Isabel Wilkerson

by The Warmth of Other Suns

  Anything with the least amount of status or job security seemed reserved for people who did not look like them and often spoke with an accent from a small eastern European country they had never heard of. They were running into the same sentiment, albeit on a humbler level, that a colored man in Philadelphia faced when he answered an ad for a position as a store clerk. “What do you suppose we’d want of a Negro?” the storekeeper asked the applicant.

  George had been struggling since he arrived. He had worked on a coal truck, dug ditches for the Works Progress Administration, delivered ice to the tenements on the South Side, and been turned away from places that said they weren’t hiring or just had nothing for him. He would just keep looking until he found something.

  Finally, he landed a job that suited his temperament on the soup-making line at the Campbell Soup plant, a place so big there was bound to be some work for him if the people were open to hiring him, which, fortunately for him, they were. The plant was on twenty-two acres at Thirty-fifth and Western by the panhandle tracks, where they mixed several thousand tomatoes and oxtails at a time to make soup for customers west of the Mississippi. He had been working all his life, but this was the first indoor job he had ever had.

  His days would now turn on the directions of foremen and the spinning of machinery, the orderly and finite ticking of the company punch clock instead of the rhythms of the field, where he and Ida Mae used to work according to what an anthropologist once called “the great clocks of the sky.”

  The plant turned out six thousand cans of soup a minute along three miles of tracks and switches. He was entering the world of assembly-line factory culture, the final destination of many unskilled black southerners once they got established in the North. Whatever reception he got, good or bad, he kept it to himself, as was his way, and he carried out whatever duties he was to perform without complaint, whatever kind of soup was coming down the vats in his direction.

  Like so many others, he had gone from the mind-numbing sameness of picking cotton to the mind-numbing sameness of turning a lever or twisting a widget or stoking a flame for one tiny piece of a much larger thing he had no control over. He had moved to a different part of the country but was on the same rung of the ladder. It was, in some ways, not all that different from picking cotton. The raw bolls went off to some mill in Atlanta or Massachusetts to be made into something refined and unrecognizable from what he saw of it, from the poorly remunerated kernel of the thing that represented George’s and other sharecroppers’ contribution to the final product intended for someone far better off than he. Except now, in Chicago, he would get paid.

  Just by being able to keep his job, which he would for many years, George would be spared the contentious relations at so many plants in the North, where the migrants were scorned if they were hired at all, or outright turned away. Most migrants like George were hired into either menial labor—janitors or window cleaners or assembly-line workers—or hard labor—longshoremen, coal miners, stokers of foundries and diggers of ditches, which is what he had done before landing the assembly-line job at Campbell Soup.

  Many companies simply didn’t hire colored workers at all but for altogether different reasons from the South. It wasn’t because of an explicit Berlin Wall of exclusion, written into law and so engrained as to not need to be spelled out for people on either side, as in the South. Instead, in the North, companies and unions said that, however much they might want to hire colored people, their white workers just wouldn’t stand for it. And, for the sake of morale, the companies and unions weren’t going to force the issue.

  A glass plant in Pittsburgh tried to hire colored workers, but the white workers ran them out, the researcher Abraham Epstein reported, by cursing them and “making conditions so unpleasant they were forced to quit.” At a steel mill there, the white bargemen threatened to walk out “because black workers were introduced among them.” The white workers at the mill were appeased only “by the provision of separate quarters” for the colored workers.

  A factory in Chicago reported that after it hired colored workers, there was “friction in the washrooms” and that “for every colored girl employed, we lost five white girls.”

  “I find a great resentment among all our white people,” the manager of a wholesale millinery in Chicago reported. “I couldn’t overcome the prejudice enough to bring the people in the same building, and had to engage outside quarters for the blacks.… We thought it would be nice if we would start a school for machine operators.… I received a delegation from our sewing hall who said they resented the idea. They wouldn’t listen to it at all, and I had to abandon the project. Their argument was: ‘If you let them in it won’t be long until we are out entirely.’ The attitude against the colored is only the same as it was against the Slavs or the foreign races when they first intruded the field.”

  Somehow the migrants persisted, partly because they had little choice and could only hope that open-minded whites might see past the preconceptions. A Chicago laundry, for instance, reported that when it hired its first colored girl, “the white girls threatened to quit. The manager asked them to wait a week and, if they still objected, he would let her go.” As it turned out, the white girls grew to like the colored girl, and she was permitted to stay.

  Overall, however, what was becoming clear was that, north or south, wherever colored labor was introduced, a rivalrous sense of unease and insecurity washed over the working-class people who were already there, an unease that was economically not without merit but rose to near hysteria when race and xenophobia were added to preexisting fears. The reality was that Jim Crow filtered through the economy, north and south, and pressed down on poor and working-class people of all races. The southern caste system that held down the wages of colored people also undercut the earning power of the whites around them, who could not command higher pay as long as colored people were forced to accept subsistence wages.

  The dynamic was not lost on northern industrialists, who hired colored workers as strikebreakers and resorted to them to keep their labor costs down just as companies at the end of the twentieth century would turn to the cheap labor of developing nations like Malaysia and Vietnam. The introduction of colored workers, who had long been poorly paid and ill treated, served as a restraint on what anyone around them could demand.

  “Their presence and availability for some of the work being performed by whites, whether they are actually employed or not,” wrote the sociologist Charles S. Johnson, “acts as a control on wages.”

  By the time George managed to find steady work, he was joining the forty percent of black men doing unskilled or semiskilled work in Chicago in the 1940s. Another thirty-four percent of black men were working as servants, meaning that, for three out of four black men, the only work they could get was work that nobody else wanted—lowly and menial or hard, dangerous, and dirty. Nearly the inverse was true for white men, the majority of whom—some sixty percent—were doing skilled, clerical, business, or professional work, clean indoor jobs.

  The ceiling was even lower and the options fewer for colored women, a situation that was making it even harder for Ida Mae to find work. By 1940, two out of every three colored women in Chicago were servants, as against seventeen percent of white women (most of those newly arrived immigrants). Only a fraction of colored women—a mere seven percent—were hired to do clerical work—common and upstanding positions for women of the day—compared to forty-three percent of white women.

  Under these conditions, Ida Mae and George found themselves at the bottom looking up at the layers of immigrants, native-born white people, and even northern-born black people who were stacked above them in the economic hierarchy of the North. It was all well and good that George now had a job at Campbell Soup. But they would never be able to get settled in Chicago until Ida Mae found reliable work. So Ida set out to look whenever George wasn’t at work and, the rest of the time, took care of the children.

  By now it was winter in Chicago,
and the cold was beginning to get to her. She had never felt anything like it before. It was a supernatural kind of cold that burned the tips of her fingers and hunted her down through the layers of sweaters to the half inch of skin that happened to have been left unprotected.

  On the streets, there were perils at every turn. The sidewalks were glazed with ice, and she had to climb over hills of unmelted snow. She looked up and saw spears of icicles hanging from the gutters and soffits of the buildings. The icicles were as big as a human leg and pointed toward the sidewalk like swords. She heard that sometimes the icicles broke from the buildings and killed people. It was like being on a different planet.

  “You spit, and it would be froze,” she said.

  She didn’t complain about it. She just did what she had to do. She trudged through the snow to take baby Eleanor to the clinic at Forty-third and State for the immunizations the city said the baby had to have. She wrapped Eleanor in so much swaddling you couldn’t tell there was a baby inside.

  At the clinic, the nurse gave her instructions.

  “Mother,” the nurse said, “take the baby’s clothes off.”

  Ida Mae thought that was the craziest thing in the world, cold as it was outside. She didn’t want Eleanor exposed like that.

  “All that snow out there,” Ida Mae said. “I ain’t takin’ my baby’s clothes off.”

  “The doctor has to see her,” the nurse told her.

  Ida Mae balked but soon learned there was no point in protesting. This was the way they did things here on this new planet she was on.

  NEW YORK, DECEMBER 1951

  GEORGE SWANSON STARLING

  NO MATTER HOW SETTLED the migrants got or how far away they ran, the South had a way of insinuating itself, reaching out across rivers and highways to pull them back when it chose. The South was a telegram away, the other end of a telephone call, a newspaper headline that others might skim over but that hurtled them back to a world they could never fully leave.

  George had been in New York for six years when the South came back to haunt him. Sometime in late December 1951, he got word that something terrible had happened to an old acquaintance back in Florida.

  It was someone he knew from his days as a substitute teacher at the colored school in Eustis during the lulls in the picking season. George had only a couple years of college, but it was more education than most colored people in town, which was why they called him Schoolboy with his proper-sounding talk. So George was a welcome and natural fill-in for the regular teachers when they took sick or went away.

  He loved imparting whatever wisdom he had acquired in his twenty-odd years. But he soon came to realize that colored teachers were making only a fraction of what the white teachers were making in Florida. He was always alert to any hint of injustice, and here was yet another example of the double-sided world he was living in. He would later lead a series of strikes in the groves, which would force him out of Florida for good, but before that time, while he was substitute teaching, he got pulled into a different crusade.

  Harry T. Moore, a churchly schoolteacher from an old place called Mims over on the Atlantic Coast, was the NAACP’s chief organizer for all of Florida back in the 1930s and 1940s. He wore out three cars crisscrossing the state in his stiff suit and tie, teaching colored people how to vote before Florida granted them the right to, investigating lynchings, and protesting segregated schools and unequal pay for colored teachers. He did much of this work as a volunteer, driving alone in the backwoods and small towns of Florida, “where no restaurant would serve him, no motel would house him, and some gas stations wouldn’t let him fill his tank, empty his bladder or even use the phone,” his biographer Ben Green wrote.

  These were the dark early days of the civil rights movement, before it even had a name: Martin Luther King, Jr., was still in grade school, Rosa Parks was a young bride, and the NAACP was an underground organization in the South. It was still building a base there among its fearful constituents, and segregationists were viewing it as an uppity troublemaker meddling in the private affairs of the southern order of things. It took courage even to be associated with it in those days, let alone be its field secretary in one of the most violent states in the South. Between 1882 and 1930, vigilantes in Florida lynched 266 black people, more than any other state, so many, in fact, that, after white men killed a black man with a hatchet one day, a newspaper could smugly and correctly report, “It is safe to predict that nothing would be done about it.” The same could be said for the hundreds of blacks driven out of town in that same era, their homes shot up and set afire in the all-black settlements of Rosewood and Ocoee. “We are in the hands of the devil,” a black Floridian said.

  It was here that Harry T. Moore began his quiet crusade. He wore out typewriter ribbons and worked a hand-cranked ditto machine to produce his measured entreaties to governors and legislators in cases of brutality or injustice in the courts, often facing ridicule or outright rejection. One case in particular spurred him to action. A young colored boy sent a Christmas card to a white girl, who showed the card to her father. A posse of white men captured the boy, hogtied him, and forced the boy’s father to watch as they tortured the boy and drowned him in the river. The posse would later say the boy jumped into the water on his own.

  Moore then stepped up his letters, circulars, and broadsides and threw himself into more dangerous terrain, the fight against lynching and police brutality. He began conducting his own one-man investigations into every lynching in Florida, interviewing the victims’ families and writing to the government on their behalf.

  When he wasn’t working to hold officials to their oaths of duty, he was going door-to-door, town to town, trying to recruit people to join his cause. It was in this way that George Starling met Harry T. Moore.

  The men were not friends. They only met once. But both he and George shared an outrage over the treatment of colored people when it came to the schools. Florida school boards, each its own little fiefdom, had a habit of shutting down the colored schools weeks or months before the school year was supposed to end, blaming the closures on budget shortfalls that for some reason did not affect class time at the white schools. It was a way for county school boards to save on both the cost of running colored schools and having to pay colored teachers for the already foreshortened school year colored schools had.

  Even when the teachers got to work a full year under the colored school schedule, they were paid a salary of $542 a year, compared to $1,146 per year for white teachers in the late 1930s, forty-seven percent of what the white teachers were making. There was nothing the colored teachers or parents could do about it until Harry T. Moore, himself the principal at a grade school in Brevard County, started a petition to protest it.

  George Starling met Moore sometime in the early 1940s when the civil rights worker arrived in Eustis to enlist colored teachers in the effort. Moore had been making his way around an unwelcoming state and was now seeking to make inroads in Lake County in the state’s central interior. Moore wanted to start a local chapter in Eustis to build up state membership and widen support for the cause. He needed people on the ground to help him discreetly canvass the colored district of Eustis, allay people’s fears, and take on the forbidding task of convincing them to join the NAACP.

  Moore gathered the colored people of Eustis together at Gethsemane Baptist Church one Sunday after service. Moore, along with his wife, Harriette, laid out his plan to petition the state to raise colored teachers’ pay and said he needed someone to lead the NAACP registration drive in Eustis. The principal of the colored school, a Mr. J. S. Pinckney, expressed support for the cause; after all, he was being cheated by the pay gap too. Everyone in town knew how vocal George could be, and the principal nominated him to lead the registration effort.

  “I didn’t want to do it,” George said years later. But the principal assured him that he wouldn’t be going it alone.

  “I’ll help you,” the principal said. “We need somebod
y that knows how to organize people, how to approach people.”

  “So I let him talk me into doing it,” George said years later. “And I started first working with the teachers.”

  Sunday evenings after church, George went door-to-door to try to persuade them in private to join the NAACP. Membership dues were a dollar. Sometimes the principal went with him. But George was having little success.

  “I couldn’t get one single teacher to join,” he said years later. “And I was tight with most all the teachers out there.”

  The teachers were making all kinds of excuses and were flat-out saying they just couldn’t do it. George thought something wasn’t adding up. These were intelligent, reasonable people, people he had known all his life and worked with at school when he was a substitute. They were the ones who would benefit most from the changes the NAACP was seeking.

  So one day, he cornered one of the teachers he was closest to and asked her what was going on.

  “Look, now,” he said. “Something is not right. Why is it that I can’t get any teacher to join the NAACP? We all tight together, but I can’t get none of y’all to sign up.”

  The teacher didn’t want to talk about it. But George persisted.

  “I’m not gonna take ‘no’ for no answer today,” he said. “I wanna know what’s happening.”

  So she told him.

  “Well, the principal held a faculty meeting,” she began, “and he told all the teachers that any teacher that joins the NAACP, he would personally see that they don’t ever teach in this county no more.”

  The principal had given the impression to the colored people in town and to Harry Moore himself that he was all for progress and the NAACP. But he was undercutting the effort in private, knowing George’s every move and every person George was talking to and in the perfect position to manipulate the results.