Isabel Wilkerson

by The Warmth of Other Suns

  The book is essentially three projects in one. The first was a collection of oral histories from around the country. The second was the distillation of those oral histories into a narrative of three protagonists, each of whom led a sufficiently full life to merit a book in his or her own right and was thus researched and reported as such. The third was an examination of newspaper accounts and scholarly and literary works of the era and more recent analyses of the Migration to recount the motivations, circumstances, and perceptions of the Migration as it was in progress and to put the subjects’ actions into historical context.

  As might be expected, the participants in the Migration had keener memories of their formative years and of the high and low points of their lives—the basis of this book—than of the more mundane and less relevant aspects of their retirement years. Some subjects recalled certain moments of their lives with greater detail than did other subjects recounting the same point in their own trajectory, which is reflected in the text. Furthermore, in their wisdom and commitment to an accurate rendering of events, they frequently declined to speculate or press beyond what they recollected. Where possible, I confirmed or clarified their accounts through interviews with the waning circle of surviving witnesses, cohorts, and family members; through newspaper accounts in the South and North dating back to 1900; and through census, military, railroad, school, state, and municipal records.

  The primary subjects and many of the secondary informants were interviewed for dozens, if not hundreds, of hours, most of the interviews tape-recorded and transcribed. I returned to their counties of origin to interview the surviving people who knew them and to retrace their lives in the South. I then reenacted all or part of each subject’s migration route, devoting most of my time to the migration of Robert Foster, which meant driving from Monroe, Louisiana, to Houston and Laredo, Texas, to Lordsburg, New Mexico, Phoenix, San Diego, Los Angeles, and on to Oakland, as Dr. Foster described in bitter detail, with my parents as generational tour guides for most of the journey. My father took notes and my mother offered commentary as I tried to re-create the experience of one person driving the entire distance through the desert night.

  “You know he must have been ready to cry right about in here,” my mother said as the car I had rented, a new Buick as was his when he made the crossing, hurtled into hairpin curves in total darkness with hundreds of miles yet to go. As it turned out, I was not able to reenact to the letter one of the most painful aspects of the drive. I was nearly ready to fall asleep at the wheel by the time we reached Yuma, Arizona. My parents insisted that we stop. We got a hotel room with, of course, no trouble at all, the one thing he had been so desperate for all those decades ago but that was denied him over and over again that long night in 1953.

  The seeds of this project were sown within me years ago, growing up with parents who had migrated from the South and who sent me to an affluent white grade school that they themselves could never have dreamed of attending. There, classmates told of ancestors coming from Ireland or Scandinavia with little in their pockets and making something of themselves in the New World. Over time, I came to realize that the same could be said of my family and of millions of other black Americans who had journeyed north during the Great Migration.

  I gravitated to the children of recent immigrants from Argentina, Nepal, Ecuador, El Salvador, with whom I had so much in common as the children of newcomers: the accents and folkways of overprotective parents suspicious of the libertine mores of the New World and our childish embarrassment at their nervous hovering; the exotic, out-of-step delicacies from the Old Country that our mothers lovingly prepared for our lunchboxes; the visits to my parents’ fellow “immigrant” friends—all just happening to be from the South and exchanging the latest about the people from back home; the gentle attempts at instilling Old World values from their homelands, my father going so far as to nudge me away from city boys and toward potential suitors whose parents he knew from back home in Petersburg, Virginia, who were, to him, upstanding boys by definition and who would make a fine match in his view, which all but guaranteed that I’d have little interest in them.

  Thus I grew up the daughter of immigrants, “a southerner once removed,” as the Mississippi-born poet Natasha Trethewey once called me. My parents bore the subtle hallmarks of the immigrant psyche, except they were Americans who had taken part in an internal migration whose reach and nuances are still little understood.

  The research into the world of the Great Migration required wading through dozens of scholarly works of the era, which were a revealing commentary on the attitudes and conditions the migrants lived under before and after their departures. Some of the works were benignly patronizing. Many betrayed such unquestioning bigotry as to be nearly unreadable. All were useful in some way or another. Yet, throughout my research, I was at times struck by the wisdom and compassion of otherwise detached social scientists, many of them white, privileged, and exhibiting unavoidable prejudices of the day but still often rendering prescient and even-handed conclusions. At the start of its 672-page report on the 1919 Chicago Riots, the sober, white-led Chicago Commission on Race Relations, presaging the sentiments of a yet-to-be-born African-American president, whose rise would have been beyond imagination at the time, admonished in 1922:

  It is important for our white citizens always to remember that the Negroes alone of all our immigrants came to America against their will by the special compelling invitation of the whites; that the institution of slavery was introduced, expanded and maintained by the United States by the white people and for their own benefit; and they likewise created the conditions that followed emancipation.

  Our Negro problem, therefore, is not of the Negro’s making. No group in our population is less responsible for its existence. But every group is responsible for its continuance.… Both races need to understand that their rights and duties are mutual and equal and their interests in the common good are identical.… There is no help or healing in appraising past responsibilities or in present apportioning of praise or blame. The past is of value only as it aids in understanding the present; and an understanding of the facts of the problem—a magnanimous understanding by both races—is the first step toward its solution.

  AFTERWORD

  Ida Mae Gladney died peacefully in her sleep after a brief onset of leukemia in September 2004. Her family was so distraught that her children and grandchildren kept her room precisely as it was for years. The door remained closed in memoriam to her, and no one had the heart or strength to touch it.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book is the culmination of many years of research and distillation and could not have come to be without the faith and encouragement of critical people and institutions at crucial moments in its gestation.

  I wish first to express gratitude for my parents—my mother and my late father, who gave me my earliest understanding of the Great Migration through their lives and experiences and through what they passed on to me, and who were the inspiration for what I did not know was possible when I first began pursuing the idea.

  Thank you to the people who helped to create the groundwork necessary for my intuitions to become a reality: Denise Stinson, who believed in the book from the start, and Michael Winston, for his wise counsel.

  I wish to thank my editors at Random House—Ann Godoff, who acquired it, Jonathan Karp, who cheered it on, and, most of all, Kate Medina, who embraced it, championed it, and brought it into the world. I also benefited from the support and insights of Lindsey Schwoeri, Millicent Bennett, Jonathan Jao, Amelia Zalcman, Sally Marvin, Carol Schneider, London King, Ashley Gratz-Collier, and Steve Messina and his team, among many others at Random House. Thank you ever so much.

  During the course of the research, I was fortunate to have been able to rely on support from a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation; an Edith Kreeger Wolf endowed lectureship at Northwestern University; a semester as Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University; an
d various lectures and seminars I delivered at such places as Brown University, the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, the narrative journalism conference in Aarhus, Denmark, the University of Nevada at Reno, the University of Mississippi at Oxford, and, for three years, as the James M. Cox Professor of Journalism at Emory University. I am grateful to Boston University, where I now am on faculty, for its role in promoting narrative nonfiction such as this book and for the support of David Campbell, Thomas Fiedler, Louis Ureneck, Mitchell Zuckoff, Robert Manoff, Richard Lehr, Robert Zelnick, Caryl Rivers, Safoura Rafeizadeh, and James Brann.

  I was on leave from The New York Times for much of the time I was researching the book with the good wishes of three executive editors, Bill Keller, Joseph Lelyveld, and Howell Raines, who showed patience and understanding as I pursued this calling, as well as the good cheer of Soma Golden Behr.

  This has been a personal journey that, due to the nature of the work and the loss of the primary subjects, transformed me out of necessity from journalist to unintended historian. I am grateful for the insights of historians who have made rigorous examination of the American past, particularly of the Jim Crow era, their life’s work. In particular, I wish to thank Leon Litwack, who shared with me his wisdom and made sure I left Berkeley with the books I needed from the old Cody’s near campus.

  Beyond these, I thank God for the will and fortitude to make it through this journey. But also for their encouragement at critical moments, I am grateful to Alex Reid, Jonathan Schwartz, Rick Jones, Gwendolyn Whitt, Fannye Jolly, Michael Elliston, D. J. Page, D. M. Page, Laleh Khadivi, Christine Ristaino, Anthony Martin, Pat Harris, Marcia Lythcott, Debora Ott, and, for their belief in me over the years, Frances Ball, Gladys Pemberton, Beatrice Judge, Lawrence Kaggwa, Lena Williams, Ronald Richardson, and the Taylor family of Richmond and Petersburg, Virginia. Thank you to Eva Harvey, Robert K. Watts, and Joseph Beck for sharing their memories of the Jim Crow South; and my sincerest gratitude to those who assisted in the research: Christine Savage in the final throes of production, Christine Li, Emily Truax, Sarah Stanton, and, especially, Kathryn Wilson for her hard work in the early years of the project.

  I am deeply grateful for the time and contributions of the more than twelve hundred people who shared their stories in preliminary interviews in the first year and a half of the research and whose experiences, while not explicitly cited in the text, helped shape its direction. They were my initial teachers in the world of Jim Crow and the unseen chorus that validated the final narrative. For going out of their way to help identify people who had migrated from the South as they had done, I am grateful for the kindness shown me by Wilks Battle, Bennie Lee Ford, Aline Heisser-Ovid, and, especially, Almeta Washington.

  I wish to thank the subjects’ families for allowing me into their lives and entrusting me with their loved ones on trips both long and short that we made to the places they worked and lived and, for two of them, back to the Old Country. In particular, I want to thank Eleanor Smiley, James and Mary Ann Gladney, Karen Smiley, Kevin Smiley, Madison James Foster II, Bunny Fisher, Joy Foster, and Patricia George for their warmth and encouragement, and Amjad “Kenny” Mujaahid for his inspiring letters of support.

  Finally, I reserve the greatest measure of gratitude for Ida Mae Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Pershing Foster, the people who gave so much of themselves to a book they would never see. They believed in me and in this project perhaps more than anyone else, perhaps, at times, even more than I did. Their unfailing faith in this work carried me through when I doubted what was possible. Meeting and sharing with them their final years on this earth has been one of the great joys and honors of my life, and I have been inspired and made better for having known them.

  ISABEL WILKERSON

  June 2010

  SELECTED INTERVIEWS AND SOURCES

  CALIFORNIA

  Dr. Robert P. Foster

  Cathryn Covington Baker

  Lee Ballard

  Romie Banks

  Mrs. J. M. Beard

  Howard and Isabelle Beckwith

  Pat Botchekan

  Malissa Briley

  Sylvester Brooks

  Claire Collins

  John Collins

  Joseph Cooper

  Ivorye Covington

  Leo DeJohn

  John Dunlap

  Dallas Evans

  Sherman Ferguson

  Bennie Lee Ford

  Joy Foster

  Warren Hollingsworth

  Jessie Holmes

  Charles Honore

  Marilyn Hudson

  Robert Johnson

  Carrie Jones

  Limuary and Adeline Jordan

  Barbara Lemmons

  Marguerite Lewis

  Nellie Lutcher

  Carl Kendall

  James Marshall

  Leola McMearn

  Cleo Pierre

  John Rachal, Sr.

  Vera Roberts

  Della B. Robinson

  De Willow Sherman

  Reatha Gray Simon

  Reatha Beck Smith

  Ida Bryant Spigener

  Barbara Starks

  Ruby Thomas

  Melba Thompson

  Almeta Washington

  Inette Weasel

  Betty S. White

  FLORIDA

  Reuben Blye

  Viola Dunham

  Watson Dunham

  Cleave Frink

  Patricia George

  Reverend William Hawkins

  Andrew “Jack” Johnson

  Carla Mitchell

  Virginia Sallet

  GEORGIA

  Joseph Beck

  Sharon Seay

  James C. Washington

  ILLINOIS

  Ida Mae Brandon Gladney

  Laura Addison

  Ruby Barnes

  Wilks Battle

  Bessie Baugard

  Homer Betts

  Erma Bien-Aimee

  Marie Billingsley

  Barbara Bowman

  Isiah Bracy

  Albert Brooks

  George Brown

  Joe L. Brown

  Herbert Bruce

  Albert Sidney Burchett

  Tony Burroughs

  Florine Burton

  Betty Caldwell

  Orlando Campbell

  Joseph Chapman

  James Clark

  Elwood Crowder

  Austin Cunningham

  Grady Davis

  Henrietta Dawson

  John Harold Earl

  Arthur Ellis

  Lisa Ely

  Mildred Elzie

  Eddie Ervin

  Robert David Fields

  Bunny Fisher

  Myrtis Francis

  Lasalle Frelix

  Phlenoid Gaiter

  James and Mary Ann Gladney

  Walter Goudy

  Ruth Hamilton

  Aaron Henderson

  Leon “Jack” Hillman

  James Hobbs

  Spurgeon Holland

  Karyne Islam

  Urelle Jackson, Sr.

  Isabel Joseph Johnson

  Willie Johnson

  Lola Jones

  Spencer Leak

  Emma Leonard

  Clinton Lewis

  Hollis Lewis

  Carl Little

  Ruth McClendon

  Doris McMurray

  Charles Mingo

  Irene Nelson

  Clara Piper

  Raymar Pitchfork

  Robena Porter

  Robert Pulliam

  Edna Robertson

  William G. Samuels

  James Seahorn

  Eleanor Smiley

  Karen Smiley

  Kevin Smiley

  Coy F. Smith

  Ruby W. McGowan Mays Smith

  Laura Starks

  Howard Stephenson

  Roma Stewart

  Bennie Therrell

  Riley Tubbs

  John Valson

/>   Mamie Westley

  Mary Louise Wiley

  Delores Woodtor

  LOUISIANA

  Joella Burton

  Madison James Foster II

  Faroker Johnson

  Clara Poe

  B. D. Robinson

  Rosalie Taylor

  Florence Todd

  Clyde Walker

  MISSISSIPPI

  Marcelle Barr

  Doretta Boston

  Gilbert Elie

  Aubrey Enochs

  Gloria Enochs

  Jessie Gladney

  Isolena Harris

  David McIntosh

  NEW YORK

  George Swanson Starling

  Dees Abraham

  Nathaniel M. Baker

  Maxie Broughton

  Bennie Brown

  Gary Byrd

  Franklin Caldwell

  John Carter

  Christine Chambers

  Virginia DeBreaux Hall

  Petite Bell Hammond

  Reverend Henry V. Harrison

  James Hobbs

  Clarence Jerrell

  Julia Johnson

  Gardenia Joyner

  Aurilla Moore

  Ulysses Morris

  Amjad “Kenny” Mujaahid

  Onie Bell Carter Norwood

  Donald Payne

  Delphine Smith Peterman

  Henry Roberts

  Ruth Rudder

  Jerry Ward

  Robert K. Watts

  Monifa White

  Manier E. Webber

  Eva Mae Williams

  TENNESSEE

  Richard Jarvis Enochs

  WISCONSIN

  Jerome Hervey

  Freddie Knox

  Manley Thomas

  PARTIAL LIST OF ORGANIZATIONS THAT OFFERED SUPPORT AND ACCESS TO MIGRANTS

  CALIFORNIA

  Betty Hill Recreation Center, Senior Line Dancing

  East Texas Club of Los Angeles

  Estelle Van Meter Senior Center

  Grambling Alumni Association, Los Angeles

  Independent Square Senior Center

  Jefferson Council

  Jim Gilliam Senior Center

  Lake Charles, Louisiana, Club

  LA–LA (Louisiana to Los Angeles), Inc.

  Monroe, Louisiana, Club

  Mount Carmel Senior Center

  People Coordinated Services