St. Andrew’s Senior Group
St. Bernadette Senior Center
Slauson Senior Recreation Center
Theresa Lindsay Senior Center
Vineyard Recreation Senior Center
Watts Senior Center
Xavier College Alumni Club of Los Angeles
FLORIDA
Gethsemane Baptist Church, Eustis
NAACP, South Brevard Chapter
GEORGIA
National Funeral Directors and Morticians Association
ILLINOIS
Ada S. Niles Senior Center
African-American Police League
Afro-American Genealogical and Historical Society of Chicago
AFSCME, Chicago District Council
Atlas Senior Center, Chicago Area Agency on Aging
Bethel Terrace Senior Center
Brookhaven, Mississippi, Club
Carter Funeral Home
Chicago Housing Authority Senior Housing
Chicago Pensioners Club
Chicago Urban League
Chicago Usher Board
Cotton Plant, Arkansas, Club
DuSable High School
Fourth District, Beat 414, South Chicago
Greater St. John’s AME Church
Greenville, Mississippi, Club
Greenwood, Mississippi, Club
Grenada, Mississippi, Club
Happy Action Seniors, St. Joachim Church
Historic Pullman Foundation
Latney Funeral Home
Leak and Sons Funeral Home
Local 241/Chicago Transit Authority Bus Drivers Union
Metro Seniors in Action
National Alliance of Postal and Federal Employees, Chicago Branch, Retirees’ Division
Neptune Seniors
Newton, Mississippi, Club
Old Friends of Chicago
Pastors of Englewood, Seventh District
Police Beat 713, Boulevard Arts Center
Prince Hall Masonic Lodge of the State of Illinois
Senior Advisory Committee, Third District
Senior Advisory Committee, Fourth District
Senior Steppers’ Set at Mr. G’s
Tabernacle Baptist Church
Third District, Beat 312, Grand Crossing
Third District, Beat 322, Grand Crossing
Third District, Beat 323, Grand Crossing
UBA A. Philip Randolph Center
Vicksburg, Mississippi, Club
Willa Rawls Manor
WBEZ-FM
WGCI-AM
WVON-AM
NEW YORK
African American Quilting Club, Brooklyn
Baptist House of Prayer, Harlem
Bridge Street Baptist Church, Brooklyn
Central Harlem Senior Center
First Baptist Church, Brooklyn
Lagree Baptist Church, Harlem
Metropolitan A.M.E. Church, Harlem
New York City Department of Aging
Wilson Major Morris Senior Center, Harlem
WLIB-AM
NOTES
1 I was leaving the South: Richard Wright, Black Boy (New York: HarperCollins, 1993, a reissue of Wright’s autobiography, originally published in 1945 by Harper and Brothers). This passage is from a last-minute insertion in a restructuring of the book, which originally had been titled American Hunger. For its release in 1945, the title was changed to Black Boy and the second half of the book, describing Wright’s adjustment in the North, was deleted at the behest of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Wright chose to insert this passage as a compromise ending to the revised autobiography. Because this passage was not part of the original manuscript, it is not included in the text of the modern-day version. The passage instead appears in the footnotes of the 1993 reprint, p. 496.
PART I: IN THE LAND OF THE FOREFATHERS
1 Our mattresses were made: Mahalia Jackson with Evan McLeod Wylie, Movin’ On Up (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1966), pp. 22, 25.
LEAVING
1 The land is first: David L. Cohn, God Shakes Creation (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1935), pp. 32, 33.
2 They fly from the land: W. H. Stillwell, “Exode,” Chicago Inter-Ocean, March 12, 1881. The stanza reads: “They fly from the land that bore them, as the Hebrews fled the Nile; from the heavy burthens [sic] o’er them; from unpaid tasks before them; from a serfdom base and vile.”
3 A man named Roscoe Colden: Jonathan Rosen, “Flight Patterns,” The New York Times Magazine, April 22, 2007, pp. 58–63.
THE GREAT MIGRATION, 1915–1970
1 In our homes: “The Negro Problem,” Independent 54: 2221. The colored Alabama woman interviewed for this 1902 article requested that her name not be used, fearing retribution for expressing a desire to leave. The fear of being identified was common among southern black letter writers to the Chicago Defender inquiring about opportunities in the North and others discussing or considering migration. Often they explicitly pleaded that their identities not be revealed.
2 “They left as though”: Emmett J. Scott, Negro Migration During the War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1920), p. 44.
3 Over the course: Estimates vary for the number of blacks who left the South during the Great Migration. Some have put the number at well over six million. The historian Jeffrey S. Adler writes that “the total for the three-decade period after 1940 exceeded 4.3 million” alone. David R. Colburn and Jeffrey S. Adler, eds., African-American Mayors: Race, Politics, and the American City (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), p. 4. Definitions vary as to which states make up the South, with the border states of Maryland, Delaware, and the District of Columbia often included. This book uses a definition based on the states that made up the Confederacy and the definitions and perceptions of the migrants who left the South. The migrants’ decision to escape to those border regions and those states’ participation in the Civil War on the Union side suggest that politically, psychologically, and demographically they were not southern but rather part of the North to which the migrants fled. Those states had net inflows of blacks in a dramatic departure from the states the migrants perceived of as the South. The estimate, just over five and a half million, used in this book is a conservative one and derives from data compiled from Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) Tapes of U.S. Census figures for out-migration of African Americans from the former Confederate states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, along with Kentucky and Oklahoma, to the former Union states that attracted the bulk of the migrants, namely, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Kansas, California, Nevada, Oregon, and the District of Columbia, along with the border states of Delaware, Maryland, and Missouri and the state of Washington, which was not admitted to the Union until after the Civil War. The number is considered to be an underestimate. “One estimate places the net under-enumeration of Negro males [alone] at about 20 per cent,” wrote the sociologists Karl E. Taeuber and Alma F. Taeuber in “The Changing Character of Negro Migration,” The American Journal of Sociology 70, no. 4 (January 1965), p. 433.
4 “receiving station”: Carl Sandburg, The Chicago Race Riots, July 1919 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1919), p. 60.
5 Over time: See Nicholas Mirkowich, “Recent Trends in Population Distribution in California,” Geographical Review 31, no. 2 (April 1941), pp. 300–307, for a general discussion of Gold Rush and Dust Bowl migrations.
6 for far longer: Blacks were enslaved in this country for 244 years, from 1619 to 1863. As of 2010, they have been free for 147 years.
7 “The story of”: Neil R. McMillen, “The Migration and Black Protest in Jim Crow Mississippi,” in Black Exodus: The Great Migration from the American South, ed. Alferdteen Harrison (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991), p. 81.
8 By then nearly half: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial
Times to 1970, Part 1 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975), table A, pp. 177–194; 1970 State Form 2 IPUS sample. From James N. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). See also Reynolds Farley and Walter Allen, The Color Line and the Quality of Life in America (Washington, D.C.: Russell Sage Foundation, 1987), pp. 112–13. Cited by Dernoral Davis in “Portrait of Twentieth-Century African-Americans,” in Black Exodus, ed. Harrison, p. 12. See also John D. Reid, “Black Urbanization of the South,” Python 35, no. 3 (1974), p. 259, for reference to the South’s being 53 percent black in 1970, the end of the Migration.
9 “Oftentimes, just to go”: John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1937), p. 302.
10 In Chicago alone: U.S. Census Bureau, Census 2000 Redistricting Data (Public Law 94-171) Summary File, Table PL1. In 2000, the black population was 1,084,221 in the city of Chicago and 1,033,809 in the state of Mississippi.
11 “folk movement”: McMillen, “The Migration and Black Protest in Jim Crow Mississippi,” p. 81.
12 Farragut: Union naval officer David G. Farragut, who rose to admiral, led the capture of the South’s largest city during the Battle of New Orleans in April 1862.
13 ten thousand: Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 209.
14 “I went to the station”: Scott, Negro Migration During the War, p. 41.
15 into the words of: Lawrence R. Rodgers, Canaan Bound: The African-American Great Migration Novel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), pp. x, xiii. The author notes that, among scholars, “the Great Migration, for many years, remained primarily an academic sideshow displaying only limited signs of penetrating the realm of national popular discourse and culture.” However, in the arts, the Great Migration and the resulting issues of “movement and identity have, over the entire history of published black literature, occupied the center of African American consciousness.” On p. 3, he adds, “As one of the most widely shared experiences of black America, migration, whether through force or volition, has remained a central subject of black literature and folklore.” Blyden Jackson, professor of literature emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, wrote that “no event, large or small, … has had an impact equal in mass or gavity upon the consciousness of black writers.” Blyden Jackson, “Introduction,” in Black Exodus, p. xv.
16 “Less has been written”: Gregory, The Southern Diaspora, p. 5.
17 the language changes: Writers navigating the language of intolerance often struggle with how to convey old attitudes and norms with the authenticity the work demands but with the grace and sensitivity required to reach current and future generations. On issues of race and ethnicity, the debate often centers on how best to describe black Americans when the names for the group change with the political fashions of the times and with the origins and intentions of the speaker regarding whatever term is at issue. Based on my many interviews with people from the era, the term “colored” was the most common word they used among themselves. This is not to say that prominent blacks of the day did not use the term “Negro,” many arguing that its capitalization bestowed greater status on a group hungry for recognition. But ordinary blacks seemed to wince at how the word could be so easily corrupted by the ruling class, coming out “nigra” instead of the more formal-sounding “Negro,” and thus they tended to use the term somewhat derisively in everyday conversation. As for the N-word itself, I have chosen to use it only where required for context, which turned out to be rarer than might be assumed. I chose to use great care out of an acknowledgment of the violence and loss of life that often accompanied its utterance. On the whole, I found that people who had most felt the sting of the word and the violence that undergirded it were less likely to use the word in casual speech than people who had never had to step off a sidewalk because of the color of their skin.
18 “Compared with northern-born”: Stewart E. Tolnay, “The African American ‘Great Migration’ and Beyond,” Annual Review of Sociology 29 (2003): 219.
PART II: BEGINNINGS
1 This was the culture: Richard Wright, Black Boy (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 303.
IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY
1 From the open door: Unless otherwise indicated, all references to Ida Mae Gladney are based on continual interviews and conversations with her from May 1996 to August 2004.
2 Calhoun City, Mississippi: Interview with Jarvis Enoch, Ida Mae’s nephew and a professor at Tennessee State University, in September 1998 in Nashville, about his experiences growing up in Calhoun City, Mississippi, in the 1940s and 1950s.
3 “hardware of reality”: Carrie Mae Weems, Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment, a film directed and narrated by Weems (Atlanta: Savannah College of Art and Design with the National Black Arts Festival, 2008).
THE STIRRINGS OF DISCONTENT
1 Everybody seems to be: Macon Telegraph, Editorial, September 15, 1916, p. 4.
2 One of the earliest: “Race Labor Leaving,” Chicago Defender, February 5, 1916, p. 1. Though this is what scholars have cited as the earliest known reference to a group of colored people leaving the South during World War I, it can logically be assumed that other parties left before them in the early stages of the war without telling anyone of their intentions. The full headline was “Race Labor Leaving. Much Concern over Possible Shortage of Labor—Exodus Steady—Treatment Doesn’t Warrant Staying.” The paragraph read: “Selma, Ala., Feb. 4—The white people of the extreme South are becoming alarmed over the steady moving of race families out of the mineral belt. Hundreds of families have left during the past few months and the stream is continuing. Every effort is being made to have them stay, but the discrimination and the race prejudice continues as strong as ever. Not many years ago there was a dearth of labor in this part of the country and the steerage passengers from Europe were sought. They cannot do the work of the race men, as they do not understand. Local editorials in white papers are pleading with the business men to hold the race men if possible.”
3 “treatment doesn’t warrant staying”: Ibid.
4 the long and violent hangover: Some historians have termed the period between Reconstruction and the early twentieth century the Nadir. See Rayford Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought, The Nadir: 1887–1901 (New York: Dial Press, 1954).
5 “I find a worse state”: Robert Preston Brooks, The Agrarian Revolution in Georgia, 1865–1912, doctoral dissertation (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1914; reprinted New York: AMS Press, 1971), pp. 413–14.
6 “They will almost”: “Laborers Wanted,” Southern Cultivator, March 1867, a letter from a writer identified by the initials G.A.N. of Warrenton, Georgia, dated February 2, 1867, APS Online, p. 69.
7 The fight over: Harvey Fireside, Separate and Unequal: Homer Plessy and the Supreme Court Decision That Legalized Racism (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004).
8 Fourteenth Amendment: The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, of 1868, enacted to establish the rights of freed slaves after the Civil War, reads as follows: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
9 Fifteenth Amendment: The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, of 1880, granting freed slaves the right to vote, reads: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
10 “If it is necessary”:
Ray Stannard Baker, Following the Color Line (New York: Doubleday and Page, 1908), p. 245 for Hoke Smith quotation, p. 246 for Vardaman remark on lynching.
11 “The only effect”: Jackson (Mississippi) Weekly Clarion-Ledger, July 30, 1903, quoted in The Oratory of Southern Demagogues, ed. Calvin McLeod Logue and Howard Dorgan (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), p. 73.
12 Fifteen thousand: “Summary Punishment Administered by Mob,” Hobart (Oklahoma) Republican, May 16, 1916, p. 1.
13 “My son can’t learn”: “Waco Horror Stirs to Action,” Savannah Tribune, July 8, 1916, page 4. “Supreme Penalty for Murder Paid by Negro Ghoul,” Monroe News-Star, March 5, 1935, p. 1—an example of newspaper headlines of the Migration era in the town where Pershing Foster grew up.
14 someone was hanged: Arthur F. Raper, The Tragedy of Lynching (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933), p. 36.
15 “insult to a white person”: Ibid.
16 stealing seventy-five cents: Baker, Following the Color Line, p. 176.
17 “perhaps most”: Herbert Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), p. 32.
18 Soon Klansmen: Documented History of the Incident Which Occurred at Rosewood, Florida, in January 1923, an investigation submitted to the Florida Board of Regents, December 22, 1993, p. 2. This seventy-nine-page report, commissioned by the State of Florida and conducted by a team of historians from the University of Florida, the State University of Florida, and Florida A&M University, provides a detailed account of the mob attack on the colored town of Rosewood and of the political and racial climate leading to the massacre, including the rebirth and rise to prominence of the Klan.
19 “was much less”: Wilbur J. Cash, The Mind of the South (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1941), pp. 124–25.
20 White citizens, caught up: The years and locations of the major riots of this era were: Wilmington, North Carolina (1898); Atlanta (1906); Springfield, Illinois (1908); East St. Louis, Illinois (1917); and Charleston; Nashville; Omaha; Elaine, Arkansas; Longview, Texas; Chicago; and Washington, D.C., among other places, in 1919, the year following the end of World War I.
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