As a stream of colored people trudged north from other parts of Manhattan and from the countryside of the American South, the Italians and Jews ceded much of Harlem to the new arrivals in the early decades of the twentieth century for the greener hamlets of Westchester, Queens, and the Bronx or the stylish apartments on Riverside Drive.
By 1930, some 165,000 colored people were living in Harlem, packed so densely that some tenants had to sleep in shifts—“as soon as one person awoke and left, his bed was taken over by another,” the historian Gilbert Osofsky wrote. Harlem had become majority black, its residents having built institutions like the Abyssinian Baptist Church, regaling white audiences at the Cotton Club, reciting poetry at private salons, running numbers rackets, and baptizing themselves in the Harlem and East Rivers.
Even during the Depression, people continued to pour in by the tens of thousands, such that the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., wrote, “There was hardly a member of Abyssinian Church who could not count on one or more relatives among the new arrivals.”
The changeover in Harlem was not a smooth one and went to the very heart of the basic difference between the North and South, between the authoritarian control over colored lives under Jim Crow and the laissez-faire passivity in the big, anonymous cities of the North and West.
The receiving stations of the Great Migration were no more welcoming of the colored migrants than the South was—in fact, the arrival of colored migrants set off remarkable displays of hostility, ranging from organized threats against white property owners who might sell or rent to blacks to firebombing of houses before the new colored owners could even move in.
White Harlemites banded together into committees to fight what they openly called “a growing menace,” an “invasion” of “black hordes,” and a “common enemy,” using what Gilbert Osofsky called “the language of war.” They formed organizations like the Save-Harlem Committee and the Harlem Property Owners Improvement Corporation to protect against “the greatest problem Harlem has had to face.”
Panicked property owners drafted restrictive covenants in which they swore not to let colored people into their properties for fifteen years or “till when it was thought this situation … will have run its course.” Some covenants covered entire blocks and went so far as to limit the number of colored janitors, bellboys, butlers, maids, and cooks to be employed in a Harlem home or business. White leaders tried to segregate churches, restaurants, and theaters, the Lafayette Theater on Seventh Avenue permitting colored people to sit only in the balcony, no different from Mississippi.
White leaders warned colored real estate agents not to seek housing on certain streets and tried to negotiate a boundary line that colored people would agree not to cross. On the other side of the color line, they took recalcitrant white neighbors to court if they broke down and rented to colored people against the rules of the covenants.
In the end, none of these things worked, not because anti-black forces gave up or grew more tolerant but because of the more fluid culture and economics of the North—the desire of whites to sell or rent to whomever they chose whether for profit or out of fear, necessity, or self-interest, or the temptation of higher rents that could be extracted from colored tenants with few other places to go.
Just as significantly, these things didn’t work because of what might be called the dispassion of the indifferent. The silent majority of whites could be frightened into lockstep solidarity in the authoritarian South but could not be controlled or willed into submission in the cacophonous big cities of the North.
The Great Migration forced Harlem property owners to make a choice. They could try to maintain a whites-only policy in a market being deserted by whites and lose everything, or they could take advantage of the rising black demand and “rent to colored people at higher prices and survive,” Osofsky wrote. Most were pragmatic and did the latter.
The flood of colored migrants soon broke down the last of the racial levees in Harlem, and signs went up all over the place, alerting people to the opening up of the market. The following notice, one among many, was posted in front of a Harlem tenement in 1916, at the start of the Great Migration:
NOTICE
We have endeavored for some time to avoid turning over this house to colored tenants, but as a result of … rapid changes in conditions … this issue has been forced upon us.
The posted concessions, addressed to white neighbors with a sense of defeat and resignation, offered a glimpse into the differences between the North and South. The South, totalitarian and unyielding, was at that very moment succeeding at what white Harlem leaders were so desperately trying to do, that is, controlling the movements of blacks by controlling the minds of whites.
“The basic collapse of all organized efforts to exclude Negroes from Harlem was the inability of any group to gain total and unified support of all white property owners in the neighborhood,” Osofsky wrote. “Landlords forming associations by blocks had a difficult time keeping people on individual streets united.”
The free-spirited individualism of immigrants and newcomers seeking their fortune in the biggest city in the country thus worked to the benefit of colored people needing housing in Harlem. It opened up a place that surely would have remained closed in the straitjacketed culture of the South.
By the 1940s, when George Starling arrived, Harlem was a mature and well-established capital of black cultural life, having peaked with the Harlem Renaissance, plunged into Depression after the 1929 stock market crash, climbed back to life during World War II, and, unbeknownst to the thousands still arriving from Florida, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Virginia, not to mention Jamaica and the rest of the Caribbean when George got there, was at that precise moment as rollickingly magical as it was ever likely to be.
Seventh Avenue was the Champs-Élysées, a boulevard wide and ready for any excuse for a parade, whether the marches of the minister Father Divine or several thousand Elks in their capes and batons, and, on Sunday afternoons, the singular spectacle called The Stroll. It was where the people who had been laundresses, bellmen, and mill hands in the South dressed up as they saw themselves to be—the men in frock coats and monocles, the women in fox stoles and bonnets with ostrich feathers, the “servants of the rich Park and Fifth Avenue families” wearing “hand-me-downs from their employers,” all meant to evoke startled whispers from the crowd on the sidewalk: “My Gawd, did you see that hat?”
Virtually every black luminary was living within blocks of the others in the elevator buildings and lace-curtained brownstones up on Sugar Hill, from Langston Hughes to Thurgood Marshall to Paul Robeson, Duke Ellington, and W. E. B. Du Bois, on and off, to Richard Wright, who had now outgrown even Chicago, and his friend and protégé Ralph Ellison, who actually lived in Washington Heights but said it was close enough to be Harlem and pretty much considered it so.
Of course, George, having just arrived from Florida, was nowhere near the Sugar Hill set. He was, however, good with money and managed to save up enough fairly quickly to find a more than decent place to live. He located a brownstone on 132nd Street off Lenox in what the people on Sugar Hill called the Valley, which accounted for most of what would be considered Harlem and was thought of as perfectly respectable, even admirable, for someone like George. Now that he had a place and had put a down payment on it, he was in a position to send for Inez. In the meantime, he made the most of his free, new self.
When he wasn’t on the rails, he was at the Savoy Ballroom, the rum-boogie emporium that took up a whole city block at Lenox and 140th Street. It had a marble staircase and a cut-glass chandelier in the lobby, settees for guests to rest on between dances, two bands alternating so the music never stopped. Anyone might be there, from a shoeshine boy to Greta Garbo or the Prince of Wales. For a time, Ella Fitzgerald was the house vocalist, Benny Goodman or Jimmy Lunceford might be there on any given night, and if you stayed there long enough—which, having come all this way, George, of course, did—you were bound to r
un into someone from back home in the South—someone from Durham, Charleston, Richmond, Augusta, or, to George’s delight, Eustis, Florida.
Gussie Robinson, Louis and Cleo Grant, “Babe” Blye—old Reuben’s brother—John Burns, Mary McClendon, and a whole bunch of the Youngs. All of them might show up at the Savoy or at a place called Big George’s or the Monte Carlo out in Corona, where a colony of Eustis people were living, which meant that pretty much every weekend, there was a Great Migration convention, a reunion of onetime fruit and cotton pickers, yard boys and house girls and country schoolteachers who had left all the sirring and ma’aming behind. They were jitterbugging on a floating wood floor in the sequins and Florsheims they now could afford, toasting themselves in another world altogether, a world of their own making in the North—if only for a Saturday night.
LOS ANGELES, 1953
ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER
ROBERT WAS HEADING BACK to Los Angeles sometime in the late spring of 1953 with the relief and uncertainty of a discriminating man having finally made the decision of his life. He would no longer be a visitor here. For better or for worse, it was home now, and yet he knew little of it. It was as if he had married a perfect stranger and was now confronting the enormity of getting to know her after the deed was done. He had to convince himself that he had made the right choice, that, after all, there really had been no choice for an educated and ambitious colored man like him at the time.
He had driven clear across the country and more than halfway up the California coast and back, with an unsatisfying flirtation with Oakland in between. But his task had just begun.
What little he had when he set out from Louisiana had now dwindled to almost nothing. He pulled into Los Angeles with all of a dollar and a half in his pocket. Now it somehow had to be converted into enough money to buy equality, meaning, to him, enough to go anywhere, do anything, buy the best of whatever he might want. He could not erase half a lifetime of sirring and stepping off the sidewalk, but he would have a good time trying.
He did not have enough to put a security deposit on an apartment, so he had to return to Dr. Beck, who put him up in the guest room of his house and made good on his promise to throw some surgery his way.
Dr. Beck called Robert into his office early on.
“I want you to examine this lady,” Dr. Beck told him, starting to describe the patient. “This is Mrs. Brown. I think she has a tumor. Check her out. Tell me what she needs.”
Dr. Beck had already examined the patient and knew precisely what she needed, but it was his way of easing Robert into this part of his practice. “That would feed you,” Robert said years later. “It wouldn’t give me quail, but it would feed me.”
He needed to find a place so he could send for Alice and the girls. He was itching to be on his own and make a name for himself. He couldn’t do that sitting in somebody else’s office waiting for a patient to need surgery.
He heard that the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company, the largest colored insurance company in the West (founded by William Nickerson, Jr., a migrant from Texas; George Allen Beavers, a migrant from Georgia; and Norman Oliver Houston, a native Californian, in 1925), was hiring doctors to go house to house to collect urine samples and do routine examinations of customers seeking coverage. Years later, this kind of work would be performed by people with a fraction of his education, and it would be unthinkable for a doctor to show up at a patient’s house for any reason, much less to collect urine samples.
It was beneath him, and it was exactly the kind of thing he was running from in Louisiana. He never wanted to be a country doctor going out to people’s shotgun houses with a satchel in his hand. Now he would be a city doctor going out to people’s bungalows with a satchel in his hand, and not to deliver babies or patch wounds but to take people’s blood pressure, of all things. There was no way he could let the people back in Monroe, and, Heaven forbid, his in-laws, the Clements, know how humble his existence was and how desperate he had become.
But he needed the money and had no choice. He was better off than most other new arrivals from the South, who didn’t have his credentials. So he made himself grateful for the $7.50 he got for each exam and for the extra $2.50 for the cup of urine.
It was as if he were a young boy again, going door-to-door as he had in Monroe, asking people if they wanted some figs to can for the coming winter. As he had before, he tried to make the best of the situation. He learned to ingratiate himself to the customers while making sure not to miss anything lest he not get paid. But he never knew what he was in for, because here, unlike in Monroe, he was a small person in a big place, a colored man who had memorized the rules of the South and was now in a place with no rules, none that he could see anyway, and where the Foster name could not help him.
One day he showed up at the modest home of a colored couple in their fifties somewhere in South Central. The wife met him at the door and called her husband to the front room.
“John, the doctor’s here,” the wife said before disappearing into the kitchen.
Robert checked off the answers the husband gave about preexisting conditions, fractures, and surgeries. He gave the man a cup to collect the urine in and later began the physical.
He put a blood pressure cuff on the man’s arm and began listening for the systolic pressure. Just then the wife walked in and turned the television on so loud that Robert couldn’t hear the beat.
“Could you ask your wife to please cut the television off?” Robert asked. “I can’t do my examination.”
The woman complied, and soon Robert was finished with the husband.
“Now,” Robert said, “I also have a form to examine your wife.”
“Alright,” the husband said. “Baby, come on. The doctor’s ready to do your physical.”
The wife came out. She was a large woman in a housedress and apron. She had her hands on her hips. And Robert was unprepared for what she had to say.
“I told you I wasn’t going to let no nigger doctor examine me.”
Robert was beside himself. There were many things one could say about the South, but he had never experienced rejection by patients of his own kind and hadn’t anticipated such a thing in this new place. Colored doctors in the South were revered because there were so few of them and because they were the only ones who could be counted on to go into the country to tend to colored people. They were greeted like Union soldiers come to free the slaves. Because of the great chasm between blacks and whites, colored doctors also had a virtual monopoly on colored patients.
He realized he had entered a more complicated universe than he had imagined. Colored people in California didn’t have to go to colored doctors if they didn’t want to. They had choices colored people in the South couldn’t dream of. To make matters worse for a colored doctor new in town, the very system that instilled privilege and superiority in southern whites also instilled a sense of inferiority in their colored workers, and when the latter got the chance to get all that had been denied them, some sought out whatever they were convinced was superior—and thus white.
In that one exchange, Robert experienced a by-product of integration that would affect nearly every black business and institution when the doors of segregation flung open—rejection by a black customer base for the wide-open new world. It didn’t take Robert long to realize that he would have to work doubly hard to win over his own people and get any patients at all. But at the moment, he was so hurt and rattled by the woman’s rejection that he couldn’t think straight.
“It frightened me so,” Robert said years later, “I threw all my things in my bag and dashed out of the house to leave.”
“I’m sorry, Doctor,” the husband was saying.
“That’s alright, that’s alright,” Robert said, the door closing behind him.
Robert got into his car and only then realized that, in his haste, he had forgotten something.
“Oh, my gosh, I’ve undergone this embarrassment,” he thought to
himself, “and I don’t have the urine specimen. I’ll only get $7.50.”
He needed every nickel, so he had no choice. “I cut the motor off,” he said, “swallowed my pride, and went back and got the urine specimen.”
The woman never let him examine her, and it was just as well. The experience had begun to shape his vision of this new world. “To think that I had come all the way from the Deep South,” he would say many years later, “out here to this Land of Milk and Honey and Opportunity and Intelligence, to find that one of my own color was disrespecting me.”
He endured such slights for years, and drove all over South Central Los Angeles doing perfunctory examinations and collecting urine as if he were a traveling salesman and not a surgeon with military awards, and he did it because he had to. “That’s the cut that you took to get your foot in the door,” he would say years later.
The ready-made clientele of old Louisianans he had imagined in his more cocksure moments in Monroe did not materialize. The people were there, alright. He saw them spilling onto Jefferson after Mass on Sunday mornings and packing into the clubs and cafés on Central Avenue and shopping on Crenshaw. But he had no easy way to get to them. Some were going to white doctors over in Leimert Park. Some were going to colored doctors they already knew. Specialists like him often built a practice through referrals, but few doctors knew him well enough to refer patients to him, and they seemed content with the surgeons already on their roster. Los Angeles was turning out to be bigger than he thought, and it was harder to make inroads.
Even the people he knew from back in Monroe were slow to seek him out for treatment. Some people acted different when they got out to the New World. Some changed their names, no longer wanted to be called Boo but by their given name, Henry or William, as Robert himself had done. Some were anxious to leave the South and the past behind and preferred doctors from California, because people from California were seen as better educated, more sophisticated, untainted by the South, and just “better.” Some people disappeared completely—the palest Creoles passed into white society, never to be seen again in the colored world. But mostly, the same cliques and assumptions people had had back home had migrated with them to the New World. Some people had resented Robert and the Fosters back in Monroe and brought the feelings with them. And some just couldn’t bear the idea of little Pershing from back home examining them.
Isabel Wilkerson Page 30