22 “I hope and trust”: Frederick Douglass, “The Lessons of the Hour,” an address to the Metropolitan A.M.E. Church, Washington, D.C., delivered January 9, 1894 (Baltimore: Press of Thomas & Evans, 1894), p. 23.
23 It was during that time: See Gilbert Thomas Stephenson, “The Separation of the Races in Public Conveyances,” The American Political Science Review 3, no. 2 (May 1909): 181 on the origins of the term “Jim Crow” and the first Jim Crow laws in Massachusetts, 1841. See also Ronald L. F. Davis, “Creating Jim Crow,” http://www.jimcrowhistory.org/history/creating2.htm, as well as David Hinckley, “Natural Rhythm: Daddy Rice and the Original Jim Crow,” New York Daily News, May 27, 2004. Mississippi, in 1865, required separate seating for all colored people except those “traveling with their mistresses, in the capacity of nurses.” Florida, in 1865, made no such allowances and punished people of either race with standing in a “pillory for one hour” or a whipping “not exceeding thirty nine stripes.” Texas, in 1866, simply required every railroad company to “attach to each passenger train run by said company one car for the special accommodation of Freedmen.”
24 Streetcars: C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 97–102.
25 “The measure of”: Howard Thurman, The Luminous Darkness: A Personal Interpretation of the Anatomy of Segregation and a Ground of Hope (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), pp. 70–71. Thurman, a prominent theologian in the mid–twentieth century and a migrant himself, was born in Daytona Beach, Florida, in 1899. He was the dean of Rankin Chapel at Howard University and later the dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University, where he became a mentor of Martin Luther King, Jr., while King was a seminary student at the university.
26 “his fate”: David L. Cohn, God Shakes Creation (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1935), p. 156.
27 “a premature”: Philip S. Foner, ed., The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, vol. 4, specifically from “The Negro Exodus from the Gulf States, an Address Before Convention of the American Social Science Association, Saratoga Springs, New York, September 12, 1879” (New York: International Publishers, 1955), p. 336.
28 “The Negroes just quietly”: U.S. Department of Labor, Division of Negro Economics, Negro Migration in 1916–17 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1919), p. 95.
29 “You tell us”: Ibid., p. 31.
30 “stabbed the next day”: Ibid., p. 95.
31 “The sentiment”: Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of Alabama, 1901, 4, p. 4441.
32 “It is too much”: U.S. Department of Labor, Negro Migration in 1916–17, p. 13.
33 These were the facts: See Baker, Following the Color Line, pp. 29–36, for description of segregated elevators, waiting rooms, libraries, parks, and saloons and streetcar protocols. See Bertram Wilbur Doyle, The Etiquette of Race Relations in the South: A Study in Social Control (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1937), p. 147 (rules on amusement parks, theaters, and playhouses); p. 148 (rules on boarding and exiting streetcars); pp. 149–150 (rules on waiting rooms at depots and the protocol of colored people being served at ticket windows); p. 151 (different hours at colored and white schools, segregated ambulances); p. 152 (segregated hearses and cemeteries). See William H. Chafe, Raymond Gavins, and Robert Korstad, eds., Remembering Jim Crow (New York: New Press, 2001), p. 110, on separate windows for car license plates in Indianola, Mississippi.
34 In 1958, a new: Cal Brumley, “Segregation Costs: Dixie Firms Find Them More a Burden as Racial Tension Grows,” The Wall Street Journal, December 17, 1957, p. 1.
35 separate tellers: See Chicago Defender, March 21, 1931, p. 3, on separate teller for colored people at an Atlanta bank.
36 Colored people had: Stetson Kennedy, Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1959), p. 227.
37 the conventional rules: Charles S. Johnson, Patterns of Negro Segregation (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1943), pp. 124–26. Johnson devoted an entire section to racial etiquette on the highway. “When driving their own cars,” he wrote, “they were expected to maintain their role as Negros and in all cases to give whites the right-of-way.” He later added, “If there is any doubt about whose turn it is to make a move in traffic, the turn is assumed to be the white person’s.”
38 If he reached: Hortense Powdermaker, After Freedom: A Cultural Study of the Deep South (New York: Viking Press, 1939), p. 49. See also Kennedy, Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A., pp. 221–23.
39 In everyday interactions: Hugh Stephen Whitaker, “A Case Study in Southern Justice: The Emmett Till Case,” unpublished dissertation for the Graduate School of Florida State University, August 1963. See p. 11 for description of taboos between blacks and whites in the South through the 1960s.
40 The consequences: James C. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 213.
41 It was against the law: Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, pp. 117–18, on Arkansas law on segregated racetrack betting and Birmingham ban on integrated playing of checkers.
42 At saloons in Atlanta: Baker, Following the Color Line, p. 36.
43 There were white parking spaces: “Confusion with Jim Crow Bible,” The Raleigh Evening Times, March 29, 1906, p. 1. The story describes an incident during the trial of a black schoolteacher accused of disposing of a mule on which there was a mortgage. A defense witness, who was colored but looked white, took the stand and was being sworn in when the judge told the sheriff the man had been given the wrong Bible. “That one over this is the one for the use of the white people,” Judge Amistead Jones said. “Not that I am a stickler about such matters, but if there are to be different Bibles kept for the races, then you must not get them mixed that way. Have a different place for them, and keep them there. Then such mistakes as this will not be made.” Also practiced in Atlanta, and thus likely elsewhere in the South, as described by Baker in Following the Color Line, p. 36.
GEORGE SWANSON STARLING
1 His world is the basement: Unless otherwise indicated, all references to George Starling are based on numerous interviews and conversations with him from June 1995 to June 1998.
2 “the caste barrier”: John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1937), p. 65.
3 “The question of”: J. W. Johnson, Along This Way (New York: Viking Press, 1933), p. 56.
4 In some parts: Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (New York: Knopf, 1977), p. 83; original citation: Henry Adams, Senate Report 693, 2, p. 104.
5 only a quarter: Hortense Powdermaker, After Freedom: A Cultural History of the Deep South (New York: Viking Press, 1939), p. 86.
6 “The Negro farm hand”: “The Negro Exodus,” Montgomery Advertiser, a letter from J. Q. Johnson, pastor of St. Paul A.M.E. Church in Columbia, Tennessee, April 27, 1917, p. 4.
7 “One reason for preferring”: Powdermaker, After Freedom, p. 86.
8 “in a hurrying time”: Theodore Dwight Weld, American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (New York: The American Anti-Slavery Society, 1839), p. 38.
9 Florida went farther: See Julia Floyd Smith, Slavery and Plantation Growth in Antebellum Florida, 1821–1860 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1973), p. 102, on punishment for slaves; p. 121 on law requiring free blacks to register or face arbitrary reenslavement.
10 Florida, in the early winter: The southern states did not all secede at the same time. There were two waves of secession following the November 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln and a Republican majority in Congress, portending abolition of a state’s right to, among other things, maintain or expand slavery. The first wave of secession included seven slave states, beginning with South Carolina on December 20, 1860, followed by Mississippi on January 9, 1861; Florida on January 10, 1861; Alabama on January 11, 1861; Georgia on January 19, 1861; Louisiana on Jan
uary 26, 1861; and Texas on February 1, 1861. The second wave of secession came after the outbreak of war at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, in April 1861. In the second wave were the marginally more moderate, previously fence-sitting slave states of Virginia, April 17, 1861; Arkansas, May 6, 1861; Tennessee, May 7, 1861; and North Carolina, May 20, 1861. The Confederacy also claimed portions of modern-day Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona, as well as the support of Missouri and Kentucky, slaveholding border states that did not formally secede.
11 “the great truth”: “The Southern Confederacy. Slavery the Basis of the New Government, An Official Manifesto. Speech of Vice-President Stephens,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 28, 1861, p. 1. Stephens delivered this extemporaneous speech in Savannah, Georgia, on March 21, 1861, after the first Confederate states had seceded from the Union and drafted the Confederate Constitution. That document was largely based on the U.S. Constitution, setting forth three branches of government with duties nearly identical to those in the Union. The Confederate Constitution states in Part 4, Section 9: “No bill of attainder, ex-post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.” The constitution was adopted by what was known as the Congress of the Confederate States (at the time, South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas) at a joint meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, on March 11, 1861, precisely one week after Lincoln took the oath of office on March 4, 1861.
12 “if any negro”: Gilbert Thomas Stephenson, “The Separation of the Races in Public Conveyances,” The American Political Science Review 3, no. 2 (1909): 181.
13 “anything that was black”: Documented History of the Incident Which Occurred at Rosewood, Florida, in January 1923 (submitted to the Florida Board of Regents, December 22, 1993), p. 19.
14 single worst act: James R. McGovern, Anatomy of a Lynching: The Killing of Claude Neal (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), pp. 52–66.
15 It was the early morning: “Group Kills Negro; Disappoints Crowd,” Associated Press, October 28, 1934; appeared in The New York Times, October 28, 1934.
16 The crowd grew so large: See The Lynching of Claude Neal (New York: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1934), p. 2, for an account of the lynching. Also McGovern, Anatomy of a Lynching, pp. 79–90, for details of mob behavior, the lynching, and the rioting by whites after Neal’s death.
17 Soon afterward: “Lynch Victim’s Innocence Apparent as Father of Girl Is Sentenced,” Pittsburgh Courier, June 15, 1935, p. A4. The Neal lynching cast a lingering cloud over race relations in Jackson County, Florida, decades after the killing. James R. McGovern, a historian examining the case in the early 1980s, found people who had clear memories of the lynching and its aftermath but were reluctant to speak about it out of fear of reprisal. This was especially true of black residents, one of whom, in finally relenting to give an interview, said, “Well, if I am going down, it will be for a good cause.” McGovern, Anatomy of a Lynching, p. xi.
18 “never had a negro”: Ben Green, Before His Time: The Untold Story of Harry T. Moore, America’s First Civil Rights Martyr (New York: Free Press, 1999), p. 244.
19 “he might be accused”: McGovern, Anatomy of a Lynching, p. 6.
ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER
1 The paneled door: Unless otherwise indicated, all references to Robert Pershing Foster are based on numerous interviews and visits with him from April 1996 to July 1997.
2 1,139 pupils: See “Louisiana States,” Chicago Defender, October 10, 1931, p. 19, regarding the number of students at Monroe Colored High.
3 the church broke into an uproar: “Two Murdered in Baptist Church Riot: Four Others Wounded During Free for All Fight,” Chicago Defender, September 17, 1932, p. 1.
4 “the doors of the church”: “Eight Wounded, One Killed in Church Fight,” Atlanta Daily World, September 8, 1932, p. 2.
5 In Louisiana in the 1930s: D. T. Blose and H. F. Alves, Biennial Survey of Education in the U.S., Statistics of State School Systems, 1937–38, U.S. Office of Education Bulletin, 1940, no. 2, p. 137. Cited in Charles S. Johnson, Patterns of Negro Segregation (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1943), p. 16.
6 The disparity in pay: Thomas M. Shapiro, The Hidden Cost of Being African-American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 47.
7 lopsided division of resources: W. D. Weatherford and Charles S. Johnson, Race Relations: Adjustment of Whites and Negroes in the United States (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1934), pp. 358–59, on disparity of investment in white schools and colored schools in the South.
8 “The money allocated”: Robert A. Margo, Race and Schooling in the South, 1880–1950: An Economic History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 44, citing Carleton Washburne, Louisiana Looks at Its Schools (Baton Rouge: Louisiana Educational Survey Commission, 1942), p. 111.
9 “If these Negroes become”: see Ray Stannard Baker, Following the Color Line (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1908), p. 295, for quote lamenting the effect of education for black southerners.
10 Sherman, Texas: Arthur F. Raper, The Tragedy of Lynching (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933; reprinted Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2003), pp. 319–55.
11 And I’d whisper: Mahalia Jackson with Evan McLeod Wylie, Movin’ On Up (New York: Hawthorne Books, 1966), p. 36.
12 Gilbert and Percy Elie: Interview with Gilbert Elie, who migrated from Grenada, Mississippi, to Akron, Ohio. Conducted in Grenada, Mississippi, May 29, 1996.
13 Hundreds of miles away: Interview with Virginia Hall, a migrant from North Carolina, in Brooklyn, New York, February 22, 1998.
A BURDENSOME LABOR
1 “one of the most backbreaking”: Donald Holley, The Second Great Emancipation: The Mechanical Cotton Picker, Black Migration and How They Shaped the Modern South (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000), p. xii.
2 It took some seventy: See ibid., p. 9, for a description of the basic mechanics of picking and the number of bolls per pound of seed cotton.
3 “begin to dream”: Rupert B. Vance, Human Factors in Cotton Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1929), p. 135, quoting the author Henry K. Webster from “Slaves of Cotton,” American Magazine, July 1906, p. 19.
4 “The first horn”: Ulrich B. Phillips, in Vance, Human Factors in Cotton Culture, p. 47.
5 Sometime in the 1930s: Interviews with Lasalle Frelix, a migrant from Brookhaven, Mississippi, in Chicago, 1996.
6 A pound of cotton: William C. Holley and Lloyd E. Arnold, Changes in Technology and Labor Requirements in Crop Production: Cotton, National Research Project Report no. A-7 (Philadelphia: Works Progress Administration, September 1937), pp. 19–54. Also Ronald E. Seavoy, The American Peasantry: Southern Agricultural Labor and Its Legacy: A Study in Political Economy, 1850–1995 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998), pp. 37–47, cited in Holley, The Second Great Emancipation, p. 56.
7 The other brother: Interviews with Reuben Blye in Eustis, Florida, July 1997 and July 1998.
8 In North Carolina: Gilbert Thomas Stephenson, “The Separation of the Races in Public Conveyances,” The American Political Science Review 3, no. 2 (May 1909): 200–201.
9 standing in the way: David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), pp. 491–92.
10 “The result of this action”: Ibid., p. 495; Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 22; W. E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (New York: International Publishers, 1968), p. 323.
11 “There was no earthly”: Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, pp. 493–95.
12 His northern friends thought: Ibid., p. 495, citing Shirley Graham Du Bois, His Day Is Marching On: A Memoir of W. E. B. Du Bois (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott,
1971), p. 71.
13 In the winter of 1919: Richard Panek, “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cosmologist,” The New York Times, July 25, 1999, available at www.nytimes.com.
14 It would confirm: Alexander S. Sharov and Igor D. Novikov, Edwin Hubble, the Discoverer of the Big Bang Universe, trans. Vitaly Kisin (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 9, 10, 29–35.
THE AWAKENING
1 You sleep over a volcano: Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 132–33. Gilmore recounts a debate on a summer night in 1901 in Charlotte, North Carolina, between two well-educated young women, Addie Sagers and Laura Arnold, on the topic “Is the South the Best Home for the Negro?” Sagers argued against going north, where, she said, the only jobs open to blacks were “bell boy, waiter, cook or house maid,” and where northern unions excluded blacks from their ranks. Arnold, her debate opponent, railed against the violence, segregation, and disenfranchisement of blacks in the South. She agreed that “the unknown was frightening,” but added, “if the Puritans could cross the oceans in small boats, surely North Carolina’s African-Americans could board northbound trains.” Gilmore notes that Arnold’s “received more points than any other speech that night.” Two weeks later, Arnold “took her own advice and moved to Washington, D.C.”
2 I am in the darkness: Emmett J. Scott, “Additional Letters of Negro Migrants, 1916–1918,” The Journal of Negro History 4, no. 4 (October 1919): 412–45, quote on p. 440. This letter, dated May 13, 1917, was one of several hundred letters from anxious black southerners, written primarily to the Chicago Defender and collected and published by Emmett Scott in two series of articles at the end of World War I.
3 a fight broke out: Alfred McClung Lee and Norman D. Humphrey, Race Riot (New York: Dryden Press, 1943), p. 26.
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