I read a number of very interesting books over the past year. Unfortunately, my recall of details in the books I read has been slipping over the years. In response to this memory weakness I began to take notes as I read. These notes took the very simple form of noting page numbers and the thoughts, ideas, data, etc. I found particularly interesting. I never really developed a plan with what to do with this data until earlier this week. I have selected a “book of the year” from the books I have read. This years’ winner is The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. Some of you who may have read this book are probably wondering how, and why, I took this leap into the race relations genre. Even if you are not wondering, it gives me an opportunity to interject one of my favorite Dartmouth basketball stories.
During my junior year at Dartmouth we played in a Christmas tournament at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Dartmouth was invited to these four team Christmas tournaments as an easy first round opponent for the hosting team all but guaranteeing their participation in the finals the next night. One of the star players on our team was raised in Nashville and always hoped to play for Vanderbilt. Fortunately for us he was never recruited by Vanderbilt and ended up at Dartmouth where he eventually became the school scoring leader and a two time all Ivy selection. Our game against Vandy came down to our final possession with Dartmouth very surprisingly behind by only one point. As time expired, the Vanderbilt reject hit a monster fadeaway jump shot from just in front of our bench to win the game.
Let me continue. One of my best friends in Jacksonville attended Vanderbilt along with his wife. I related the above story to my friend many years ago and it turns out he was at the game described above. About a year ago, he and his wife highly recommended to me a book about the captain of that 1970 Vanderbilt team who was the first black basketball player in the Southeast Conference (SEC). As a team, we were unaware of the color barrier which had been in place in the SEC several years prior to that December game in 1970. The Southeast Conference is arguably the most powerful and wealthiest college conference in the country. It currently includes as its member schools Vanderbilt, Alabama, Florida, LSU, Auburn, Tennessee, Mississippi, Mississippi State, and Georgia among several others. I found Inside Strong an outstanding book not because of its basketball roots but because of the incredible racism it described. I found it hard to fathom how totally unaware I was of the depth of hatred being spewed in our country at that time. I had played sports with and against many black players and entirely black teams. In spite of this, the racism described in Inside Strong shook me to the core. I played eight high school games over four years in two all black high schools in Hartford without any racial incidents I can remember. It was disconcerting at the time to play in a rundown gymnasium in front of an all black crowd, but what I remember most was the fans melodically chanting “Weaver high is mellow” as their team crushed us on the court. Not a particularly threatening cheer. The epithets shouted at Percy Williams during games in Mississippi and Alabama were stunning in their viciousness.
I told the above story to another friend during one our ski trips and she recommended I read The Warmth of Other Suns. Shortly thereafter, another college friend from West Virginia raved about the book. With recommendations from Boston and West Virginia I realized I had to read another depressing book.
This blog entry is my attempt at summarizing in a kind of book report form what I found to be some of the historical highlights of Warmth of Other Suns. It should take you about 15 minutes to read and I hope it gives you some insight you did not have previously. At a minimum I hope it is at least a short refresher on some of the history of blacks in America from the Civil War until the 1970’s. Being the grandson of immigrants made this book particularly compelling as you will see in the narrative. I plan to bring this narrative forward to the present based upon a number of articles I have read and saved pertaining to race relations. Hopefully, you can check out future postings to theryzblog.com if you are interested.
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“The Warmth of Other Suns” – by Isabel Wilkerson
Isabel Wilkerson won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her reporting as Chicago bureau chief of the New York Times. The award made her the first black woman in the history of American journalism to win a Pulitzer Prize and the first African American to win for individual reporting.
“The Warmth of Other Suns is a brilliant and stirring epic, the first book to cover the full half century of the Great Migration… Wilkerson combines impressive research… with great narrative and literary power. Ms. Wilkerson does for the Great Migration what John Steinbeck did for the Okies in his fiction masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath; she humanizes history, giving it emotional and psychological depth.”
– The Wall Street Journal
The book was published in 2010.
The Great Migration began during the First World War and ended sixty years later in the 1970’s. Over the course of these six decades some six million black southerners left the land of their forefathers and fanned out across the United States for an uncertain existence in nearly every corner of the country. The book chronicles the lives of Ida Mae Brandon Gladney who left for Chicago in the 1930’s, George Swanson Starling who left for New York City in the 1940’s, and Robert Joseph Foster who left for Los Angeles in the 1950’s. Ida Mae was a health care worker, Robert a luggage handler on the trains traveling from New York to Florida and Robert a doctor. The development of the characters in the book is wonderfully done, but since my main interest is in the historical aspects of the Migration and its impact, in general, on the black race, these notes will focus on summarizing historical details I found particularly revealing (and in many cases revolting).
“Jim Crow” was a popular term used as a pejorative for colored people and things related to colored people, and, by 1841, was applied to the laws used to segregate blacks after the Civil War. “The Jim Crow” was a minstrel song and dance routine performed across the country by a white actor dressed in blackface and ragged clothes who imitated a handicapped black stable hand. The song and dance, “Jumping Jim Crow”, became a national sensation. The first Jim Crow laws were enacted in the South right after the Confederates lost the Civil War. When the northerners took over the South during Reconstruction they repealed these hastily passed laws. The Federal Civil Rights Act of 1875 explicitly outlawed segregation. When the northerners who were there to enforce the law retreated in the late 1870’s and the twentieth century approached, the South quickly resurrected Jim Crow. Whites in the South began to reconstruct the caste system founded under slavery and to refine the language of white supremacy. The fight over this new caste system made it to the U.S. Supreme Court. Homer Plessy, a black Louisianan, protested a new state law forbidding any railroad passenger from “entering a compartment to which by race he does not belong.” Plessy bought a first class ticket and took a seat in a white-only car and was arrested when he refused to move. In 1896, in the seminal case of “Plessy v. Ferguson”, the Supreme Court sided with the South and ruled, in a seven to one vote (one judge did not participate in the case), that “equal but separate” accommodations were constitutional. That ruling would stand for the next sixty years. By 1905, every southern state, from Florida to Texas, outlawed blacks from sitting next to whites on public conveyances.
These laws multiplied and became more onerous as time passed. In 1906, Alabama required streetcars for whites and streetcars for blacks. By 1909, Mobile, Alabama required blacks to be off the streets by 10 p.m. There were restrictions on uses of cups, pails, water buckets, etc. in factories. Blacks could not work in the same room as whites, or even go up or down a stairway at the same time. In 1958, a new bus station was built in Jacksonville, Florida, with two of everything, including cocktail lounges. There were colored windows at Post Offices, colored telephone booths, separate windows to get drivers licenses, separate tellers to make deposits, separate taxicabs, and black people had to be off the streets and out of the city limits by 8 p.m. in Palm Beach and Miami.
With these new laws as guides, young whites were weaned on a formal kind of supremacy more hostile than their slave holding ancestors. When I mentioned to a friend of mine raised in Mississippi how disturbing I found the racial hostility prevalent in the South at that time he immediately referred to this white supremacy mindset. I am not sure if his immediate referral to this perceived supremacy confirmed his agreement with my disgust, or if he felt it was a reasonable explanation for the extreme racism it embodied.
Newspapers gave top billing to black violence, the most popular being any rumor of black male indiscretion toward a white woman. According to the 1933 book The Tragedy of Lynching, someone was hanged or burned alive every four days from 1889 to 1929 for such alleged crimes as “stealing hogs, poisoning mules, jumping labor contract, suspected of killing cattle, boastful remarks” or “trying to act like a white person”. Fifteen thousand men, women, and children gathered to watch eighteen-year-old Jesse Washington as he was burned alive in Waco, Texas, in May 1916. The crowd chanted, “Burn, Burn, burn!” as he was lowered into the flames. One father with his young son in tow said “My son can’t learn too young.”
The net result of this aggressive segregation was the realization by many blacks that the insanity of this caste system was not going away any time soon. As Isabel wrote in her summary, “Their lives were left to the devices of planters with no vested interest in them and, now, no intimate ties to ease the harshness of their circumstances or to protect them, if only out of paternalism, from the whims of night riders, a hell bent jury, or poor whites taking out their resentment at their unwitting competitors for work.” For many, the only sensible option was to leave. The first groups left in 1916 from Selma, Alabama.
Southern cities and towns spent vastly different sums on educating whites and blacks. As an example, there were whites only high schools and black only high schools. Books for the black high schools were the used books from the white schools. In Louisiana in the 1930’s, white teachers and principals were making an average salary of $1,165 a year. Black teachers and principals were making $499 per year. Obviously, this disparity in pay was true throughout most jobs blacks were entitled to have under the caste system. It made it all but impossible for black families to accumulate assets nearly to the extent of whites. This gap multiplied over generations would factor into a wealth disparity of white Americans having an average net worth ten times that of Black Americans by the turn of the twenty-first century (in 2013, the median white family had net assets of $142,000 and the median black family $11,000 according to the US Census Bureau) dampening the economic prospects of the children of both Jim Crow and the Great Migration. In summary, white ruling class policy on colored education enforced the belief that colored people needed no education to fulfill their God-given role in the South. Too many educated colored people would upset the whole balance of power in the caste system.
Even a highly educated black person faced strict segregation. One of the characters in the book manages to graduate from a black college and become a doctor who performs complex operations and procedures as an officer in the army. Once out of the army he decides to migrate to California as he is not allowed to operate in the whites only hospital in his hometown. Incidentally, there is no black hospital in the town, either. During his drive to California he is unable to find a motel to spend the night. Even though he passes through numerous non Jim Crow states the modus operandi is no blacks in white hotels under the guise of their being no rooms available.
During the Great Migration the railroad cars were at times packed with the peasant caste of the South, “the huddled masses yearning to breathe free” in their own country and, save for their race and citizenry, not unlike the passengers crossing the Atlantic in steerage with the intention of never returning to the old country. As the book progresses you realize what an appalling difference in opportunity awaited the European peasant immigrants versus the peasant caste of the South. As the grandson of four European peasant immigrants I can certainly appreciate the difference.
Upon arrival in the north the migrants all met the same fate. They were forced into and sealed off in overcrowded colonies which became the foundation for the ghettos that would persist into the next century. The hill district in Pittsburgh; Roxbury in Boston; the east side of Cincinnati; the near east of Detroit; whole swaths of the south side of Chicago and south central in Los Angeles; Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant in New York. They were known as the colored quarters where the least paid people were forced to pay the highest rents for the most dilapidated housing owned by absentee landlords.
Riots were commonplace in migration cities generally carried out by disaffected whites against groups perceived as threats to their survival. Both sides were made up of rural and small town people relegated to the worst jobs by industrialists who pitted one group against another. They were all essentially the same people except for the color of their skin set against one another and unable to see the commonality of their mutual plight. The reality was that Jim Crow filtered through the economy, north and south, pressing down on working class people of all races. Whites could not command higher pay as long as black people were forced to accept subsistence wages. The availability of black labor for work being performed by whites, whether they were actually employed or not, acted as a control on wages benefitting the northern industrialists. This fierce implementation of the caste system resulted in 75% of black men working in lowly, menial, dangerous, dirty work with little opportunity to advance. The situation was even worse for black women.
By the late 1950’s the colonies were straining to hold the migrants still flowing into the northern cities. Bombings, shootings and riots greeted the arrival of nearly every new colored family in white-defended territory. It was similar to the war playing out in the South at the same time, from the arrest of Rosa Parks in 1955 for refusing to give up a bus seat in Alabama to white troops blocking nine colored students in 1957 on their first day of school in Little Rock, Arkansas, after the Supreme Court said they had the right to enroll.
The biggest standoffs came between the groups with the most in common, save race: the working-class white immigrants and the working-class black migrants, both with similar backgrounds and wanting the same thing – good jobs and a decent home for their families.
After World War II northern cities would witness a migration of whites out of their urban strongholds. These suburbs became sanctuaries for whites seeking, with government assistance, to replicate the white havens they once had in the cities. A prime example was Dearborn, Michigan. The Dearborn mayor once said to a Southern newspaper that “every time we hear of a negro moving in, we respond quicker than you do to a fire.” Forty-five years later blacks would make up eighty percent of the population of Detroit. Just across the Ford Expressway, the black population of the suburb of Dearborn, the 2000 census found, was one percent.
By this time in history the words of James Baldwin ring true when he writes:
I can conceive of no Negro native to this
country
who has not, by the age of puberty, been
irreparably scarred
by the conditions of his life….
The wonder is not that so many are ruined
But that so many survive.
The very thing that made black life hard in the North, the very nature of northern hostility – unwritten, mercurial, opaque, and eminently deniable – made it hard to nail down an obvious right-versus-wrong cause to protest. Blacks in the North could already vote and sit at a lunch counter or anywhere they wanted on an elevated train. Yet they were hemmed in and isolated into overcrowded sections of their cities, restricted in the jobs they could hold and the mortgages they could get, their children attending segregated and inferior schools, not by edict as in the South but by circumstance in the North, with the results pretty much the same. The unequal living conditions produced the expected unequal results: blacks working long hours for overpriced flats, their children left unsupervised and open to gangs, the resulting rise in crime and drugs, with few people able to get out.
In 1966 Dr. Martin Luther King was struggling with what sociologist Gunnar Myrdal called the Northern Paradox. In the North, Myrdal wrote, “almost everybody is against discrimination in general, but, at the same time, almost everybody practices discrimination in his own personal affairs” – that is, by not allowing blacks into unions or clubhouses, certain jobs, and white neighborhoods avoiding social interaction overall. “It is the culmination of all of these personal discriminations,” he continued, “which creates the color bar in the North, and, for the Negro, causes unusually severe unemployment, crowded housing conditions, crime and vice. About this social process, the ordinary white Northerner keeps sublimely ignorant and unconcerned.”
Rioters after the assassination of Martin Luther King were predominantly the children of the migration participants. The discontent of the young people unsettled the migrant parents who had fled the violence of the South. “What did they know of the frustration of the young people who had grown up in the mirage of equality but a whole different reality, in a densely packed world of drugs and gangs and disorder, with promises that seemed to have turned to dust?” Fast forward to the Chicago of 2016 and you realize this frustration has impacted another generation.
By the time the Migration reached its conclusion in the 1970’s, sociologists had a name for this hard-core racial division. They would call it hypersegregation, a segregation of the races that was so total and complete that blacks and whites rarely intersected outside of work. At the time of the end of the Migration the top ten hypersegregated cities per the 1980 census in order of severity of racial isolation from most segregated to least were: (1) Chicago, (2) Detroit, (3) Cleveland, (4) Milwaukee, (5) Newark, (6) Gary, (7) Philadelphia, (8) Los Angeles, (9) Baltimore, and (10) St. Louis – all of them receiving stations of the Great Migration.
Additional factoid: De facto segregation has declined since 1970, but it has not done so evenly. On a scale where 0 means blacks are evenly distributed and 100 means they live completely separately Milwaukee scores 82, New York 78 and Chicago 76. Anything above 60 is considered high.
Personal factoid: Susan and I lived Chicago from 1973 until 1979. We lived in Hyde Park on the southeast side of Chicago. Hyde Park was home to the University of Chicago and remained a rare island of integration despite the racial hostilities raging around it. From the time we arrived we were made aware of the actual street boundaries where “safe” movement was possible. There was a delicatessen on the southside which sold incredibly cheap sandwich meats that we liked to visit as poor graduate students. Unfortunately, it was on the southwest side of Chicago. Nevertheless, we would hitch a ride with friends and travel due west for miles through the 100% “black colony” established as part of the Great Migration (although I did not know its origins at that time). It wasn’t only the blacks who were segregated. My old college roommate arranged for me to participate in an all Mexican basketball league on the far south side. I was the only non-Mexican in the league along with a single referee. When Susan and I were about to leave Chicago we attended a party of young professionals on the white, near north side of the city. When one of the women at the party found out we were moving to New York she asked if we realized that in New York you had to walk on the sidewalks with black people.
After sit-ins and marches in the South things began to change. President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act on July 2, 1964, 101 years after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation granting rights that would have to be spelled out again long after Lincoln was gone.
Additional factoid: coincidentally, serfdom was abolished in Russia in 1863 allowing my young, unskilled ancestors (all four of my grandparents) from Belarus to become part of the group of immigrants who clashed with the blacks as they climbed the economic ladder.
There were two sets of similar people arriving in Chicago and other industrial cities of the North at around the same time in the early twentieth century – blacks pouring in from the South and immigrants arriving from eastern and southern Europe in a pilgrimage that had begun in the latter part of the nineteenth century. On the face of it, they were sociologically alike, mostly landless rural people, put upon by the landed upper classes or harsh autocratic regimes, seeking freedom and autonomy in the northern factory cities of the United States.
But as they made their way into the economies of Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and other receiving cities, their fortunes diverged. Both groups found themselves ridiculed for their folksy ways and accents and suffered backward assumptions about their abilities and intelligence. But with a stroke of a pen, many eastern and southern Europeans and their children could wipe away their ethnicities-and those limiting assumptions-by adopting Anglo-Saxon surnames and melting into the world of the more privileged native born whites. In this way, generations of immigrant children could take their places without the burdens of an outsider ethnicity in a less enlightened era. Issur Danielovitch, the son of immigrants from Belarus, could become Kirk Douglas, meaning that his son could live life and pursue stardom as Michael Douglas instead of Michael Danielovitch.
A name change would have had no effect in masking the ethnicity of black migrants. They did not have the option of choosing for themselves a more favored identity. Black migrants did not have the same shot at craft unions or foreman jobs or country clubs or exclusive neighborhoods if they were of a mind to do so. A daughter of white ethnics could bear white children and thus assume the identity of a more privileged class. This was not the case with a black migrant daughter who would gain no such advantage by intermarrying. In summary, white immigrants and their descendants could escape the disadvantages of their station if they chose to, while that option did not hold for the vast majority of black migrants and their children.
Because they were largely excluded from well paying positions in even unskilled occupations and were concentrated in servant work and other undesirable jobs, blacks were the lowest paid of all the recent arrivals and treated in a manner similar to immigrants. In 1950, blacks in the North and West made a median annual income of $1,628, compared to Italian immigrants, who made $2,295, Czechs, who made $2,339, Poles, who made $2,419, and Russians, who made $2,717. Black southerners stepped into a hierarchy that assigned them to a station beneath everyone else, no matter that their families had been in the country for centuries.
Black people were among the first nonnative people to set foot in the New World, brought by the Europeans to build it from wilderness and doing so without pay and by force from the time of their first arrivals in 1619 to their emancipation 246 years later. For twelve generations, their ancestors had worked the land and helped build the country. Into the twentieth century, their fourth century in America, they still had had to step aside and fall further down the economic ladder with each new wave of immigrants from all over the world, after generations as burden bearers.
And so when blacks who migrated north and west showed resentment at being considered immigrants, it was perhaps because they knew in their bones that their ancestors had been here before there was a United States of America and that it took their leaving the South to achieve the citizenship they deserved by their ancestry and labors alone. That freedom and those fights had not come automatically, as they should have, but centuries later and of the migrants’ own accord.
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