DIVISIONS

I walked to the elevator and rode down with Shorty.³⁸

“You lucky bastard,” he said bitterly.

“Why do you say that?”

“You saved your goddamn money and now you’re gone.”

“My problems are just starting.”

—RICHARD WRIGHT, Black Boy/American Hunger

THE NORTH AND WEST, 1915 TO THE 1970S

UNKNOWINGLY, the migrants were walking into a headwind of resentment and suspicion. They could not hide the rough-cast clothes ill suited for northern winters or the slow syrup accents some northerners could not decipher. They carried with them the scents of the South, of lye soap and earthen field. They had emerged from a cave of restrictions into wide-open, anonymous hives that viewed them with bemusement and contempt. They had been trained to walk humbly, look down when spoken to. It would take time to learn the ways of the North.

What they could not have realized was the calcifying untruths they would have to overcome on top of everything else. As soon as the North took note of the flood of colored people from the South, sociologists and economists began studying the consequences of their arrival and drawing conclusions about who these people were and why they were coming.

“With few exceptions,” wrote the economist Sadie Mossell of the migration to Philadelphia, “the migrants were untrained, often illiterate, and generally void of culture.”³⁹

“The inarticulate and resigned masses came to the city,” wrote the preeminent sociologist E.⁴⁰ Franklin Frazier of the 1930s migration to Chicago, adding that “the disorganization of Negro life in the city seems at times to be a disease.”

In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an official in the U.S. Department of Labor, called the inner cities after the arrival of the southern migrants “a tangle of pathology.”⁴¹ He argued that what had attracted southerners like Ida Mae, George, and Robert was welfare: “the differential in payments between jurisdictions has to encourage some migration toward urban centers in the North,” he wrote, adding his own italics.⁴²

Their reputation had preceded them. It had not been good. Neither was it accurate. The general laws of migration hold that the greater the obstacles and the farther the distance traveled, the more ambitious the migrants. “It is the higher status segments of a population which are most residentially mobile,” the sociologists Karl and Alma Taeuber wrote in a 1965 analysis of census data on the migrants, published the same year as the Moynihan Report.⁴³ “As the distance of migration increases,” wrote the migration scholar Everett Lee, “the migrants become an increasingly superior group.”⁴⁴

Any migration takes some measure of energy, planning, and forethought. It requires not only the desire for something better but the willingness to act on that desire to achieve it. Thus the people who undertake such a journey are more likely to be either among the better educated of their homes of origin or those most motivated to make it in the New World, researchers have found. “Migrants who overcome a considerable set of intervening obstacles do so for compelling reasons, and such migrations are not taken lightly,” Lee wrote.⁴⁵ “Intervening obstacles serve to weed out some of the weak or the incapable.”

The South had erected some of the highest barriers to migration of any people seeking to leave one place for another in this country. By the time the migrants made it out, they were likely willing to do whatever it took to make it, so as not to have to return south and admit defeat. It would be decades before census data could be further analyzed and bear out these observations.

One myth they had to overcome was that they were bedraggled hayseeds just off the plantation. Census figures paint a different picture. By the 1930s, nearly two out of every three colored migrants to the big cities of the North and West were coming from towns or cities in the South, as did George Starling and Robert Foster, rather than straight from the field. “The move to northern cities was dominated by urban southerners,” wrote the scholar J.⁴⁶ Trent Alexander. Thus the latter wave of migrants brought a higher level of sophistication than was assumed at the time. “Most Negro migrants to northern metropolitan areas have had considerable previous experience with urban living,” the Taeuber study observed.⁴⁷

Overall, southern migrants represented the most educated segment of the southern black population they left, the sociologist Stewart Tolnay wrote in 1998. In 1940 and 1950, colored people who left the South “averaged nearly two more years of completed schooling than those who remained in the South.”⁴⁸ That middle wave of migrants found themselves, on average, more than two years behind the blacks they encountered in the North.

But by the 1950s, those numbers would change. As the Migration matured, the migrants would arrive with higher levels of education than earlier waves of migrants and thus greater employment potential than both the blacks they left behind and the blacks they joined. A 1965 study of ninety-four migrants to Chicago, most of them from Mississippi and Arkansas, found that thirteen percent were illiterate (defined as having five or fewer years of schooling), compared to forty-five percent of the people in the southern counties they came from.⁴⁹ The migrants and the blacks they encountered in the poor west side neighborhood of North Lawndale had roughly the same amount of schooling—an average of about eight years, the study found. “There is no support,” the sociologist Frank T.⁵⁰ Cherry wrote, for the notion of “a less-well-educated” pool of migrants entering Chicago “than it already has.”

A seminal study that would be published that same year went even further. Across the North as a whole, the post–World War II migrants “were not [italics in original] of lower average socioeconomic status than the resident Negro population,” the Taeubers wrote in their 1965 census analysis of migrants arriving north from 1955 to 1960.⁵¹ “Indeed, in educational attainment, Negro in-migrants to northern cities were equal to or slightly higher than the resident white population.”

Against nearly every assumption about the Migration, the 1965 census study found that the migrants of the 1950s—particularly those who came from towns and cities, as had George Starling and Robert Foster—had more education than even the northern white population they joined.⁵²The percentage of postwar black migrants who had graduated from high school was as high as or higher than that of native whites in New York, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and St. Louis and close to the percentage of whites in Chicago.

As for blacks who had the advantage of having come from the urban South, the percentage who had graduated from high school was higher than that of the whites they joined, by significant margins in some cases, in each of the seven northern cities the study examined.

In Philadelphia, for instance, some thirty-nine percent of the blacks who had migrated from towns or cities had graduated from high school, compared with thirty-three percent of the native whites. In Cleveland, forty percent of migrants from the urban South were high school graduates compared to thirty-one percent of the native whites. This was the case for George Starling, Robert Foster, and hundreds of thousands of other colored migrants from the small-town South, who, it turns out, often had as much as or more education than those they met, colored or white, in the cities to which they fled, though they were often looked down upon.

Indeed, when it came to their black counterparts, the Taeuber study found that, in every major city the migrants fled to, a higher percentage of migrants had completed at least one year of high school than the black population they joined—sixty-one percent of migrants compared to fifty-three percent of native blacks in New York, fifty-six percent of migrants compared to fifty-two percent of native blacks in Chicago, sixty-three percent of migrants compared to fifty-four percent of native blacks in Cleveland, sixty-six percent of migrants compared to fifty-four percent of black natives in Washington, D.C., sixty percent of migrants compared to forty-eight percent of native blacks in Philadelphia, and so on.

The migrants, the Taeubers found, “resemble in educational levels the whites among whom they live,” and they tended to be “of substantially higher socioeconomic status, on the average, than the resident Negro population.”⁵³ The researchers added that “these findings are at variance with most previous discussions of Negro migration.”

The misconceptions about the migrants carried over to their presumed behavior upon arrival. Contrary to popular convention, the migrants were more likely to be married and remain married, less likely to bear children out of wedlock, and less likely to head single-parent households than the black northerners they encountered at their destinations. They were more likely to be employed, and, due to their willingness to work longer hours or more than one job, they actually earned more as a group than their northern black counterparts, despite being relegated to the lowliest positions.

“Black men who have been out of the South for five years or more are, in every instance, more likely to be in the labor force than other black men in the North,” wrote Larry H.⁵⁴ Long and Lynne R. Heltman of the Census Bureau in 1975. They found that, among young black men in the North, fifteen percent of those born in the North were jobless as against nine percent of the southern migrants they studied. “The same pattern applies to all other age groups and to the West,” the census found.

Whatever their educational level, the migrants “more successfully avoided poverty,” wrote Long and his colleague Kristin A.⁵⁵ Hansen of the Census Bureau, “because of higher rates of labor force participation and other (unmeasured) characteristics.”

There developed several theories as to why. One was that, because of the migrants’ hard-laboring lives in the South, they had “a stronger attachment to the labor force as a result of their work-oriented values,” Long and Hansen wrote. Another explanation pointed to disadvantages facing the northern-born blacks in the migrants’ destinations—“exposure to drugs, crime and other conditions in big cities that may be handicaps in obtaining and holding jobs.”

There is yet another possible reason—that the migrants who would make it out of the South and outlast others who gave up and returned home were a particularly resilient group of survivors. “The migration of blacks out of the South has clearly been selective of the best educated,” Long and Hansen wrote. “It is possible that the least capable returned, leaving in the North a very able and determined group of migrants.”

Those who would tough it out in the North and West were “not willing to risk relocation in the South because of possible greater advantages in their current location,” wrote the sociologists Wen Lang Li and Sheron L.⁵⁶ Randolph in a 1982 study of the migrants.

This would suggest that the people of the Great Migration who ultimately made lives for themselves in the North and West were among the most determined of those in the South, among the most resilient of those who left, and among the most resourceful of blacks in the North, not unlike immigrant groups from other parts of the world who made a way for themselves in the big cities of the North and West.

There appeared to be an overarching phenomenon that sociologists call a “migrant advantage.” It is some internal resolve that perhaps exists in any immigrant compelled to leave one place for another. It made them “especially goal oriented, leading them to persist in their work and not be easily discouraged,” Long and Heltman of the Census Bureau wrote in a 1975 report.⁵⁷ In San Francisco, for instance, the migrants doubled up like their Chinese counterparts and, as in other cities, tended to “immigrate as groups and to remain together in the new environment for purposes of mutual aid,” wrote the sociologist Charles S.⁵⁸ Johnson.

The willingness to do whatever it took to survive appeared to offer some protection from the ills surrounding them, North and South. The San Francisco study found that the migrants were half as likely to be separated, divorced, or widowed as the blacks they encountered upon arrival. Overall, wherever they went, they tended to be “more family-stable compared both to those they left behind at their origin and those they encountered at their destination,” the sociologist Thomas Wilson wrote in 2001.⁵⁹ “They are less likely to bear children outside of marriage and less likely to be divorced or separated from their spouses.”

The findings, he wrote, “are once again clearly at odds with earlier claims that family dysfunction was carried north by southern migrants.”

Still, the stereotypes persisted despite the evidence and extended to even the youngest migrants. The children, having emerged from one-room schoolhouses with their southern English, were often labeled retarded by northern school officials, regardless of their native abilities. Segregation was not the law, but northerners would find creative ways to segregate the migrant children from the white children when so inclined.

“Colored pupils sometimes occupy only the front seats or the back seats,” wrote the researcher W.⁶⁰ A. Daniel in 1928. “They are grouped on one side, or occupy alternate rows; sometimes they are seated without regard to race; or they share seats with white pupils, a method used regularly by one teacher for punishing white pupils.”

The absurdities of the South seemed to follow the migrants north despite their efforts to escape. One migrant child faced altogether different seating and circumstances in each classroom he entered. In this case, the student, Daniel wrote, “is literally forced to take the back seat” in one classroom.⁶¹ “In another room, he is the president of his class, and in another the editor of the paper, in another in charge of the tool room, while in another he is expected to do more than his share of menial tasks.”

It was in the early 1920s that a little boy named James Cleveland Owens migrated with his sharecropper parents from Oakville, Alabama, to Cleveland, Ohio, when he was nine years old.⁶² The city of Cleveland was the Promised Land to colored people in his part of Alabama, as reflected by his middle name. The parents had debated for months over whether to leave, the mother anxious to do so, the father, having been beaten down by sharecropping, worried and fearful. As they prepared to leave, the little boy happened to bump into his father while they were packing for the train. The father put both hands on his son’s shoulders to steady himself but quickly removed them out of embarrassment. Only then did the boy realize that his father’s hands were “shaking with fright.”

The boy’s first day of school in the North, he was assigned to a grade lower than the one he’d been in where he had come from, and the teacher couldn’t understand his southern accent.⁶³ When she asked him his name, he said he was called J.C. The teacher misheard him and, from that day forward, called him Jesse instead. So did everyone else in this new world he was in. He would forever be known as Jesse Owens, not by his given name. He would go on to win four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, becoming the first American in the history of track and field to do so in a single Olympics and disproving the Aryan notions of his Nazi hosts.

It made headlines throughout the United States that Adolf Hitler, who had watched the races, had refused to shake hands with Owens, as he had with white medalists.⁶⁴ But Owens found that in Nazi Germany, he had been able to stay in the same quarters and eat with his white teammates, something he could not do in his home country. Upon his return, there was a ticker-tape parade in New York. Afterward, he was forced to ride the freight elevator to his own reception at the Waldorf-Astoria.

“I wasn’t invited to shake hands with Hitler,” he wrote in his autobiography.⁶⁵ “But I wasn’t invited to the White House to shake hands with the President either. I came back to my native country, and I could not ride in the front of the bus. I had to go to the back door. I couldn’t live where I wanted. Now, what’s the difference?”

It would take the arrival of millions of more migrants and many more decades of perseverance on their part and on the part of protesters for human rights before they would truly become accepted.

But his father, a man of few words who had come north with the greatest reluctance and worry, was overcome with the enormity of the moment and how it had come to be. His son had had the chance to go to good schools, run on real tracks, and be coached at Ohio State University, rather than spend his life picking cotton. “My son’s victories in Germany,” Henry Owens said, “force me to realize that I made the best move of my life by moving out of the South.”⁶⁶

CHICAGO, AUGUST 1938

IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY

MISS THEENIE HAD BEEN RIGHT about her daughter. Ida Mae was expecting when she left Mississippi with her husband and two little ones in the fall of 1937. That spring, she returned south for the express purpose of having the baby in the familiar hands of a midwife. She had heard that up north, doctors strapped women down when they went into labor, and she wasn’t going to submit to that kind of barbarity. So she gave birth to her last child in Miss Theenie’s house, on May 28, 1938. It was a baby girl, and Ida Mae named her Eleanor, like the first lady of the land, Eleanor Roosevelt.

She kept the baby in Mississippi until she was plump and strong and then carried her and little James and Velma north on the Illinois Central sometime in August to rejoin her husband. Only this time, Ida Mae didn’t return to Milwaukee. She got off in Chicago, the city of skyscrapers and Montgomery Ward that she had thought was Heaven when she first set foot in the North.

While she was away giving birth, George had left Milwaukee, having found little work and given up on the prospects of making a living there. One of his brothers had settled in Chicago. So George turned to the bigger city with its steel mills, blast furnaces, slaughterhouses, and tanneries. He would have been willing to take just about anything to feed his family, having stooped to pick cotton all his life, but what he found first was a job on another man’s ice wagon.

Up and down the rutted streets they went, steering the horse and wagon in the early-morning hours, delivering ice to the colored people in their cold-water flats on the South Side.

“Iceman! Iceman!” they shouted as they steered.

“Bring me fifty pounds!” someone would yell from the window of a three-flat.

“Bring me a hundred!” came an order from another.

George slung a rug across his shoulders and hoisted a block of ice on his back to carry it up the tenement steps. He was used to hauling a hundred pounds of cotton in a day for fifty cents. Now he could make that with each fifty-pound block of ice. And he was delivering a lot of it. Ice melted fast in the summer heat. Some people needed to replenish their iceboxes every day. He was already making more money than in Mississippi, and not under the shotgun scrutiny of a planter. It was stoop labor, and he couldn’t do it forever. But it would have to do for now.

By the time Ida Mae got back with the baby and little James and Velma, he had secured for his family a one-room basement apartment among the frail tenements and dilapidated lean-tos in the roped-off colored section of town.

It was a kitchenette in a two-flat in the low Forties off St. Lawrence. Preceding waves of European immigrants had lived there before them in creaking buildings from the nineteenth century, the streets now pockmarked and piled so high with rubbish that ice wagons couldn’t get through some of them. It was only a few miles south but a world away from the boulevards and skyscrapers Ida Mae had seen when she first arrived, gray and weed-strewn as this new place of hers was.

They were confined to a little isthmus on the South Side of Chicago that came to be called “Bronzeville,” the “black belt,” “North Mississippi.” It was “a narrow tongue of land, seven miles in length and one and one half miles in width,” as the midcentury historians St.⁶⁷ Clair Drake and Horace Cayton described it, where a quarter-million colored people were packed on top of one another by the time Ida Mae and her family arrived.

Up and down Indiana and Wabash and Prairie and South Parkway, across Twenty-second Street and down to Thirty-first and Thirty-ninth and into the low Forties, a colored world, a city within a city, rolled out from the sidewalk, the streets aflutter with grocers and undertakers, dressmakers and barbershops, tailors and pressers, dealers of coal and sellers of firewood, insurance agents and real estate men, pharmacists and newspapers, a YMCA and the Urban League, high-steepled churches—Baptist, Holiness, African Methodist Episcopal churches practically transported from Mississippi and Arkansas—and stacked-heeled harlots stumbling out of call houses and buffet flats.

There were temptations a southern sharecropper couldn’t have known existed and that could only catch root when so many people were packed into one place, the police could be bought, and the city looked away: reefer pads, card sharks, gangsters and crapshooters.⁶⁸ The so-called mulatto queen of the underworld running poker games. Policy kings running the numbers racket, ready to take a migrant’s newly earned dollar fresh from the slaughterhouse. The migrants could see Ma Rainey at the Regal or just melt into the neon anonymity of city life without a watchful uncle or jackleg preacher knowing about it.

This was the landing place in Chicago for most colored people just in from the South.⁶⁹ They had left the wide-open spaces and gravel roads of the cotton fields and had to watch their every step. Ida Mae and George, in particular, pious and churchly as he was, wanted nothing to do with the devilment crowding in on them but had to make the best of it and just be thankful for having made it out of Mississippi alive.

By the time Ida Mae and her family arrived, Chicago was a major terminus of the Great Migration of colored people out of the South and of latter-day immigrants from central and eastern Europe. It had first been settled in 1779 by a black man named Jean Baptiste Point DuSable in what was then wilderness. He was a fur trader who built a “rude cabin on the sandpoint at the mouth of the river.”⁷⁰

Ida Mae found the living conditions not much better than those back home and, in some cases, worse. “A few goats and an occasional pig” roamed alleyways that reeked of rotting vermin.⁷¹ Front doors hung on single hinges. The sun peeked through cracks in the outer walls. Many rooms sat airless and windowless, packed with so many people that some roomers had to sleep in shifts, all of which made a mockery of city codes devised to protect against these very things.

“Families lived without light, without heat, and sometimes without water,” observed Edith Abbott, a University of Chicago researcher who studied tenement life in Chicago in the 1930s, the time when Ida Mae arrived.⁷² “The misery of housing conditions at this time can scarcely be exaggerated.”

They were living in virtual slave cabins stacked on top of one another, wives, like Ida Mae, cooking on hot plates and hanging their laundry out the window, if they had a window at all, unable to protect themselves or their children from the screams and conversation and sugar talk and fighting all around them. It was as if all of them were living in one room without space for their own thoughts or for their dreams of how best to get out.

Ida Mae soon discovered that there really was no getting out, not right off anyway. “Negro migrants confronted a solid wall of prejudice and labored under great disadvantages in these attempts to find new homes,” Abbott wrote.⁷³ The color line in Chicago confined them to a sliver of the least desirable blocks between the Jewish lakefront neighborhoods to the east and the Irish strongholds to the west, while the Poles, Russians, Italians, Lithuanians, Czechs, and Serbs, who had only recently arrived themselves, were planting themselves to the southwest of the colored district.

With several thousand black southerners arriving each month in the receiving cities of the North and no extra room being made for them, “attics and cellars, store-rooms and basements, churches, sheds and warehouses,” according to Abraham Epstein in his study of the early migration, were converted to contain all the new arrivals.⁷⁴ There was “rarely a place in these rooms for even suitcases or trunks.”

People like Ida Mae had few options, and the landlords knew it. New arrivals often paid twice the rent charged the whites they had just replaced for worn-out and ill-kept housing.⁷⁵ “The rents in the South Side Negro district were conspicuously the highest of all districts visited,” Abbott wrote.⁷⁶ Dwellings that went for eight to twenty dollars a month to white families were bringing twelve to forty-five dollars a month from black families, those earning the least income and thus least able to afford a flat at any rent, in the early stages of the Migration.⁷⁷ Thus began a pattern of overcharging and underinvestment in black neighborhoods that would lay the foundation for decades of economic disparities in the urban North.

Ida Mae tried never to worry about things she couldn’t change and so made do with what they could get. She wasn’t the only one. “Lodgers were not disposed to complain about the living conditions or the prices charged,” Epstein wrote.⁷⁸ “They were only too glad to secure a place where they could share a half or at least a part of an unclaimed bed.”

The story played out in virtually every northern city—migrants sealed off in overcrowded colonies that would become the foundation for ghettos that would persist into the next century. These were the original colored quarters—the abandoned and identifiable no-man’s-lands that came into being when the least-paid people were forced to pay the highest rents for the most dilapidated housing owned by absentee landlords trying to wring the most money out of a place nobody cared about.

It would soon come to be that anyone living in any American city would know exactly where these forgotten islands were, if only to make sure to avoid them: under the viaduct along a polluted stream in Akron, Ohio; in the Hill District in Pittsburgh; Roxbury in Boston; the east side of Cincinnati; the near east side of Detroit; nearly all of East St. Louis; whole swaths of the South Side of Chicago and South Central in Los Angeles; and much of Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant in New York.

Like other migrants with limited options, Ida Mae and her family moved from place to place, from one unacceptable flat to a slightly larger and less odious option a few blocks away, not unlike sharecroppers moving from farm to farm looking for a less exploitive arrangement with, they hoped, a fairer planter. Soon they were living on the top floor of a three-flat at Thirty-sixth and Wabash. It was well into the Great Depression, and a man took to sleeping at odd hours of the day on the little landing outside their kitchen door.

“I open the door and put garbage out there, and he still be sleep,” Ida Mae remembered. “I don’t know who he was. He stayed there winter and summer. He didn’t bother nobody. He was sleeping like he was in a bed. He had his little cover out there.”

Did he ever wake up when you went out there? I asked her once. “No,” she said. “Because I reckon he done did his devilment all night.”

Ida Mae didn’t know it, but, with the Great Depression deepening, she and her family had arrived in a city unprepared for and utterly resistant to the continuing influx of migrants. City fathers and labor experts had expected the Great Migration to end with World War I. Jobs and housing were scarcer now. White unions were refusing colored workers membership, keeping colored wages low, restricting the work that migrants could do, and leaving them unprotected during cutbacks.

The colored old-timers who were already there were not especially happy to see them. Even as the Migration was a bonanza for colored storekeepers and businessmen, it meant more competition for the already limited kinds of jobs blacks were allotted and made the black presence in the city more conspicuous and threatening to the city’s racial alchemy.

As it was, the city was still recovering from the tensions of one of the worst race riots in American history. The riots had set the city on edge and hardened race lines that would persist for generations.

The trouble began after an incident only blocks from the three-flat at Thirty-sixth and Wabash where Ida Mae’s family would live exactly two decades later. It was the summer of 1919. World War I, the stimulus of the first wave of the Great Migration, was over. Munitions plants had shut down, the factories that lured black southerners were now letting workers go, the country was on the verge of recession, not able even to imagine the actual Depression that was brewing. The migrants, hemmed in and living on top of one another, even as more of them arrived, pressed against the white neighborhoods on their borders and were met with death threats and bombings when they ventured to the other side.

The demilitarized zone was a moving target that no one could see but that everyone knew in his bones. Blacks were finding more things off-limits than it would otherwise appear, defined by custom and whites’ discomfort rather than by law. Even the beaches of Lake Michigan were segregated. Everyone was feeling the strain of a declining economy. Whites saw the migrants as competition for a scarcer pool of jobs and took to attacking them along the western boundary of the black belt.⁷⁹

Then on Sunday, July 27, 1919, a seventeen-year-old black boy named Eugene Williams, swimming along the shore of Lake Michigan, drifted past an invisible line in the lake into the white side of the Twenty-ninth Street beach.

As was common in the North, there were no white or colored signs. It was merely understood that whites entered and used the beach at Twenty-ninth Street and blacks were to stay near the Twenty-seventh Street entrance two blocks north. The imaginary color line stretched out into the water. Swimming as he was, the boy couldn’t see the line where the white water began because the water looked the same.

Carl Sandburg, the future poet who was then a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, recounted it this way: “A colored boy swam across an imaginary segregation line.⁸⁰ White boys threw rocks at him and knocked him off a raft. He was drowned.”

Blacks demanded that the white police officer on the scene arrest the whites they said had hurled rocks at Williams. The officer refused, arresting, instead, a black man in the crowd “on a white man’s complaint.”⁸¹

Within hours, tensions reached a boil on both sides, and a riot was in full cry. Whites dragged black passengers from streetcars and beat them. Blacks stabbed a white peddler and a white laundryman to death.⁸² Two white men were killed walking through a black neighborhood, and two black men were killed walking through a white neighborhood.⁸³ White gangs stormed the black belt, setting houses on fire, hunting down black residents, firing shotguns, and hurling bricks.⁸⁴

All told, the riots coursed through the south and southwest sides of the city for thirteen days, killing 38 people (23 blacks and 15 whites) and injuring 537 others (342 blacks, 178 whites, the rest unrecorded) and not ending until a state militia subdued them.

Contrary to modern-day assumptions, for much of the history of the United States—from the Draft Riots of the 1860s to the violence over desegregation a century later—riots were often carried out by disaffected whites against groups perceived as threats to their survival. Thus riots would become to the North what lynchings were to the South, each a display of uncontained rage by put-upon people directed toward the scapegoats of their condition. Nearly every big northern city experienced one or more during the twentieth century.

Each outbreak pitted two groups that had more in common with each other than either of them realized. Both sides were made up of rural and small-town people who had traveled far in search of the American Dream, both relegated to the worst jobs by industrialists who pitted one group against the other. Each side was struggling to raise its families in a cold, fast, alien place far from their homelands and looked down upon by the earlier, more sophisticated arrivals. They were essentially the same people except for the color of their skin, and many of them arrived into these anonymous receiving stations at around the same time, one set against the other and unable to see the commonality of their mutual plight.

Thus these violent clashes bore the futility of Greek tragedy. Yet the situation was even more complicated than the black migrants could have imagined. As they made their way north, so did some of the poorer whites from the South, looking not for freedom from persecution but for greater economic rewards for their hard work. Slavery and sharecropping, along with the ravages of the boll weevil and floods, had depressed the wages of every worker in the South. The call of the North drew some of the southern whites the migrants had sought to escape.

Initially, they came to the North in greater numbers, but they were much more likely to return south than colored southerners were—fewer than half of all white southerners who left actually stayed in the North for good, thus behaving more like classic migrant workers than immigrants.⁸⁵Still, many brought their prejudices with them and melted into the white working-class world of ethnic immigrants to make a potent advance guard against black inroads in the North.

As a window into their sentiments, a witness to the Detroit riots in 1943 gave this description of a white mob that had attacked colored people in that outbreak. “By the conversation of the men gathered there, I was able to detect that they were Southerners and that they resented Negroes working beside them and receiving the same amount of money,” the informant said, adding that these southern whites believed that the black migrants “ought to be ‘taken down a peg or two.⁸⁶’ ”

Perhaps the earliest indication of what the migrants were unknowingly up against came from an outbreak directly related to the Great Migration, or rather to how the North reacted to the newcomers from the South. These were the riots that erupted in East St. Louis, Illinois, in the summer of 1917 after companies being struck by white workers hired colored migrants to replace them. The migrants were flocking to the city at a rate of a thousand a month, some eighteen thousand having arrived that spring, and they instantly became the perfect pawns, an industrialist’s dream: they were desperate to leave the South, anxious for work, untutored in union politics or workers’ rights—as most could not have imagined unionizing themselves as field hands, thus uncomprehending of the idea of a worker making demands and unlikely to complain about whatever conditions they might face.

Once the strike was over, the colored migrants, resented by the unions and unprotected by the plants that had hired them, paid the price. One union wrote its members that “the immigration of the southern Negro into our city for the past eight months has reached a point where drastic action must be taken” and demanded that the city “retard this growing menace, and devise a way to get rid of a certain portion of those who are already here.”⁸⁷

On the night of July 1, a carload of whites fired shots into colored homes. The colored residents fired back when a second car filled with whites passed through, killing two policemen. The next day, full-scale rioting began. Colored men were “stabbed, clubbed and hanged from telephone poles.”⁸⁸ A colored two-year-old “was shot and thrown into the doorway of a burning building.”

“A black skin was a death warrant on the streets of this Illinois city,” wrote an observer shortly afterward.

The police, charged with quelling the riot, in some cases joined in, as did some in the state militia sent in to restore order, actions that resulted in seven courts-martial.⁸⁹ All told, thirty-nine blacks and eight whites were killed, more than a hundred blacks were shot or maimed, and five thousand blacks were driven from their homes.

After the two riots, city leaders in Chicago could see no end to the racial divisions without intervention and a public appeal for tolerance. A white-led, biracial commission set up to investigate the climate and circumstances leading to the riots produced a 672-page report, The Negro in Chicago. It stands to this day as one of the most comprehensive examinations of both the early stages of the Great Migration and race relations in a northern American city.

With a sense of urgency, it set out fifty-nine recommendations for improving race relations.⁹⁰ It urged that the police rid the city’s colored section of the vice and prostitution that plagued the black belt; that the schools hire principals with an “interest in promoting good race relations”; that white citizens seek accurate information about blacks “as a basis of their judgments”; that restaurants, stores, and theaters stop segregating when they weren’t supposed to; that companies “deal with Negroes as workmen on the same plane as white workers” and stop using them as strikebreakers and denying them apprenticeships; that labor unions admit colored workers when they qualified; that employers “permit Negroes an equal chance with whites to enter all positions for which they are qualified by efficiency and merit”; that the press avoid using epithets in referring to blacks and treat black stories and white stories with the same standards and “sense of proportion.”

With the commission having no authority to enforce its recommendations and a good portion of the citizenry not likely even to have seen them, much of its counsel went unheeded. So Ida Mae arrived in a world that was perhaps even tenser than before the riots. In the ensuing decades, the color line would only stiffen. The South Side would become almost totally black and the North Side almost totally white. Ida Mae’s adopted home would become one of the most racially divided of all American cities and remain so for the rest of the twentieth century.

NEW YORK, SUMMER 1945

GEORGE SWANSON STARLING

GEORGE FINALLY BROUGHT INEZ to New York in June of 1945 to begin life on their own for the first time in their marriage. Now that he had a decent job on the railroad, he was hoping she could now get a job as a beautician like she had trained for and they could make a go of it in New York.

But Inez was still nursing a grudge over how little time they had spent together since they’d been married, how he’d gone off to Detroit without her, how he had taken so long to send for her, and now, here he was, likely to be gone half the time working the rails.

He was always the one with big dreams, and he had them now. He wanted to make up for all they didn’t have and couldn’t have back in Florida. He located a little beauty shop around the corner from the brownstone where they lived that had six available booths for her to use.

“Inez, this is your chance,” he told her. “We can rent this place, and you can do hair in one booth and rent out the other five booths. You can build you up a business here, and then after a while you don’t have to do no hair at all, just supervise.”

But Inez wasn’t of a mind to do much of what he said, given all they had been through, so she decided to forgo hairdressing after all. She would never work at it a day in her life. Instead she took a short nursing course and got a job at a hospital to show her independence, to spite him, or both.

George had escaped Florida but could not run away from the frustrations of an impulsive, ill-advised marriage. Inez had arrived in Harlem, but nothing had changed. They were getting along no better than before. So when he wasn’t on the rails, he began to fall under Harlem’s spell like many of the new arrivals suddenly free of the South. Between the people he knew from back in Florida and the co-workers he met riding the rails, he had a ready-made set of diversions every night of the week in a place that never shut down and was spilling over with people.

It was said that Harlem was one of the most crowded places in all of the country. Some half a million colored people were crammed into a sliver of upper Manhattan that was about fifty blocks long and only seven or eight blocks wide. A 1924 study by the National Urban League confirmed what colored tenants already knew: that colored renters paid from forty to sixty percent higher rents than white tenants for the same class of apartment. So colored people in Harlem took in boarders and worked second and third jobs.

Beginning in World War I, as many as seven thousand people were estimated to be living in a single block in Harlem. The crush of people begging for space forced rents even higher in what became a landlord’s paradise. Cash-strapped renters looked for new ways to make their rent. They began throwing end-of-the-month parties, “where they drank bathtub gin, ate pig knuckles and danced with the lights off,” as Arna Bontemps wrote.⁹¹ They called them rent parties. They charged twenty-five cents admission for a few hours of smoke-hazed, gin-juiced, tom-tom caterwauling, and poker playing with people from back home and with worldly-wise northerners they did not know just to help make that month’s rent.

Up and down the side streets off Lenox and Seventh Avenues, people flung open their apartment doors the Saturday night before the rent was due. They served pork chops and pigs’ feet and potato salad just like down south, except that the food and spirits were for sale, and they put Count Basie on the record player to give people something to dance to. Total strangers looking for a good time could stroll down the block looking for a red, pink, or blue light in a window and listening for the rabble of a rent party in progress. Signs went up inviting anybody willing to pay. One read:

There’ll be brown skin mammas

High Yallers too

And if you ain’t got nothing to do

Come on up to Roy and Sadie’s

West 126 St.⁹² Sat. Night May 12th.

There’ll be plenty of pig feet

An lots of gin

Jus ring the bell

An come on in.

Tenants stood to make the most money if they got the partygoers playing poker, and George was all for it. There were some people from Eustis, Florida, living up on Seventh Avenue, between 146th and 147th Streets. They lived right next door to each other and started running their parties simultaneously.

“We just go from one house to the other,” George said. “We get tired of playing over to Freeman’s, or we get mad with him about something, and we go over to M.B.’s. We go from one house to the other. We would be gambling the whole weekend.”

When they got tired of the people on Seventh Avenue, they went over to the Bronx, where the Blye brothers had a sister named Henry living over at Third Avenue and Seventeenth Street, and played some more.

The wives and girlfriends served the gin and bourbon and the grits and eggs and biscuits and smoked pork from the pork store down the street, the big poker players never getting up from the table, shoveling forkfuls of grits into their mouths between hands.

They were playing five-card stud, and sometimes there were so many people there’d be two or three games running, people just in or visiting from Eustis and Ocala, people who had been in Harlem for years, hustlers who made a life out of circulating at the gambling tables of the rent parties to beat the tenants out of their own rent money. It was an open invitation, after all.

George saw the money they were making—some of them were pulling in hundreds of dollars a weekend—and decided to throw some parties himself.

He went in with his friend Babe Blye, one of the Blye brothers from back home in Florida (there were nine brothers in all, plus three girls that the parents had given boys’ names to, but that’s another story). Babe was working as an auto painter for General Motors in New York and was living upstairs from George and Inez in the brownstone George was buying. Sometimes Inez served food, sometimes she wouldn’t. Sometimes she would stay down in their apartment. Working the rails mostly for tips, George could use the extra money for the house note and went in with Babe to run some poker parties.

George figured out the system. “If you stay outta the game, and if you run a game for four or five hours or more, you gonna have most of the money,” George said. “You’re gonna have most of the money and the cut. Because most of the players are going to lose.”

Trouble was, Babe couldn’t just sit back and watch. “See, that was our weakness,” George said. “Babe couldn’t stay outta the game. He just had to get in the game, and he’d lose pretty near everything that we take in.”

Like most migrants from the South, George had surrounded himself with the people he knew from back in the Old Country, but the Old Country was still in the people no matter where they went, and George found that, as much as he loved the people from back home, he could never truly move up with the country people still acting country. He never put it in so many words, but he didn’t keep his resentment to himself.

“We done sat up here all night, and you done gambled all the money out of the cut box,” he told Babe. “We just set this whole thing up for nothing. And now we got to clean up and see how many cigarette spots somebody done burned in the furniture. And we don’t have a thing to show for it.”

Then one night, George had had enough. They were gambling upstairs in Babe’s apartment. They had a big game going, and Babe and George were both in the game. George looked to be winning the pot when Babe called him. Two men they didn’t know and who looked to have been in Harlem much longer than George and Babe were in the game, as often happened when the migrants threw open their doors to make extra money to make ends meet. George caught Babe dealing off of the bottom of the deck. He hit himself from the bottom with an ace, giving himself a better hand than everyone else.

Babe had cheated to win the pot, but it did not appear that the two other men had caught on. “I couldn’t say anything because of the other guys in the game,” George said. “If they caught you cheating, some of them guys would kill you right on the spot. So I had to sit there and let Babe go with that. I lost thirty dollars down the deal.”

George made a show of borrowing thirty dollars from the pot.

“Well, I’m borrowing thirty dollars,” he said to no one in particular, figuring Babe would get the message that George was onto his cheating and wanted him to stop.

“That was for the benefit of the other guys around the table, not to become suspicious,” George said.

When the game was over, George headed downstairs. Babe called out to him.

“Hey, son. You know you owe me thirty dollars.”

“I do?” George asked. “Let me tell you one thing. I will never in life play with you again. Because you dealt yourself off the bottom with an ace that beat my hand, and the only reason I let you go, I didn’t want you to get me and you both killed because there were other people in the game. And you know the rule is, if you caught cheating, you in trouble. Now, I don’t want no killing in the house. It might have been me. So I had to let you go with that.”

George wasn’t finished.

“Didn’t you hear me saying, ‘I’m borrowing thirty dollars out the pot?’ I took my money out that I lost. I don’t owe you nothing. You owe me your life ’cause if I had squawked about you dealing off the bottom, you and I both might have got killed.”

He told Babe, who was, after all, his tenant, that he was through with him when it came to gambling. “I ain’t gon’ never pay you,” George said. “And, furthermore, I ain’t gon’ never gamble with you no more. If you can’t gamble with your friends without being cheated, who can you gamble with?”

That was the end of George’s short, unhappy career running a gambling den. He wasn’t making money, and now it was dangerous.

The city had a way of bringing out the best and now the worst in everyone. People got up to the big city and either forgot where they came from and took on the meanest aspects of a hard life or kept a kind of sweet country blindness and fell victim to what looked to be city charms but could be traps if you weren’t wise to them. Or they somehow managed to keep the best of both worlds, keep the essential goodness of the old culture and the street wit of the new. George had to learn to recognize that admixture in the people who surrounded him, even as he tried, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, to do the same himself.

LOS ANGELES, JUNE 1953

ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER

ROBERT HAD BEEN IN CALIFORNIA for a couple of months now, taking whatever work Dr. Beck threw his way and doing physicals for Golden State Insurance. He had set aside some of what he had been making and was starting to feel he could pull a practice together, what with all the people he was meeting through Golden State.

He decided it was time he got an office of his own. He could never get ahead on those ten-dollar physicals, and he wouldn’t be able to make the most of Dr. Beck’s referrals or treat any patients without an office they could come to. Besides, Alice and the girls were wanting to know when they could come out to California, and the Clements, just waiting for him to fall short, wanted to know what was taking him so long since he had raved so much about the place before he had seen it.

Robert didn’t want an office in the predictable places where colored businesses went. He didn’t want to be in Compton or Watts or South Central. He wanted to be as far north as he could afford, which wouldn’t be but so far north given his resources and wouldn’t be practical anyway, given where his current roster of potential patients was living. He wanted a location with some prestige so he could live out the California dream he had in his head and justify the fees he thought he deserved, not knowing that a shot of penicillin generally went for five dollars no matter where you were.

He went driving around the west side looking for the right kind of place for himself. He found an office to let at 959 West Jefferson, well west of Central Avenue, right across the street from the University of Southern California campus. He could always say he was near Southern Cal, and he liked the sound of that.

It was a ground-floor suite at the front of an office building with a dentist upstairs and a doctor and an Asian import-export company on the ground floor with him. The office directly behind his was occupied by an internist from Los Angeles who was neither willing to nor interested in extending himself to this newcomer just in from the South, as seemed to be the distancing and disdainful attitude of many of the people who happened to have gotten to the North or West first or had the advantages of having grown up outside the walls of Jim Crow.

The internist had come from a completely different world, an integrated world that Robert both distrusted and envied, a world he could only hope his young daughters could grow to master and benefit from but not completely lose themselves in one day.

The building was just a few blocks south of the apartment on Ellendale he had secured for himself and his family until they could afford the house everyone expected of him. Everything finally seemed to be coming together.

That office was where he would start his new life. “And it was a beautiful building,” Robert said. “It had a nice marquee in front of it. My office was at the front of the building, and my name was on the window, beautifully etched.”

He put a deposit on an X-ray machine and the draperies for the office, a desk in the waiting room, chairs for the patients he hoped to attract. Now that he was nearly established, the people from Monroe turned out. Limuary Jordan and his wife, Adeline, came and helped him set up the office.

“We built his operating table in a room over there,” Limuary would remember.

Howard Beckwith, a friend from back home, built furniture and opened his line of credit for Robert to use to get on his feet. Limuary loaned him money, too. They all made sure he ate.

“Come on, Doc, you can’t practice on your empty stomach,” they said. “You gotta eat.”

Mrs. Beck and her daughter, Vivian, planned an open house for that July. They supplied the linens, the lace tablecloths, the crystal punch bowls. They made the punch and refreshments and served as hostesses in their cinched-waist dresses and pumps.

“I spent my last dime buying whiskey at Mick’s for the open house,” Robert said. “We had two fifths of whiskey.”

He invited twenty people. The friends from Morehouse and Spelman and Atlanta University all came out, and Robert was in business.

He called Alice to say it was time. He was ready for them to join him in Los Angeles. They had been waiting in Atlanta for him to give them the word. The girls were growing up fast, and he had missed most of it. Bunny was nine already, and Robin was seven. He was all packed and ready to receive them. He would move out of the Becks’ and into an apartment a few blocks north of his new office.

But when it came time to actually move in, the manager told him she was sorry but it was already rented to somebody else.

“That was my introduction to the deception of California,” he said.

Alice and the girls had come all this distance, and he didn’t have a place for them. He had to scramble to find something else before word got back to the Clements. He heard about a Dr. Anderson he knew from back in Louisiana, who happened to be moving out of his apartment. It was on St. Andrews Place, near the Becks’. It had two bedrooms. It was a far cry from Hickory Hill, the president’s mansion back at Atlanta University, where Alice and the girls had been living. But the family would be together for the first time since Austria.

“And he rented it to me for my family,” Robert said.

Alice set about making the apartment a home, while Robert began building a practice. He discovered he was having trouble attracting his most obvious patient base. For some reason, even with the new office on the fashionable side of town, the people from back home—from Monroe and from his days at Morehouse and Alice’s days at Spelman—weren’t coming. They had shown up for the hors d’oeuvres and whiskey at the open house, but they weren’t coming in for appointments.

“Some were going to white doctors,” he would say years later. “But not all of them went to white doctors. I really don’t know who they were going to. I wasn’t really interested in who they were going to. I wanted them to come to me.”

He figured he was a hometown patient’s dream. He was board-certified in surgery but was doing family practice, knew their family histories, could talk their language, and, as he had done all his life, would do just about anything to please them.

But among the gumbo recipes and family Bibles they brought to California were the petty rivalries from back in Louisiana. People had long memories, and if Professor Foster had taken a switch to them without cause or Robert’s mother had been too hard on them in the seventh grade or if one of the Fosters had happened not to speak to them at Zion Baptist Church one Sunday back in 1932, they remembered it and carried it with them across the desert to California.

And that wasn’t all. Some of the middle-class people from back in Monroe—the insurance agents and teachers and salesclerks—seemed to resent even the early signs of success and the fact that he was wanting people to call him Robert instead of Pershing after all these years.

They seemed to be second-guessing him more than his other patients did. They questioned the motives of his every instruction and stood up to him like they did when they were back in the third grade, especially when it came to surgery.

“See, they got lots of time before they get on the table,” Robert remembered. “They can think a whole lot. They can get another consultation. They’d be quick to say, ‘I’ll get another consultation.’ Or somebody would say, ‘What you tryin’ to do? Buy a mink coat for Alice?’ Now, that slaps you. People can be little.”

The rejection hurt him and gnawed at him. It stayed with him for decades. He set out to prove he could make it without them. He would be the very best doctor he knew how. He would focus not on the grudging people from Monroe but on the people who wanted him as their doctor. He would put on a show so they wouldn’t forget him. He would pull in more of the cooks and laborers from Texas and the Mardi Gras–celebrating people from New Orleans and Baton Rouge, who would appreciate his loud suits and stingy-brim hats and folksy, one-of-the-people bedside manner.

The people from Monroe would learn how wrong they had been.