolina.
Wilkerson: Jacob Lawrence. I mean how could we even discuss this without mentioning Jacob Lawrence, who grew up in New York? His parents had migrated.
Gates: And he documented the migration in that great series of panels.
Wilkerson: Absolutely. When you think of the Great Migration you think of Jacob Lawrence and his depictions of it. How beautiful they are. And you think of John Coltrane. John Coltrane migrated at age seventeen from North Carolina to Philadelphia where he got his first alto sax. His mother had preceded him up there and she gave him a used one. And there he began to practice. Where would we be, where would music be, where would jazz be, where would culture be? Not just in this country, but internationally, if John Coltrane had not gone to Philadelphia and gotten an alto sax?
Their expressions of creativity were within them, but it was also the transfer of southern culture. Much of their creation was informed by the spirituals and the gospels that they had grown up with. For Toni Morrison, it was the language that she had grown up with. It is a beautiful expression and marriage of the South and the North.
Gates: I thank God for the Great Migration every Sunday as I eat fried chicken after church [laughter]. Isabel Wilkerson, thank you so much for this interview. And congratulations on the accomplishment of a brilliant, brilliant book.
Wilkerson: Thank you so much.
SOURCE: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “A Conve
rsation with Isabel Wilkerson,” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 7, no. 2 (2010): 257–269. Copyright © 2010 W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. Reprinted with permission of Cambridge University Press.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
More people than I can name have taught me and supported me along the way. I owe a tremendous debt to the following:
Debra Abell
Sharon Adams
Jane Ailes
Elizabeth Alexander
Maya Angelou
Bennett Ashley
Anthony Appiah
Isobel Appiah-Endresen
Romare Bearden
Tina Bennett
Kimberly W. Benston
David Bindman
John W. Blassingame, Sr.
John Morton Blum
Lawrence Bobo
Derek Bok
Carl Brandt
Tina Brown
Lawrence Buell
Rudolph Byrd
Gaston Caperton
Albert Carnesale
Johni Cerny
Richard Cohen
Virgis Colbert
Ethelbert Cooper
Karen C. C. Dalton
D. Ronald Daniel
Charles T. Davis
Brenda Kimmel Davy
Angela De Leon
Dominique de Menil
Rachel Dretzin
Driss Elghannaz
James Engell
David Evans
Drew Gilpin Faust
Henry Finder
Laura Fisher
Philip Fisher
William Fitzsimmons
Alphonse Fletcher, Jr.
Bettye Fletcher and James Comer
Leon Forrest
John Hope Franklin
Liza Gates
Maggie Gates
Paul and Gemina Gates
Asako Gladsjo
Thelma Golden
Sarabeth Goodwin
Amy Gosdanian
Donald Graham
Vera Ingrid Grant
Casper Grathwohl
Amy Gutmann
Evelynn Hammonds
Angela Harlock
Aaron Hatley
Candace Heinneman
Bernard Hicks
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham
Arianna Huffington
Charlayne Hunter-Gault
Glenn H. Hutchins
Steven Hyman and Barbara Bier
Marial Iglesias Utset
Barbara Johnson
Quincy Jones
Vernon Jordan
Phyllis Keller
Joanne Kendall
Martin Kilson
Peter Kunhardt
Spike Lee
Sieglinde Lemke
Joanna Lipper
Paul Lucas
Kit Luce
Mark Mamolen
Erroll McDonald
William McFeely
Dyllan McGee
W. J. T. Mitchell
Marcyliena Morgan
Toni Morrison
Albert Murray
Renée Mussai
Lynn Nesbit
Donald and Susan Newhouse
Peter and Gwen Norton
Charles Ogletree
Deborah Wilson Pampinto
Richard Parsons
Martin Payson
Kari Pei
Martin Peretz
Brian Perkins
Richard Plepler
Steven Rattner and Maureen White
Ishmael Reed
David Remnick
Condoleezza Rice
Tamara Robinson
Daniel and Joanna Rose
Henry Rosovsky
Daryl Roth
Neil and Angelica Rudenstine
Ingrid Saunders-Jones
Teresa Lupis Savage
Elaine Scarry
Sharmila Sen
Ruth Simmons
Michael Smith
Wole Soyinka
Claude and Dorothy Steele
Carol Thompson
Helen Vendler
LuAnn Walther
Omar Wasow
Cornel West
Duke Anthony Whitmore
William Julius Wilson
Oprah Winfrey
Linden Havemeyer Wise
Abby Wolf
Donald Yacovone
INDEX
Abbott, Edith, 135
Abbott, Robert S., 611
Abel, Elizabeth, 287
Abrahams, Roger D., 259, 263, 273, 282n10, 283n12
Signifyin(g) and, 242, 256, 266–267, 269, 270
Abrams, M. H., 182
Achebe, Chinua, 199
Adams, Harriet E., 49, 50
Adams, John Quincy, 146
Adams, Revels, 139
Adams, Sharon, 108, 558
Adebayo, Diran, 441
Adebayo, Dotun, 440–441, 444
Adger, Robert M., 59
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 570–571
African American literature, 1, 43, 49, 83, 121–124, 154, 156, 161, 162, 169, 170, 171, 175–177
American literature and, 160
anthologies of, 182, 183
institutionalization of, 183, 288
reconstructing, 184–185
women’s, 72, 123
African American Lives (PBS), 127, 128, 132, 290, 292, 293, 385, 387
subjects in, 129–130, 131
African American National Biography, 127
African American Studies, 74, 134, 149, 172, 183, 291, 467, 597
African Americans, 75, 146–147, 572, 573, 591
alienation of, 421–422
integral character of, 127
role definition for, 586
slavery and, 1, 143
African literature, 169, 170–171, 176, 177, 180, 224, 271, 287
African Union, 568, 570
Ailes, Jane, 8, 17
Ailey, Alvin, 130
Akintola, Chief, 199
Akomfrah, John, 448
Al-Bashir, Omar, 568, 569
Albright, Madeleine, 580
Albuquerque, Wlamyra, 494, 495, 496
Alexander, Clifford, Sr., 373, 374, 375, 388, 389
Alexander, Clifford Leopold, Jr., 371, 372, 374–375
Alexander, Elizabeth, 301, 324, 330
ancestry of, 371–383, 384, 385–386, 387, 388–389
Alexander, James, 373, 375, 376
Algren, Nelson, 191
Ali, Muhammad, 131, 449
Allen, Lin, 276
Allen, Lynn, 34
Allen, Richard, 415, 418
Allen, William G., 156–157
Alvaro II, King, 467
Álves, Dora, 492, 493
Amado, Jorge, 495
American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, The (Myrdal), 137
American literature, 154–155, 166, 160, 174, 288, 300
Amin, Idi, 423, 573
Amo, Anton Wilhelm, 468
Amoruso, Sammy, 36
Ancestry, 293, 301, 588, 619
African-American, 6, 297, 333, 415, 424
slave, 12, 143–144
Anderson, Marian, 18, 318
Anderson, Sherwood, 297
Andrews, Malachi, 261
Andrews, William L., 77, 91, 98, 117–118
Angelou, Maya, 318–319, 399
Anti-slavery movement, 101, 113, 160, 517
Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 108, 138, 224, 225, 287, 300, 359
Applebee, Arthur N., 171
Arab League, Darfur and, 568
Arata, Esther Spring, 60
Ardrey, Robert, 430
Armstrong, Louis, 330, 620
Arnheim, Rudolph, 317
Arnold, Matthew, 189
As Nasty As They Wanna Be (2 Live Crew), 513
Austen, Jane, 153, 448
Autobiography (Malcolm X), 24, 559
Autobiography of a Female Slave, The (Griffith), 64, 78, 517
“Back to Africa” movement, 40, 420
, 422
Bailey, David A., 447
Baker, Ella, 128
Baker, Houston A., Jr., 166, 173, 174, 175, 176, 284n30
Baker, Josephine: interview of, 555, 557, 558, 559, 560–565
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 212, 238, 239
Bakish, David, 60
Baldwin, James, 131, 153, 169, 172, 178, 179, 307, 316, 327, 345, 348, 455, 460, 518
Black English and, 543
interview of, 555, 557, 558–559, 560–565
Bambara, Toni Cade, 171
Baraka, Amiri, 160, 179, 198, 315, 454, 460, 523, 524, 528, 529, 532–533, 540.See also Jones, LeRoi
Barksdale, Richard, 173
Barnes, Alfred C., 230
Barry, Marion, 513
Barthelemy, Anthony, 557
Barzun, Jacques, 188
Basie, Count, 240, 253, 313, 323, 329, 331
Bate, W. Jackson, 212, 213
Batte, John, 382–383, 385, 386
Baumbach, Jonathan, 519
Baym, Nina, 60, 61, 98, 112–113
overplot and, 65–66, 68, 69
Beard, Charles, 135
Bearden, Romare, 313, 314, 315, 316, 327, 328, 331, 621
Murray and, 324–325
Beardsley, Grace Hadley, 229
Beckwourth, Jim, 132
Behrendt, Stephen D., 145
Bell, Daniel, 354
Bell, Derrick, 457
Bellow, Saul, 321, 326–327, 519, 520, 521
Beloved (Morrison), 400, 454, 459, 462
Benedict, John, 182
Bennett, Louise, 437
Bennett, William, 151, 162, 163, 168
Benston, Kimberly W., 173, 195, 240
Bernal, Martin, 430–431, 454
Bernays, Anne, 337, 338, 339, 340, 354, 357
Bernays, Edward L., 337
Berry, Chuck, 130
Bethune, Mary McLeod, 132, 419
Beti, Mongo, 177
Bettelheim, Bruno, 317
Bhabha, Homi, 287
Bina, Margaret, 104
Bindman, David, 233
Binet, Alfred: double consciousness and, 306
Bingman, Tim, 94–95
Black Arts Movement, 131, 175, 178, 179, 180, 454, 523, 525, 528, 529
Black Athena (Bernal), 430, 454
Black Boy (Wright), 171, 617
Black canon, 161–162, 163, 165, 166, 175, 183, 189, 190, 214, 291
Black Fire (Baraka and Neal), 160, 161, 315
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