Isabel Wilkerson
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11 The trouble began: Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); cited in Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1826–1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
12 By 1930: Osofsky, Harlem, p. 130 on population, p. 139 on sleeping in shifts, p. 129 for Adam Clayton Powell quote.
13 “a growing menace”: Harlem Magazine, February 1914, p. 21; cited in Osofsky, Harlem, p. 107.
14 Panicked property owners: Osofsky, Harlem, pp. 105–7.
15 White leaders tried: The New York Age, August 29 and November 14, 1912; January 9, 1913.
16 White leaders warned: Osofsky, Harlem, p. 108.
17 “rent to colored”: Ibid., p. 110.
18 NOTICE: New York Urban League, “Twenty-four Hundred Negro Families in Harlem: An Interpretation of the Living Conditions of Small Wage Earners,” typescript, Schomburg Collection, 1927, p. 7; cited in Osofsky, Harlem, p. 110.
19 “The basic collapse”: Osofsky, Harlem, p. 109.
20 “servants of the rich”: Jervis Anderson, This Was Harlem, 1900–1950 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Noonday Press, 1981), pp. 321–22.
21 It had a marble: Ibid., pp. 308–9.
22 Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company: John N. Ingham and Lynne B. Feldman, African-American Business Leaders: A Biographical Dictionary (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994), pp. 58–65. William Nickerson, one of the founders of Golden State Mutual Life Insurance, left Houston, Texas, for Los Angeles in 1921 and attributed his migration to the fact that “things were happening in the state, one of which was the riot [Longview, Texas, in 1919 and perhaps Tulsa in 1921]. So becoming disgusted,” he said, “I decided to take my wife and eight children and move to California.” Four years later, he would become one of the founders of the largest black-owned insurance company in the state.
23 “I didn’t think”: Jim Pinson, “City School Board Seat Won by Negro,” The Atlanta Constitution, May 15, 1953, p. 1.
25 “For the first time”: “Negro Is Victor in Atlanta Vote; Defeats White School Board Member, 22,259 to 13,936—Mayor Renominated,” The New York Times, May 15, 1953; “Atlanta Negro Is Elected to Board of Education,” New York Herald Tribune, May 15, 1953, p. 1.
DIVISIONS
1 I walked to the elevator: Richard Wright, Black Boy (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 303.
2 “With few exceptions”: Sadie Tanner Mossell, “The Standard of Living Among One Hundred Negro Migrant Families in Philadelphia,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 98 (November 1921): 216.
3 “The inarticulate and resigned masses”: E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in Chicago, 1939 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932), pp. 80, 84.
5 “a tangle of pathology”: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, D.C.: Office of Policy Planning and Research, United States Department of Labor, 1965), p. 23.
8 “the differential in payments”: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “The Crisis in Welfare,” The Public Interest, Winter 1968, pp. 3–29.
10 “It is the higher”: Karl E. Taeuber and Alma F. Taeuber, “The Changing Character of Negro Migration,” The American Journal of Sociology 70, no. 4 (January 1965): 429–41.
12 “As the distance”: Everett S. Lee, “A Theory of Migration,” Demography 3, no. 1 (1966): 57.
13 “Migrants who overcome”: Ibid., pp. 55–56.
14 “The move to northern”: J. Trent Alexander, “The Great Migration in Comparative Perspective: Interpreting the Urban Origins of Southern Black Migrants to Depression-Era Pittsburgh,” Social Science History, Fall 1998, pp. 358–60. Alexander’s analysis of census data found that, in 1940, only thirty-seven percent of black migrants to northern cities were from rural areas. Two-thirds were from towns with populations of 2,500 or more (p. 365).
15 “Most Negro migrants”: Taeuber and Taeuber, “The Changing Character of Negro Migration,” pp. 430–32.
17 “averaged nearly two more years”: Stewart E. Tolnay, “Educational Selection in the Migration of Southern Blacks, 1880–1990,” Social Forces, December 1998, pp. 492–97.
19 A 1965 study: Frank T. Cherry, “Southern In-Migrant Negroes in North Lawndale, Chicago, 1949–1959: A Study of Internal Migration and Adjustment,” unpublished dissertation, University of Chicago, Department of Sociology, September 1965, p. 71.
20 “There is no support”: Ibid., p. 98.
21 “were not of lower”: Taeuber and Taeuber, “The Changing Character of Negro Migration,” pp. 429–41.
22 the 1965 census study: Ibid., p. 439.
23 “resemble in educational levels”: Ibid., pp. 436–39.
24 “Black men who have been”: Larry H. Long and Lynne R. Heltman, “Migration and Income Differences Between Black and White Men in the North,” The American Journal of Sociology 80, no. 6 (May 1975): 1396–97.
25 “more successfully avoided poverty”: Larry H. Long and Kristin A. Hansen, “Selectivity of Black Return Migration to the South,” Rural Sociology 42, no. 3 (Fall 1977): 318. Based on a paper presented at the annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, Atlanta, March 30–April 2, 1977.
26 “not willing to risk”: Wen Lang Li and Sheron L. Randolph, “Return Migration and Status Attainment Among Southern Blacks,” Rural Sociology 47, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 395.
27 It made them “especially goal oriented”: Larry H. Long and Lynne R. Heltman, “Migration and Income Differences between Black and White Men in the North,” The American Journal of Sociology 90, no. 6 (May 1975): 1406.
28 In San Francisco, for instance: Charles S. Johnson, Herman H. Long, and Grace Jones, The Negro Worker in San Francisco (San Francisco: YWCA, the Race Relations Program of the American Missionary Association, and the Julius Rosenwald Fund, May 1944), pp. 15–23.
29 “more family-stable”: Thomas C. Wilson, “Explaining Black Southern Migrant Advantage in Family Stability: The Role of Selective Migration,” Social Forces 80, no. 2 (December 2001): 555–71.
30 W. A. Daniel, “Schools,” in Negro Problems in the Cities, ed. T. J. Woofter (College Park, Md.: McGrath Publishing, 1928), p. 183.
31 “is literally forced”: Ibid.
32 James Cleveland Owens: William J. Baker, Jesse Owens: An American Life (New York: Free Press, 1986), p. 16.
33 The boy’s first day: Ibid., p. 19.
34 It made headlines: Larry Schwartz, “Owens Pierced a Myth,” http://espn.go.com/sportscentury/features/00016393.html.
35 “I wasn’t invited”: Susan Robinson, “A Day in Black History: Jesse Owens,” www.gibbsmagazine.com/Jessie%20Owens.htm.
36 “My son’s victories”: Donald McRae, Heroes Without a Country: America’s Betrayal of Joe Louis and Jesse Owens (New York: Ecco, 2002), p. 168.
37 “a narrow tongue”: St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945), p. 12.
38 There were temptations: Ibid., p. 438. See Frazier, The Negro Family in Chicago, p. 103, on the mulatto woman running the biggest poker games on the South Side.
39 This was the landing place: Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, pp. 610–11.
40 “rude cabin”: A. T. Andreas, History of Chicago: From the Earliest Period to the Present Time (Chicago: A. T. Andreas, 1884), pp. 70, 71.
41 “A few goats”: Edith Abbott, The Tenements of Chicago, 1908–1935 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936), pp. 121–23.
42 “Families lived without light”: Ibid., p. 126.
43 “Negro migrants confronted”: Ibid., p. 117.
44 “attics and cellars”: Abraham Epstein, The Negro Migrant in Pittsburgh (New York: Arno Press, 1969), p. 13. Originally published by the University of Pittsburgh in 1918.
45 New arrivals often paid: Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922), p. 93.
46 “The rents in the South Side”: Abbott, The Tenements of Chicago, p. 125.
47 Dwellings that went: Thomas Jackson Woofter, Negro Problems in Cities (New York: Harper and Row, 1928), p. 127.
49 “Lodgers were not disposed”: Epstein, The Negro Migrant in Pittsburgh, p. 8.
50 Whites saw the migrants: Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago, p. 3.
51 “A colored boy swam”: Carl Sandburg, The Chicago Race Riots (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1919), p. 3.
52 “on a white man’s complaint”: Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago, p. 4.
53 Blacks stabbed a white peddler: Ibid., p. 10.
54 Two white men: Ibid., p. 11.
55 White gangs stormed: Ibid., pp. 1–6.
56 Initially, they came: 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), p. 16.
57 “By the conversation”: Alfred McClung Lee and Norman D. Humphrey, Race Riot (New York: Dryden Press, 1943), p. 81.
58 “the immigration”: U.S. Department of Labor, Division of Negro Economics, Negro Migration in 1916–17 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1919), p. 131.
59 “stabbed, clubbed and hanged”: Oscar Leonard, “The East St. Louis Pogrom,” Survey, July 14, 1917, p. 331; cited in Herbert Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), p. 116.
60 The police: Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago, pp. 71–78.
61 With a sense of urgency: Ibid., pp. 640–51.
62 “where they drank”: Arna Bontemps, “The Two Harlems,” The American Scholar, Spring 1945, p. 168.
63 There’ll be brown skin mammas: Frank Byrd, “Rent Parties,” in A Renaissance in Harlem: Lost Essays of the WPA, ed. Lionel C. Bascom (New York: Amistad Press, 1999), pp. 59–67.
TO BEND IN STRANGE WINDS
1 I was a Southerner: Zora Neale Hurston, “Backstage and the Railroad,” Dust Tracks on a Road (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1942), p. 98.
2 “They have been our best”: E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932), pp. 108–9.
3 Businessmen jumped: James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 155.
4 “I got a sharecropper”: Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), p. 50.
5 they ran notices: Grossman, Land of Hope, pp. 156–57, on the effects of the Migration on churches in the North.
6 “They tried to insulate”: Ibid., p. 139.
7 “The same class of Negroes”: Frazier, The Negro Family in Chicago, p. 112.
8 A colored newspaper: Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922), p. 304.
11 A survey of new migrants: Charles S. Johnson, Herman H. Long, and Grace Jones, The Negro Worker in San Francisco (San Francisco: YWCA, the Race Relations Program of the American Missionary Association, and the Julius Rosenwald Fund, May 1944), p. 19 on how migrants and nonmigrants viewed one another.
12 “like German Jews”: Grossman, Land of Hope, p. 144.
13 “Those who have long been”: “Our Part in the Migration,” Chicago Defender, March 17, 1917, p. 9.
14 “Well, their English”: Douglas Henry Daniels, Pioneer Urbanites: A Social and Cultural History of San Francisco (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), p. 171.
15 “Eleanor”: Ibid., p. 175.
16 “It is our duty”: Chicago Defender, March 17, 1917, and January 18, 1918, cited in Grossman, Land of Hope, pp. 144–45.
17 Don’t hang out the windows: “A Few Do’s and Don’ts,” Chicago Defender, July 13, 1918, p. 16.
18 Don’t use vile language: “Some Don’ts,” Chicago Defender, May 17, 1919, p. 20.
19 1. Do not loaf: Grossman, Land of Hope, pp. 146–47.
THE OTHER SIDE OF JORDAN
1 We cannot escape: James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 20.
2 “If you succeed”: Congressional Record, 75, Session 3, pp. 893, 873.
3 James Arthur Gay was perhaps: Ed Koch, “Pioneering Civic Leader, Hotel Executive Gay Dies at 83,” Las Vegas Sun, September 13, 1999, http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/1999/sep/13/pioneering-civic-leader-hotel-executive-gay-dies-a/.
4 “What do you suppose”: Scott Nearing, Black America (New York: Schocken Books, 1929), p. 78; original reference: H. G. Duncan, The Changing Race Relationship in the Border and Northern States (Philadelphia, 1922), p. 77.
5 Campbell Soup plant: “Business & Finance: Soup,” Time, September 2, 1929, www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,7737779,00.html.
6 “the great clocks of the sky”: Robert Redfield, Tepoztlán, A Mexican Village: A Study of Folk Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930), p. 83. Redfield describes the daily rhythms of life in his ethnography of a village in the Yucatán. His description could apply to rural people the world over who spend their days working the land. “In Tepoztlán,” he writes, “as in other simple societies, the pulse of life is measured more directly than it is with us by the great clocks of the sky.”
7 The plant turned out: Al Chase, “Chicago to Have One of the World’s Largest Soup Factories,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 20, 1927, p. C1.
8 “making conditions so unpleasant”: Abraham Epstein, The Negro Migrant in Pittsburgh (New York: Arno Press, 1969), p. 32.
9 “friction in the washrooms”: Chicago Commision on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922), p. 395.
10 “I find a great resentment”: Ibid., pp. 394–95, on resistance to black workers at a millinery and on white women threatening to quit a laundry that introduced a black woman among them.
11 “Their presence and availability”: Charles S. Johnson, A Preface to Racial Understanding (New York: Friendship Press, 1936), pp. 38–39.
12 By 1940: St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945), p. 227, Figure 16 from the 1940 Census.
13 “where no restaurant”: Ben Green, Before His Time: The Untold Story of Harry T. Moore, America’s First Civil Rights Martyr (New York: Free Press, 1999), p. 5.
14 These were the dark: Paul Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 61.
15 “It is safe to predict”: Green, Before His Time, p. 43, citing a quote in the Tampa Morning Tribune.
16 “We are in the hands”: “Florida Topics,” New York Freeman, June 25, 1887.
17 Florida school boards: Charles Johnson, Patterns of Negro Segregation (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1943), p. 16.
18 the authorities fired: Green, Before His Time, p. 85.
19 The three young men: Ibid., p. 91.
20 The trial had been so tense: Ibid., pp. 103–6, for a detailed account of the car chase after the Groveland trial.
21 Both men were from: Ray Charles and David Ritz, Brother Ray: Ray Charles’ Own Story (New York: Da Capo Press, 1978), p. 165.
22 “even at a financial loss”: Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present (Berkel
ey: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 101–6.
COMPLICATIONS
1 “What on earth was it”: Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1995), p. 294 (reissue; originally published by Random House, New York, 1952).
2 “positions in either”: Kimberley L. Phillips, AlabamaNorth: African-American Migrants, Community and Working-Class Activism in Cleveland, 1915–1945 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), pp. 241–42.
3 Entire companies and classes: Charles S. Johnson, To Stem This Tide: A Survey of Racial Tension Areas in the United States (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1943), pp. 11–12.
4 Those on the lowest rung: Brenda Clegg Gray, Black Female Domestics During the Depression in New York City, 1930–1940 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1993), pp. 57, 58.
5 One was by: Vivian Morris, “Slave Market” and “Domestic Price Wars,” in A Renaissance in Harlem: Lost Essays of the WPA, ed. Lionel C. Bascom (New York: Amistad Press, 1999), pp. 146–57.
6 In Chicago: St. Clair Drake and Horace H. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945, reprinted 1993), pp. 245–46.
7 “Someone would invariably”: Gray, Black Female Domestics, p. 51.
8 One colored woman: Keith Collins, Black Los Angeles: The Maturing of the Ghetto, 1940–1950 (Saratoga, Calif.: Century Twenty One Publishing, 1980), pp. 53–54, cited in Kevin Leonard, Years of Hope, Days of Fear: The Impact of World War II on Race Relations in Los Angeles, pp. 40, 41.
9 turning back the hands: Morris, “Slave Market,” p. 150.
10 One housewife: Gray, Black Female Domestics, p. 61.
11 In many cases: Ibid., p. 67.
12 Boy Willie: August Wilson, The Piano Lesson (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), p. 20.
13 The bartender: “Restaurant Keeper Who Breaks Dishes He Uses in Serving Negroes, Will Have to Get New Supply if This Plan Works,” The Pittsburgh Courier, February 14, 1931, p. A7, a story about black resistance to the practice of restaurants breaking the dishes used by blacks.