Isabel Wilkerson

by The Warmth of Other Suns

  Then on Sunday, July 27, 1919, a seventeen-year-old black boy named Eugene Williams, swimming along the shore of Lake Michigan, drifted past an invisible line in the lake into the white side of the Twenty-ninth Street beach.

  As was common in the North, there were no white or colored signs. It was merely understood that whites entered and used the beach at Twenty-ninth Street and blacks were to stay near the Twenty-seventh Street entrance two blocks north. The imaginary color line stretched out into the water. Swimming as he was, the boy couldn’t see the line where the white water began because the water looked the same.

  Carl Sandburg, the future poet who was then a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, recounted it this way: “A colored boy swam across an imaginary segregation line. White boys threw rocks at him and knocked him off a raft. He was drowned.”

  Blacks demanded that the white police officer on the scene arrest the whites they said had hurled rocks at Williams. The officer refused, arresting, instead, a black man in the crowd “on a white man’s complaint.”

  Within hours, tensions reached a boil on both sides, and a riot was in full cry. Whites dragged black passengers from streetcars and beat them. Blacks stabbed a white peddler and a white laundryman to death. Two white men were killed walking through a black neighborhood, and two black men were killed walking through a white neighborhood. White gangs stormed the black belt, setting houses on fire, hunting down black residents, firing shotguns, and hurling bricks.

  All told, the riots coursed through the south and southwest sides of the city for thirteen days, killing 38 people (23 blacks and 15 whites) and injuring 537 others (342 blacks, 178 whites, the rest unrecorded) and not ending until a state militia subdued them.

  Contrary to modern-day assumptions, for much of the history of the United States—from the Draft Riots of the 1860s to the violence over desegregation a century later—riots were often carried out by disaffected whites against groups perceived as threats to their survival. Thus riots would become to the North what lynchings were to the South, each a display of uncontained rage by put-upon people directed toward the scapegoats of their condition. Nearly every big northern city experienced one or more during the twentieth century.

  Each outbreak pitted two groups that had more in common with each other than either of them realized. Both sides were made up of rural and small-town people who had traveled far in search of the American Dream, both relegated to the worst jobs by industrialists who pitted one group against the other. Each side was struggling to raise its families in a cold, fast, alien place far from their homelands and looked down upon by the earlier, more sophisticated arrivals. They were essentially the same people except for the color of their skin, and many of them arrived into these anonymous receiving stations at around the same time, one set against the other and unable to see the commonality of their mutual plight.

  Thus these violent clashes bore the futility of Greek tragedy. Yet the situation was even more complicated than the black migrants could have imagined. As they made their way north, so did some of the poorer whites from the South, looking not for freedom from persecution but for greater economic rewards for their hard work. Slavery and sharecropping, along with the ravages of the boll weevil and floods, had depressed the wages of every worker in the South. The call of the North drew some of the southern whites the migrants had sought to escape.

  Initially, they came to the North in greater numbers, but they were much more likely to return south than colored southerners were—fewer than half of all white southerners who left actually stayed in the North for good, thus behaving more like classic migrant workers than immigrants. Still, many brought their prejudices with them and melted into the white working-class world of ethnic immigrants to make a potent advance guard against black inroads in the North.

  As a window into their sentiments, a witness to the Detroit riots in 1943 gave this description of a white mob that had attacked colored people in that outbreak. “By the conversation of the men gathered there, I was able to detect that they were Southerners and that they resented Negroes working beside them and receiving the same amount of money,” the informant said, adding that these southern whites believed that the black migrants “ought to be ‘taken down a peg or two.’ ”

  Perhaps the earliest indication of what the migrants were unknowingly up against came from an outbreak directly related to the Great Migration, or rather to how the North reacted to the newcomers from the South. These were the riots that erupted in East St. Louis, Illinois, in the summer of 1917 after companies being struck by white workers hired colored migrants to replace them. The migrants were flocking to the city at a rate of a thousand a month, some eighteen thousand having arrived that spring, and they instantly became the perfect pawns, an industrialist’s dream: they were desperate to leave the South, anxious for work, untutored in union politics or workers’ rights—as most could not have imagined unionizing themselves as field hands, thus uncomprehending of the idea of a worker making demands and unlikely to complain about whatever conditions they might face.

  Once the strike was over, the colored migrants, resented by the unions and unprotected by the plants that had hired them, paid the price. One union wrote its members that “the immigration of the southern Negro into our city for the past eight months has reached a point where drastic action must be taken” and demanded that the city “retard this growing menace, and devise a way to get rid of a certain portion of those who are already here.”

  On the night of July 1, a carload of whites fired shots into colored homes. The colored residents fired back when a second car filled with whites passed through, killing two policemen. The next day, full-scale rioting began. Colored men were “stabbed, clubbed and hanged from telephone poles.” A colored two-year-old “was shot and thrown into the doorway of a burning building.”

  “A black skin was a death warrant on the streets of this Illinois city,” wrote an observer shortly afterward.

  The police, charged with quelling the riot, in some cases joined in, as did some in the state militia sent in to restore order, actions that resulted in seven courts-martial. All told, thirty-nine blacks and eight whites were killed, more than a hundred blacks were shot or maimed, and five thousand blacks were driven from their homes.

  After the two riots, city leaders in Chicago could see no end to the racial divisions without intervention and a public appeal for tolerance. A white-led, biracial commission set up to investigate the climate and circumstances leading to the riots produced a 672-page report, The Negro in Chicago. It stands to this day as one of the most comprehensive examinations of both the early stages of the Great Migration and race relations in a northern American city.

  With a sense of urgency, it set out fifty-nine recommendations for improving race relations. It urged that the police rid the city’s colored section of the vice and prostitution that plagued the black belt; that the schools hire principals with an “interest in promoting good race relations”; that white citizens seek accurate information about blacks “as a basis of their judgments”; that restaurants, stores, and theaters stop segregating when they weren’t supposed to; that companies “deal with Negroes as workmen on the same plane as white workers” and stop using them as strikebreakers and denying them apprenticeships; that labor unions admit colored workers when they qualified; that employers “permit Negroes an equal chance with whites to enter all positions for which they are qualified by efficiency and merit”; that the press avoid using epithets in referring to blacks and treat black stories and white stories with the same standards and “sense of proportion.”

  With the commission having no authority to enforce its recommendations and a good portion of the citizenry not likely even to have seen them, much of its counsel went unheeded. So Ida Mae arrived in a world that was perhaps even tenser than before the riots. In the ensuing decades, the color line would only stiffen. The South Side would become almost totally black and the North Side almost totally white. Ida Mae�
�s adopted home would become one of the most racially divided of all American cities and remain so for the rest of the twentieth century.

  NEW YORK, SUMMER 1945

  GEORGE SWANSON STARLING

  GEORGE FINALLY BROUGHT INEZ to New York in June of 1945 to begin life on their own for the first time in their marriage. Now that he had a decent job on the railroad, he was hoping she could now get a job as a beautician like she had trained for and they could make a go of it in New York.

  But Inez was still nursing a grudge over how little time they had spent together since they’d been married, how he’d gone off to Detroit without her, how he had taken so long to send for her, and now, here he was, likely to be gone half the time working the rails.

  He was always the one with big dreams, and he had them now. He wanted to make up for all they didn’t have and couldn’t have back in Florida. He located a little beauty shop around the corner from the brownstone where they lived that had six available booths for her to use.

  “Inez, this is your chance,” he told her. “We can rent this place, and you can do hair in one booth and rent out the other five booths. You can build you up a business here, and then after a while you don’t have to do no hair at all, just supervise.”

  But Inez wasn’t of a mind to do much of what he said, given all they had been through, so she decided to forgo hairdressing after all. She would never work at it a day in her life. Instead she took a short nursing course and got a job at a hospital to show her independence, to spite him, or both.

  George had escaped Florida but could not run away from the frustrations of an impulsive, ill-advised marriage. Inez had arrived in Harlem, but nothing had changed. They were getting along no better than before. So when he wasn’t on the rails, he began to fall under Harlem’s spell like many of the new arrivals suddenly free of the South. Between the people he knew from back in Florida and the co-workers he met riding the rails, he had a ready-made set of diversions every night of the week in a place that never shut down and was spilling over with people.

  It was said that Harlem was one of the most crowded places in all of the country. Some half a million colored people were crammed into a sliver of upper Manhattan that was about fifty blocks long and only seven or eight blocks wide. A 1924 study by the National Urban League confirmed what colored tenants already knew: that colored renters paid from forty to sixty percent higher rents than white tenants for the same class of apartment. So colored people in Harlem took in boarders and worked second and third jobs.

  Beginning in World War I, as many as seven thousand people were estimated to be living in a single block in Harlem. The crush of people begging for space forced rents even higher in what became a landlord’s paradise. Cash-strapped renters looked for new ways to make their rent. They began throwing end-of-the-month parties, “where they drank bathtub gin, ate pig knuckles and danced with the lights off,” as Arna Bontemps wrote. They called them rent parties. They charged twenty-five cents admission for a few hours of smoke-hazed, gin-juiced, tom-tom caterwauling, and poker playing with people from back home and with worldly-wise northerners they did not know just to help make that month’s rent.

  Up and down the side streets off Lenox and Seventh Avenues, people flung open their apartment doors the Saturday night before the rent was due. They served pork chops and pigs’ feet and potato salad just like down south, except that the food and spirits were for sale, and they put Count Basie on the record player to give people something to dance to. Total strangers looking for a good time could stroll down the block looking for a red, pink, or blue light in a window and listening for the rabble of a rent party in progress. Signs went up inviting anybody willing to pay. One read:

  There’ll be brown skin mammas

  High Yallers too

  And if you ain’t got nothing to do

  Come on up to Roy and Sadie’s

  West 126 St. Sat. Night May 12th.

  There’ll be plenty of pig feet

  An lots of gin

  Jus ring the bell

  An come on in.

  Tenants stood to make the most money if they got the partygoers playing poker, and George was all for it. There were some people from Eustis, Florida, living up on Seventh Avenue, between 146th and 147th Streets. They lived right next door to each other and started running their parties simultaneously.

  “We just go from one house to the other,” George said. “We get tired of playing over to Freeman’s, or we get mad with him about something, and we go over to M.B.’s. We go from one house to the other. We would be gambling the whole weekend.”

  When they got tired of the people on Seventh Avenue, they went over to the Bronx, where the Blye brothers had a sister named Henry living over at Third Avenue and Seventeenth Street, and played some more.

  The wives and girlfriends served the gin and bourbon and the grits and eggs and biscuits and smoked pork from the pork store down the street, the big poker players never getting up from the table, shoveling forkfuls of grits into their mouths between hands.

  They were playing five-card stud, and sometimes there were so many people there’d be two or three games running, people just in or visiting from Eustis and Ocala, people who had been in Harlem for years, hustlers who made a life out of circulating at the gambling tables of the rent parties to beat the tenants out of their own rent money. It was an open invitation, after all.

  George saw the money they were making—some of them were pulling in hundreds of dollars a weekend—and decided to throw some parties himself.

  He went in with his friend Babe Blye, one of the Blye brothers from back home in Florida (there were nine brothers in all, plus three girls that the parents had given boys’ names to, but that’s another story). Babe was working as an auto painter for General Motors in New York and was living upstairs from George and Inez in the brownstone George was buying. Sometimes Inez served food, sometimes she wouldn’t. Sometimes she would stay down in their apartment. Working the rails mostly for tips, George could use the extra money for the house note and went in with Babe to run some poker parties.

  George figured out the system. “If you stay outta the game, and if you run a game for four or five hours or more, you gonna have most of the money,” George said. “You’re gonna have most of the money and the cut. Because most of the players are going to lose.”

  Trouble was, Babe couldn’t just sit back and watch. “See, that was our weakness,” George said. “Babe couldn’t stay outta the game. He just had to get in the game, and he’d lose pretty near everything that we take in.”

  Like most migrants from the South, George had surrounded himself with the people he knew from back in the Old Country, but the Old Country was still in the people no matter where they went, and George found that, as much as he loved the people from back home, he could never truly move up with the country people still acting country. He never put it in so many words, but he didn’t keep his resentment to himself.

  “We done sat up here all night, and you done gambled all the money out of the cut box,” he told Babe. “We just set this whole thing up for nothing. And now we got to clean up and see how many cigarette spots somebody done burned in the furniture. And we don’t have a thing to show for it.”

  Then one night, George had had enough. They were gambling upstairs in Babe’s apartment. They had a big game going, and Babe and George were both in the game. George looked to be winning the pot when Babe called him. Two men they didn’t know and who looked to have been in Harlem much longer than George and Babe were in the game, as often happened when the migrants threw open their doors to make extra money to make ends meet. George caught Babe dealing off of the bottom of the deck. He hit himself from the bottom with an ace, giving himself a better hand than everyone else.

  Babe had cheated to win the pot, but it did not appear that the two other men had caught on. “I couldn’t say anything because of the other guys in the game,” George said. “If they caught you cheating, some of them guys w
ould kill you right on the spot. So I had to sit there and let Babe go with that. I lost thirty dollars down the deal.”

  George made a show of borrowing thirty dollars from the pot.

  “Well, I’m borrowing thirty dollars,” he said to no one in particular, figuring Babe would get the message that George was onto his cheating and wanted him to stop.

  “That was for the benefit of the other guys around the table, not to become suspicious,” George said.

  When the game was over, George headed downstairs. Babe called out to him.

  “Hey, son. You know you owe me thirty dollars.”

  “I do?” George asked. “Let me tell you one thing. I will never in life play with you again. Because you dealt yourself off the bottom with an ace that beat my hand, and the only reason I let you go, I didn’t want you to get me and you both killed because there were other people in the game. And you know the rule is, if you caught cheating, you in trouble. Now, I don’t want no killing in the house. It might have been me. So I had to let you go with that.” George wasn’t finished.

  “Didn’t you hear me saying, ‘I’m borrowing thirty dollars out the pot?’ I took my money out that I lost. I don’t owe you nothing. You owe me your life ’cause if I had squawked about you dealing off the bottom, you and I both might have got killed.”

  He told Babe, who was, after all, his tenant, that he was through with him when it came to gambling. “I ain’t gon’ never pay you,” George said. “And, furthermore, I ain’t gon’ never gamble with you no more. If you can’t gamble with your friends without being cheated, who can you gamble with?”

  That was the end of George’s short, unhappy career running a gambling den. He wasn’t making money, and now it was dangerous.

  The city had a way of bringing out the best and now the worst in everyone. People got up to the big city and either forgot where they came from and took on the meanest aspects of a hard life or kept a kind of sweet country blindness and fell victim to what looked to be city charms but could be traps if you weren’t wise to them. Or they somehow managed to keep the best of both worlds, keep the essential goodness of the old culture and the street wit of the new. George had to learn to recognize that admixture in the people who surrounded him, even as he tried, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, to do the same himself.