Isabel Wilkerson

by The Warmth of Other Suns

  14 For several days: Michael Lydon, Ray Charles: Man and Music (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), p. 197. Ray Charles and David Ritz, Brother Ray (New York: Dial Press, 1978), p. 201.

  15 After the dealer’s: Charles and Ritz, Brother Ray, p. 201.

  16 It was around that time: Lydon, Ray Charles, p. 197.

  17 They chose not to call: Charles and Ritz, Brother Ray, p. 202; Lydon, Ray Charles, p. 198. These accounts differ in the timing and nature of Ray’s arrival at the hospital. His biographer’s account is more consistent with the sense of obligation and protocol with which Robert Foster was known to have treated his patients. Foster, honoring the patient-doctor privilege, did not speak in detail about individual patients.

  18 “Naturally, I refused”: Charles and Ritz, Brother Ray, p. 202.

  19 “Everyone I met”: Ibid.

  20 The tour was a dream: Lydon, Ray Charles, p. 198.

  21 “one of the dearest”: Charles and Ritz, Brother Ray, p. 202.

  22 “Do you feel greater freedom”: Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922), pp. 98–101.

  THE RIVER KEEPS RUNNING

  1 “Why do they come?”: Ray Stannard Baker, Following the Color Line (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1908), p. 133.

  2 “Every train, every bus”: Interview with Manley Thomas, who migrated from Jackson, Tennessee, to Milwaukee in September 1950. Interview conducted June 26, 1998, in Milwaukee.

  3 Arrington High: Dan Burley, “Mississippi Escapee Yearns to Return,” Chicago Defender, February 24, 1958, p. A4.

  4 Henry Brown: Henry Box Brown, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown (Manchester, England: Lee and Glynn, 1851; reprint, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), p. 84.

  5 Brown was in agony: From the account by William Still from The Underground Rail Road on the arrival of Henry Box Brown at the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society offices. Cited in Appendix B of the 2008 reprint of Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, pp. 160–63.

  6 They locked the door: Henry Box Brown, Narrative of Henry Box Brown, Who Escaped from Slavery Enclosed in a Box 3 Feet Long and 2 Wide. Written from a Statement Made by Himself. With Remarks upon the Remedy for Slavery by Charles Stearns (Boston: Brown and Stearns, 1849); cited in Alan Govenar, African American Frontiers: Slave Narratives and Oral Histories (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2000), pp. 9–16.

  7 many funeral directors: Interviews with black funeral directors in Chicago and at an annual National Funeral Directors Association meeting in Norfolk, Virginia, yielded polite changes of subject when directors were asked about the issue of funeral home involvement in these escapes out of the South.

  8 “That underground”: Burley, “Mississippi Escapee Yearns to Return.”

  THE PRODIGALS

  1 [My father], along with: James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 72.

  2 ’Sides, they can’t run us: Marita Golden, Long Distance Life (New York: Doubleday, 1989), p. 39.

  3 “Even in the North”: Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy, Anyplace but Here (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1945), p. 170.

  DISILLUSIONMENT

  1 Let’s not fool ourselves: Speech by Martin Luther King, Jr., May 17, 1956, MLK speech file, MLK Library, cited in James R. Ralph, Jr., Northern Protest: Martin Luther King Jr., Chicago and the Civil Rights Movement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 30.

  2 It was a hoax: Robert Coles, “When the Southern Negro Moves North,” The New York Times Magazine, September 17, 1967, pp. 25–27.

  3 “They don’t want”: L. Alex Wilson, “Plan 2-Year Ban on Migrants,” Chicago Defender, July 1, 1950, p. 22.

  4 “successfully defended”: Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 223.

  5 “chronic urban guerilla warfare”: Arnold R. Hirsch, Making of the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 41.

  6 The moving truck arrived: “Justice Department Probes Case of Negro Kept Out of Home,” Atlanta Daily World, July 11, 1951, p. 1.

  7 The Clarks did not let: “Truman May Act in Cicero Case,” Chicago Defender, September 29, 1951, p. 1.

  8 A mob stormed the apartment: Stephen Grant Meyer, As Long as They Don’t Move Next Door: Segregation and Racial Conflict in American Neighborhoods (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), pp. 118–19. Details of the mob’s destruction of the Clarks’ apartment and belongings from Chicago Defender, August 11, 1951, p. 7; Chicago Defender, July 21, 1951, p. 5; Atlanta Daily World, July 13, 1951, p. 1; “Ugly Nights in Cicero,” Time, July 23, 1953.

  9 The next day: “Chicago Called Guard for 1919 Riots,” Chicago Defender, July 21, 1951, p. 5, for reference to National Guard in racial incidents. “Truman May Act in Cicero Case,” Chicago Defender, September 29, 1951, p. 1, on arrests of 118 people in the Cicero rioting and the grand jury’s decision not to indict.

  10 “It was appalling”: Walter White, “Probe of Cicero Outbreaks Reveals Rioters Not Red but Yellow,” Chicago Defender, July 28, 1951, p. 7.

  11 “bigoted idiots”: “Support Is Growing for Cicero Riot Victims,” Atlanta Daily World, p. 1.

  12 “This is the root”: “Illinois Gov. Blames Housing Shortage for Riot in Cicero,” Atlanta Daily World, October 21, 1951, p. 1.

  13 “A resident of Accra”: Hirsch, Making of the Second Ghetto, p. 53.

  14 “Our nation is moving”: Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), p. 1. The 609-page report, issued by a commission chaired by Otto Kerner, then governor of Illinois, and at the behest of President Lyndon B. Johnson, examined the causes of a national outbreak of violence in twenty-three cities in the mid-1960s. The commission stated: “This is our basic conclusion: Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”

  15 “The panic peddler”: Hirsch, Making of the Second Ghetto, pp. 31–35.

  16 We are going to blow: “Bomb Explosion Wrecks Flat Building; Lives Imperiled When Angry Whites Hurl Dynamite: Police Failed to Protect Homes,” Chicago Defender, September 28, 1918, p. 1.

  17 “crowded out of Detroit”: Meyer, As Long as They Don’t Move Next Door, p. 122.

  18 He read in: See “RR Employes Give to Church Fund,” New York Amsterdam News, January 5, 1963, p. 24, for George Starling raising money to help rebuild churches in Georgia.

  19 In March, George: See “Airline Workers Still Helping Razed Church,” New York Amsterdam News, March 16, 1963, p. 5, for George Starling handing over the second check to help rebuild churches in Georgia.

  REVOLUTIONS

  1 I can conceive: James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 59.

  2 “Negroes have continued”: James R. Ralph, Jr., Northern Protest: Martin Luther King Jr., Chicago and the Civil Rights Movement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 35.

  3 “almost everybody is against”: Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, vol. 2 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944), p. 1010.

  4 “So long as this city”: “White and Black in Chicago,” Chicago Tribune, August 3, 1919, p. F6. The editorial also said, “We admit frankly that if political equality had meant the election of Negro mayors, judges, and a majority of the city council, the whites would not have tolerated it. We do not believe that the whites of Chicago would be any different from the whites of the south in this respect.… Legally a Negro has a right to service anywhere the public generally is served. He does not get it. Wisely, he does not ask for it. There has been an illegal, nonlegal or extra legal adjustment founded upon common sense which has worked in the past, and it will work in the future.”

  5 “in one sense”: Ralph, Northern Protest, p. 34.

  6 It was Aug
ust 5, 1966: Gene Roberts, “Rock Hits Dr. King as Whites Attack March in Chicago,” The New York Times, August 6, 1966, p. 1.

  7 The march had barely begun: Ibid. on where the rock hit King. Ralph, Northern Protest, on the size of the rock.

  8 As the eight hundred: Roberts, “Rock Hits Dr. King as Whites Attack March in Chicago.”

  9 Some of King’s aides: See Ralph, Northern Protest, p. 33, for attempts by top advisers to dissuade King from going north. The advisers argued that their work in the South was far from complete, that the North would be unreceptive, and that such efforts would hurt northern support for their cause. “King thought otherwise, and rejected this counsel just as he would subsequent warnings,” according to Ralph.

  10 “I have to do this”: “Dr. King Is Felled by Rock: 30 Injured as He Leads Protesters; Many Arrested in Race Clash,” Chicago Tribune, August 6, 1966, p. 1.

  12 “I have seen many demonstrations”: Ibid.

  13 “It happened slowly”: Louis Rosen, The South Side: The Racial Transformation of an American Neighborhood (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1998), p. 118.

  15 “I fought the good fight”: Ibid., p. 147.

  16 “It was like sitting around”: Ibid., p. 120.

  17 “It was like having”: Ibid., p. 26.

  18 Mahalia Jackson: Mahalia Jackson and Evan McLeod Wylie, Movin’ On Up (New York: Hawthorne Books, 1966), p. 119.

  19 “Shall we sacrifice”: Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy, Anyplace but Here (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1945), p. 176.

  20 The top ten cities: Isabel Wilkerson, “Study Finds Segregation in Cities Worse than Scientists Imagined,” The New York Times, August 5, 1989, an article on the findings of a five-year study of 22,000 census tracts conducted by University of Chicago sociologists Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton.

  21 kept a card file: “The Extracurricular Clout of Powerful College Presidents,” Time, February 11, 1966, p. 64.

  22 “in addition to his widow”: “Dr. Rufus Clement of AU Dies Here,” New York Amsterdam News, November 11, 1967, p. 45.

  23 The evening was unusually cool: Earl Caldwell, “Martin Luther King Is Slain in Memphis; White Is Suspected; Johnson Urges Calm: Guard Called Out; Curfew Ordered in Memphis, but Fires and Looting Erupt,” The New York Times, April 5, 1968, p. 1.

  24 “About 74 percent”: Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York: Bantam Books, 1968), p. 6.

  THE FULLNESS OF THE MIGRATION

  1 And so the root: Langston Hughes, “For Russell and Rowena Jelliffe,” Cleveland Call and Post, April 6, 1963, p. B1.

  2 There were two sets: Stanley Lieberson, A Piece of the Pie: Blacks and White Immigrants Since 1880 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 32–33.

  3 white immigrants: Ibid., p. 34.

  4 “called for blacks”: Ibid., p. 35.

  5 fertility rates for black women: Ibid., pp. 193–97. See also Clyde Vernon Kiser, Sea Island to City (New York: AMS Press, 1967), pp. 204, 205. This study from the 1930s found that the Migration “significantly reduced” fertility rates. In New York, “twenty-four out of forty wives married 1–10 years had borne no children. Five of the fourteen married 10–20 years were childless, as were the two wives married 20–30 years.”

  6 blacks were the lowest paid: Lieberson, A Piece of the Pie, pp. 292–93; Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 16.

  7 “There is just no avoiding”: Ibid., p. 369.

  PART V: AFTERMATH

  1 The migrants were gradually absorbed: 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), p. 75.

  IN THE PLACES THEY LEFT

  1 The only thing: Lonnie G. Bunch III, “The Greatest State for the Negro: Jefferson L. Edmonds, Black Propagandist of the California Dream,” in Seeking El Dorado: African Americans in California, ed. Lawrence B. de Graaf, Kevin Mulroy, and Quintard Taylor (Los Angeles: Autry Museum of Western Heritage in association with University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2001), p. 132. Jefferson Lewis Edmonds was a farmer, teacher, and state legislator in Mississippi during Reconstruction. He left Mississippi for Los Angeles in 1886, shortly after an incident in which whites, fearing that a group of colored residents were about to walk into the Carrollton County courthouse, opened fire on the unarmed people, killing twenty of them. Edmonds became editor of The Liberator, a colored newspaper in Los Angeles.

  2 Mr. Edd, whose land: Chickasaw County Historical and Genealogical Society, Chickasaw County History, vol. 2 (Dallas: Curtis Media, 1997), p. 430 on Willie Jim Linn and p. 497 on Edd Monroe Pearson.

  3 The people who had not gone: Ibid., p. 10.

  4 “intemperate individuals”: Ibid.

  5 “spent all their savings”: Mark Lowry II, “Schools in Transition,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 63, no. 2 (June 1973): pp. 173, 178.

  6 In the meantime: Ibid., p. 176.

  7 “My conscience told me”: Ben Green, Before His Time: The Untold Story of Harry T. Moore, America’s First Civil Rights Martyr (New York: Free Press, 1999), pp. 206–7.

  8 “he dropped dead”: Ibid., p. 207.

  9 “the only public building”: Ibid., pp. 206–8.

  10 But Sheriff McCall did not: Ibid., p. 207.

  11 McCall was reelected: Ibid., p. 208. See also Ramsey Campbell, “Lake’s Willis McCall Is Dead,” Orlando Sentinel, April 29, 1994, p. A1.

  12 The new high school: Contributors of Ouachita Parish: A History of Blacks to Commemorate the Bicentennial of the United States of America (The Black Bicentennial Committee of Ouachita Parish, 1976), p. 10.

  LOSSES

  1 It occurred to me: Jacqueline Joan Johnson, Rememory: What There Is for Us, cited in Malaika Adero, Up South (New York: New Press, 1993), p. 108.

  2 “one of Los Angeles’ ”: “Rites Held for L.A. Socialite Mrs. Alice Clement Foster, 54,” Chicago Defender, December 17, 1974, p. 4.

  MORE NORTH AND WEST THAN SOUTH

  1 “I could come back”: Mahalia Jackson with Evan McLeod Wiley, Movin’ On Up (New York: Hawthorne Books, 1966), p. 117.

  2 “Platters Full of Plenty Thanks”: An advertisement appearing in Chicago Metro News, November 26, 1977, p. 18.

  3 “personal isolation”: Based on an undated, registered letter written by Robert Foster to Edward Bounds, director of the U.S. Labor Department in San Francisco, as part of a workers’ compensation claim filed as a result of a dispute with the West Los Angeles Veterans Administration Medical Center in Brentwood.

  AND, PERHAPS, TO BLOOM

  1 Most of them care nothing: James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 21.

  THE WINTER OF THEIR LIVES

  1 That the Negro American: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, D.C.: United States Department of Labor, Office of Policy Planning and Research, 1965), p. 23.

  2 “I know everybody”: “Why Do You Live in Harlem? Camera Quiz,” New York Age, April 29, 1950.

  EPILOGUE

  1 “there is not one family”: Allen B. Ballard, One More Day’s Journey (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984), p. 13.

  2 “Masses of ignorant”: E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (New York: Dryden Press, 1948), p. 285. Originally published by the University of Chicago Press, 1939.

  3 “in such large numbers”: 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.

  4 better educated: Stewart E. Tolnay, “Educational Selection in the Migration of Southern Blacks, 1880–1990,” Social Forces (December 1998): 489–508. “The educational differences between southern migrants and native northerners were considerably smaller than the corresponding difference between migrants and their relati
ves and neighbors remaining in the South,” Tolnay writes. Because a disproportionate number of educated blacks migrated out of the South, the number of years of schooling for migrants on the whole was higher than might otherwise have been expected and not far from the educational levels of blacks already in the North, a difference of one and a half years by 1950. The quality of their southern education, however, was generally considered inferior.

  5 “The Southerners had their eye”: Allen B. Ballard, One More Day’s Journey (New York: McGraw Hill, 1984), p. 191.

  6 John Coltrane: Lewis Porter, John Coltrane: His Life and His Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), p. 33.

  7 “Upon their arrival”: Stewart E. Tolnay and Kyle D. Crowder, “Regional Origin and Family Stability in Northern Cities: The Role of Context,” American Sociological Review 64 (1999): 109.

  8 “Compared with northern-born blacks”: Stewart E. Tolnay, “The African American ‘Great Migration’ and Beyond,” Annual Review of Sociology 29 (2003): 219. See also 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): 1395–1407.

  9 Something deep inside: Long and Heltman, “Migration and Income Differences Between Black and White Men in the North,” p. 1395.

  10 “Instead of thinking”: Tolnay and Crowder, “Regional Origin and Family Stability in Northern Cities,” p. 109.

  11 “led to higher earnings”: Reynolds Farley, “After the Starting Line: Blacks and Women in an Uphill Race,” Demography 25, no. 4 (November 1988): 477.

  12 “Black migrants who left”: Larry H. Long and Kristin A. Hansen, “Selectivity of Black Return Migration to the South,” Rural Sociology 42, no. 3 (Fall 1977): 325. Based on a paper presented at the annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, Atlanta, March 30–April 2, 1977.

  13 “Black school principals”: Allen B. Ballard, One More Day’s Journey, p. 186.