NOTES

  1 I was leaving the South: Richard Wright, Black Boy (New York: HarperCollins, 1993, a reissue of Wright’s autobiography, originally published in 1945 by Harper and Brothers). This passage is from a last-minute insertion in a restructuring of the book, which originally had been titled American Hunger. For its release in 1945, the title was changed to Black Boy and the second half of the book, describing Wright’s adjustment in the North, was deleted at the behest of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Wright chose to insert this passage as a compromise ending to the revised autobiography. Because this passage was not part of the original manuscript, it is not included in the text of the modern-day version. The passage instead appears in the footnotes of the 1993 reprint, p. 496.

PART I: IN THE LAND OF THE FOREFATHERS

  1 Our mattresses were made: Mahalia Jackson with Evan McLeod Wylie, Movin’ On Up (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1966), pp. 22, 25.

LEAVING

  2 The land is first: David L. Cohn, God Shakes Creation (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1935), pp. 32, 33.

  3 They fly from the land: W. H. Stillwell, “Exode,” Chicago Inter-Ocean, March 12, 1881. The stanza reads: “They fly from the land that bore them, as the Hebrews fled the Nile; from the heavy burthens [sic] o’er them; from unpaid tasks before them; from a serfdom base and vile.”

  4 A man named Roscoe Colton: Jonathan Rosen, “Flight Patterns,” The New York Times Magazine, April 22, 2007, pp. 58–63.

THE GREAT MIGRATION, 1915–1970

  5 In our homes: “The Negro Problem,” Independent 54: 2221. The colored Alabama woman interviewed for this 1902 article requested that her name not be used, fearing retribution for expressing a desire to leave. The fear of being identified was common among southern black letter writers to the Chicago Defender inquiring about opportunities in the North and others discussing or considering migration. Often they explicitly pleaded that their identities not be revealed.

  6 “They left as though”: Emmett J. Scott, Negro Migration During the War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1920), p. 44.

  7 Over the course: Estimates vary for the number of blacks who left the South during the Great Migration. Some have put the number at well over six million. The historian Jeffrey S. Adler writes that “the total for the three-decade period after 1940 exceeded 4.3 million” alone. David R. Colburn and Jeffrey S. Adler, eds., African-American Mayors: Race, Politics, and the American City (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), p. 4. Definitions vary as to which states make up the South, with the border states of Maryland, Delaware, and the District of Columbia often included. This book uses a definition based on the states that made up the Confederacy and the definitions and perceptions of the migrants who left the South. The migrants’ decision to escape to those border regions and those states’ participation in the Civil War on the Union side suggest that politically, psychologically, and demographically they were not southern but rather part of the North to which the migrants fled. Those states had net inflows of blacks in a dramatic departure from the states the migrants perceived of as the South. The estimate, just over five and a half million, used in this book is a conservative one and derives from data compiled from Public Use Micro-data Sample (PUMS) Tapes of U.S. Census figures for out-migration of African Americans from the former Confederate states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, along with Kentucky and Oklahoma, to the former Union states that attracted the bulk of the migrants, namely, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Kansas, California, Nevada, Oregon, and the District of Columbia, along with the border states of Delaware, Maryland, and Missouri and the state of Washington, which was not admitted to the Union until after the Civil War. The number is considered to be an underestimate. “One estimate places the net under-enumeration of Negro males [alone] at about 20 per cent,” wrote the sociologists Karl E. Taeuber and Alma F. Taeuber in “The Changing Character of Negro Migration,” The American Journal of Sociology 70, no. 4 (January 1965), p. 433.

  8 “receiving station”: Carl Sandburg, The Chicago Race Riots, July 1919 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1919), p. 60.

  9 Over time: See Nicholas Mirkowich, “Recent Trends in Population Distribution in California,” Geographical Review 31, no. 2 (April 1941), pp. 300–307, for a general discussion of Gold Rush and Dust Bowl migrations.

10 for far longer: Blacks were enslaved in this country for 244 years, from 1619 to 1863. As of 2010, they have been free for 147 years.

11 “The story of”: Neil R. McMillen, “The Migration and Black Protest in Jim Crow Mississippi,” in Black Exodus: The Great Migration from the American South, ed. Alferdteen Harrison (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991), p. 81.

12 By then nearly half: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Part 1 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975), table A, pp. 177–194; 1970 State Form 2 IPUS sample. From James N. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). See also Reynolds Farley and Walter Allen, The Color Line and the Quality of Life in America (Washington, D.C.: Russell Sage Foundation, 1987), pp. 112–13. Cited by Dernoral Davis in “Portrait of Twentieth-Century African-Americans,” in Black Exodus, ed. Harrison, p. 12. See also John D. Reid, “Black Urbanization of the South,” Python35, no. 3 (1974), p. 259, for reference to the South’s being 53 percent black in 1970, the end of the Migration.

13 “Oftentimes, just to go”: John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1937), p. 302.

14 In Chicago alone: U.S. Census Bureau, Census 2000 Redistricting Data (Public Law 94-171) Summary File, Table PL1. In 2000, the black population was 1,084,221 in the city of Chicago and 1,033,809 in the state of Mississippi.

15 “folk movement”: McMillen, “The Migration and Black Protest in Jim Crow Mississippi,” p. 81.

16 Farragut: Union naval officer David G. Farragut, who rose to admiral, led the capture of the South’s largest city during the Battle of New Orleans in April 1862.

17 ten thousand: Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 209.

18 “I went to the station”: Scott, Negro Migration During the War, p. 41.

19 into the words of: Lawrence R. Rodgers, Canaan Bound: The African-American Great Migration Novel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), pp. x, xiii. The author notes that, among scholars, “the Great Migration, for many years, remained primarily an academic sideshow displaying only limited signs of penetrating the realm of national popular discourse and culture.” However, in the arts, the Great Migration and the resulting issues of “movement and identity have, over the entire history of published black literature, occupied the center of African American consciousness.” On p. 3, he adds, “As one of the most widely shared experiences of black America, migration, whether through force or volition, has remained a central subject of black literature and folklore.” Blyden Jackson, professor of literature emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, wrote that “no event, large or small, … has had an impact equal in mass or gavity upon the consciousness of black writers.” Blyden Jackson, “Introduction,” in Black Exodus, p. xv.

20 “Less has been written”: Gregory, The Southern Diaspora, p. 5.

21 the language changes: Writers navigating the language of intolerance often struggle with how to convey old attitudes and norms with the authenticity the work demands but with the grace and sensitivity required to reach current and future generations. On issues of race and ethnicity, the debate often centers on how best to describe black Americans when the names for the group change with the political fashions of the times and with the origins and intentions of the speaker regarding whatever term is at issue. Based on my many interviews with people from the era, the term “colored” was the most common word they used among themselves. This is not to say that prominent blacks of the day did not use the term “Negro,” many arguing that its capitalization bestowed greater status on a group hungry for recognition. But ordinary blacks seemed to wince at how the word could be so easily corrupted by the ruling class, coming out “nigra” instead of the more formal-sounding “Negro,” and thus they tended to use the term somewhat derisively in everyday conversation. As for the N-word itself, I have chosen to use it only where required for context, which turned out to be rarer than might be assumed. I chose to use great care out of an acknowledgment of the violence and loss of life that often accompanied its utterance. On the whole, I found that people who had most felt the sting of the word and the violence that undergirded it were less likely to use the word in casual speech than people who had never had to step off a sidewalk because of the color of their skin.

22 “Compared with northern-born”: Stewart E. Tolnay, “The African American ‘Great Migration’ and Beyond,” Annual Review of Sociology 29 (2003): 219.

PART II: BEGINNINGS

  1 This was the culture: Richard Wright, Black Boy (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 303.

IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY

  2 From the open door: Unless otherwise indicated, all references to Ida Mae Gladney are based on continual interviews and conversations with her from May 1996 to August 2004.

  3 Calhoun City, Mississippi: Interview with Jarvis Enoch, Ida Mae’s nephew and a professor at Tennessee State University, in September 1998 in Nashville, about his experiences growing up in Calhoun City, Mississippi, in the 1940s and 1950s.

  4 “hardware of reality”: Carrie Mae Weems, Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment, a film directed and narrated by Weems (Atlanta: Savannah College of Art and Design with the National Black Arts Festival, 2008).

THE STIRRINGS OF DISCONTENT

  5 Everybody seems to be: Macon Telegraph, Editorial, September 15, 1916, p. 4.

  6 One of the earliest: “Race Labor Leaving,” Chicago Defender, February 5, 1916, p. 1. Though this is what scholars have cited as the earliest known reference to a group of colored people leaving the South during World War I, it can logically be assumed that other parties left before them in the early stages of the war without telling anyone of their intentions. The full headline was “Race Labor Leaving. Much Concern over Possible Shortage of Labor—Exodus Steady—Treatment Doesn’t Warrant Staying.” The paragraph read: “Selma, Ala., Feb. 4—The white people of the extreme South are becoming alarmed over the steady moving of race families out of the mineral belt. Hundreds of families have left during the past few months and the stream is continuing. Every effort is being made to have them stay, but the discrimination and the race prejudice continues as strong as ever. Not many years ago there was a dearth of labor in this part of the country and the steerage passengers from Europe were sought. They cannot do the work of the race men, as they do not understand. Local editorials in white papers are pleading with the business men to hold the race men if possible.”

  7 “treatment doesn’t warrant staying”: Ibid.

  8 the long and violent hangover: Some historians have termed the period between Reconstruction and the early twentieth century the Nadir. See Rayford Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought, The Nadir: 1887–1901 (New York: Dial Press, 1954).

  9 “I find a worse state”: Robert Preston Brooks, The Agrarian Revolution in Georgia, 1865–1912, doctoral dissertation (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1914; reprinted New York: AMS Press, 1971), pp. 413–14.

10 “They will almost”: “Laborers Wanted,” Southern Cultivator, March 1867, a letter from a writer identified by the initials G.A.N. of Warrenton, Georgia, dated February 2, 1867, APS Online, p. 69.

11 The fight over: Harvey Fireside, Separate and Unequal: Homer Plessy and the Supreme Court Decision That Legalized Racism (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004).

12 Fourteenth Amendment: The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, of 1868, enacted to establish the rights of freed slaves after the Civil War, reads as follows: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

13 Fifteenth Amendment: The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, of 1880, granting freed slaves the right to vote, reads: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

14 “If it is necessary”: Ray Stannard Baker, Following the Color Line (New York: Doubleday and Page, 1908), p. 245 for Hoke Smith quotation, p. 246 for Vardaman remark on lynching.

15 “The only effect”: Jackson (Mississippi) Weekly Clarion-Ledger, July 30, 1903, quoted in The Oratory of Southern Demagogues, ed. Calvin McLeod Logue and Howard Dorgan (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), p. 73.

16 Fifteen thousand: “Summary Punishment Administered by Mob,” Hobart (Oklahoma) Republican, May 16, 1916, p. 1.

17 “My son can’t learn”: “Waco Horror Stirs to Action,” Savannah Tribune, July 8, 1916, page 4. “Supreme Penalty for Murder Paid by Negro Ghoul,” Monroe News-Star, March 5, 1935, p. 1—an example of newspaper headlines of the Migration era in the town where Pershing Foster grew up.

18 someone was hanged: Arthur F. Raper, The Tragedy of Lynching (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933), p. 36.

19 “insult to a white person”: Ibid.

20 stealing seventy-five cents: Baker, Following the Color Line, p. 176.

21 “perhaps most”: Herbert Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), p. 32.

22 Soon Klansmen: Documented History of the Incident Which Occurred at Rosewood, Florida, in January 1923, an investigation submitted to the Florida Board of Regents, December 22, 1993, p. 2. This seventy-nine-page report, commissioned by the State of Florida and conducted by a team of historians from the University of Florida, the State University of Florida, and Florida A&M University, provides a detailed account of the mob attack on the colored town of Rosewood and of the political and racial climate leading to the massacre, including the rebirth and rise to prominence of the Klan.

23 “was much less”: Wilbur J. Cash, The Mind of the South (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1941), pp. 124–25.

24 White citizens, caught up: The years and locations of the major riots of this era were: Wilmington, North Carolina (1898); Atlanta (1906); Springfield, Illinois (1908); East St. Louis, Illinois (1917); and Charleston; Nashville; Omaha; Elaine, Arkansas; Longview, Texas; Chicago; and Washington, D.C., among other places, in 1919, the year following the end of World War I.

25 “I hope and trust”: Frederick Douglass, “The Lessons of the Hour,” an address to the Metropolitan A.M.E. Church, Washington, D.C., delivered January 9, 1894 (Baltimore: Press of Thomas & Evans, 1894), p. 23.

26 It was during that time: See Gilbert Thomas Stephenson, “The Separation of the Races in Public Conveyances,” The American Political Science Review 3, no. 2 (May 1909): 181 on the origins of the term “Jim Crow” and the first Jim Crow laws in Massachusetts, 1841. See also Ronald L. F. Davis, “Creating Jim Crow,” http://www.jimcrowhistory.org/history/creating2.htm, as well as David Hinckley, “Natural Rhythm: Daddy Rice and the Original Jim Crow,” New York Daily News, May 27, 2004. Mississippi, in 1865, required separate seating for all colored people except those “traveling with their mistresses, in the capacity of nurses.” Florida, in 1865, made no such allowances and punished people of either race with standing in a “pillory for one hour” or a whipping “not exceeding thirty nine stripes.” Texas, in 1866, simply required every railroad company to “attach to each passenger train run by said company one car for the special accommodation of Freedmen.”

27 Streetcars: C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 97–102.

28 “The measure of”: Howard Thurman, The Luminous Darkness: A Personal Interpretation of the Anatomy of Segregation and a Ground of Hope (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), pp. 70–71. Thurman, a prominent theologian in the mid–twentieth century and a migrant himself, was born in Daytona Beach, Florida, in 1899. He was the dean of Rankin Chapel at Howard University and later the dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University, where he became a mentor of Martin Luther King, Jr., while King was a seminary student at the university.

29 “his fate”: David L. Cohn, God Shakes Creation (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1935), p. 156.

30 “a premature”: Philip S. Foner, ed., The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, vol. 4, specifically from “The Negro Exodus from the Gulf States, an Address Before Convention of the American Social Science Association, Saratoga Springs, New York, September 12, 1879” (New York: International Publishers, 1955), p. 336.

31 “The Negroes just quietly”: U.S. Department of Labor, Division of Negro Economics, Negro Migration in 1916–17 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1919), p. 95.

32 “You tell us”: Ibid., p. 31.

33 “stabbed the next day”: Ibid., p. 95.

34 “The sentiment”: Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of Alabama, 1901, 4, p. 4441.

35 “It is too much”: U.S. Department of Labor, Negro Migration in 1916–17, p. 13.

36 These were the facts: See Baker, Following the Color Line, pp. 29–36, for description of segregated elevators, waiting rooms, libraries, parks, and saloons and streetcar protocols. See Bertram Wilbur Doyle, The Etiquette of Race Relations in the South: A Study in Social Control (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1937), p. 147 (rules on amusement parks, theaters, and playhouses); p. 148 (rules on boarding and exiting streetcars); pp. 149–150 (rules on waiting rooms at depots and the protocol of colored people being served at ticket windows); p. 151 (different hours at colored and white schools, segregated ambulances); p. 152 (segregated hearses and cemeteries). See William H. Chafe, Raymond Gavins, and Robert Korstad, eds., Remembering Jim Crow (New York: New Press, 2001), p. 110, on separate windows for car license plates in Indianola, Mississippi.

37 In 1958, a new: Cal Brumley, “Segregation Costs: Dixie Firms Find Them More a Burden as Racial Tension Grows,” The Wall Street Journal, December 17, 1957, p. 1.

38 separate tellers: See Chicago Defender, March 21, 1931, p. 3, on separate teller for colored people at an Atlanta bank.

39 Colored people had: Stetson Kennedy, Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1959), p. 227.

40 the conventional rules: Charles S. Johnson, Patterns of Negro Segregation (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1943), pp. 124–26. Johnson devoted an entire section to racial etiquette on the highway. “When driving their own cars,” he wrote, “they were expected to maintain their role as Negros and in all cases to give whites the right-of-way.” He later added, “If there is any doubt about whose turn it is to make a move in traffic, the turn is assumed to be the white person’s.”

41 If he reached: Hortense Powdermaker, After Freedom: A Cultural Study of the Deep South (New York: Viking Press, 1939), p. 49. See also Kennedy, Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A., pp. 221–23.

42 In everyday interactions: Hugh Stephen Whitaker, “A Case Study in Southern Justice: The Emmett Till Case,” unpublished dissertation for the Graduate School of Florida State University, August 1963. See p. 11 for description of taboos between blacks and whites in the South through the 1960s.

43 The consequences: James C. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 213.

44 It was against the law: Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, pp. 117–18, on Arkansas law on segregated racetrack betting and Birmingham ban on integrated playing of checkers.

45 At saloons in Atlanta: Baker, Following the Color Line, p. 36.

46 There were white parking spaces: “Confusion with Jim Crow Bible,” The Raleigh Evening Times, March 29, 1906, p. 1. The story describes an incident during the trial of a black schoolteacher accused of disposing of a mule on which there was a mortgage. A defense witness, who was colored but looked white, took the stand and was being sworn in when the judge told the sheriff the man had been given the wrong Bible. “That one over this is the one for the use of the white people,” Judge Amistead Jones said. “Not that I am a stickler about such matters, but if there are to be different Bibles kept for the races, then you must not get them mixed that way. Have a different place for them, and keep them there. Then such mistakes as this will not be made.” Also practiced in Atlanta, and thus likely elsewhere in the South, as described by Baker in Following the Color Line, p. 36.

GEORGE SWANSON STARLING

47 His world is the basement: Unless otherwise indicated, all references to George Starling are based on numerous interviews and conversations with him from June 1995 to June 1998.

48 “the caste barrier”: John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1937), p. 65.

49 “The question of: J. W.” Johnson, Along This Way (New York: Viking Press, 1933), p. 56.

50 In some parts: Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (New York: Knopf, 1977), p. 83; original citation: Henry Adams, Senate Report 693, 2, p. 104.

51 only a quarter: Hortense Powdermaker, After Freedom: A Cultural History of the Deep South (New York: Viking Press, 1939), p. 86.

52 “The Negro farm hand”: “The Negro Exodus,” Montgomery Advertiser, a letter from J. Q. Johnson, pastor of St. Paul A.M.E. Church in Columbia, Tennessee, April 27, 1917, p. 4.

53 “One reason for preferring”: Powdermaker, After Freedom, p. 86.

54 “in a hurrying time”: Theodore Dwight Weld, American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (New York: The American Anti-Slavery Society, 1839), p. 38.

55 Florida went farther: See Julia Floyd Smith, Slavery and Plantation Growth in Antebellum Florida, 1821–1860 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1973), p. 102, on punishment for slaves; p. 121 on law requiring free blacks to register or face arbitrary reenslavement.

56 Florida, in the early winter: The southern states did not all secede at the same time. There were two waves of secession following the November 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln and a Republican majority in Congress, portending abolition of a state’s right to, among other things, maintain or expand slavery. The first wave of secession included seven slave states, beginning with South Carolina on December 20, 1860, followed by Mississippi on January 9, 1861; Florida on January 10, 1861; Alabama on January 11, 1861; Georgia on January 19, 1861; Louisiana on January 26, 1861; and Texas on February 1, 1861. The second wave of secession came after the outbreak of war at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, in April 1861. In the second wave were the marginally more moderate, previously fence-sitting slave states of Virginia, April 17, 1861; Arkansas, May 6, 1861; Tennessee, May 7, 1861; and North Carolina, May 20, 1861. The Confederacy also claimed portions of modern-day Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona, as well as the support of Missouri and Kentucky, slaveholding border states that did not formally secede.

57 “the great truth”: “The Southern Confederacy. Slavery the Basis of the New Government, An Official Manifesto. Speech of Vice-President Stephens,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 28, 1861, p. 1. Stephens delivered this extemporaneous speech in Savannah, Georgia, on March 21, 1861, after the first Confederate states had seceded from the Union and drafted the Confederate Constitution. That document was largely based on the U.S. Constitution, setting forth three branches of government with duties nearly identical to those in the Union. The Confederate Constitution states in Part 4, Section 9: “No bill of attainder, ex-post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.” The constitution was adopted by what was known as the Congress of the Confederate States (at the time, South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas) at a joint meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, on March 11, 1861, precisely one week after Lincoln took the oath of office on March 4, 1861.

58 “if any negro”: Gilbert Thomas Stephenson, “The Separation of the Races in Public Conveyances,” The American Political Science Review 3, no. 2 (1909): 181.

59 “anything that was black”: Documented History of the Incident Which Occurred at Rosewood, Florida, in January 1923 (submitted to the Florida Board of Regents, December 22, 1993), p. 19.

60 single worst act: James R. McGovern, Anatomy of a Lynching: The Killing of Claude Neal (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), pp. 52–66.

61 It was the early morning: “Group Kills Negro; Disappoints Crowd,” Associated Press, October 28, 1934; appeared in The New York Times, October 28, 1934.

62 The crowd grew so large: See The Lynching of Claude Neal (New York: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1934), p. 2, for an account of the lynching. Also McGovern, Anatomy of a Lynching, pp. 79–90, for details of mob behavior, the lynching, and the rioting by whites after Neal’s death.

63 Soon afterward: “Lynch Victim’s Innocence Apparent as Father of Girl Is Sentenced,” Pittsburgh Courier, June 15, 1935, p. A4. The Neal lynching cast a lingering cloud over race relations in Jackson County, Florida, decades after the killing. James R. McGovern, a historian examining the case in the early 1980s, found people who had clear memories of the lynching and its aftermath but were reluctant to speak about it out of fear of reprisal. This was especially true of black residents, one of whom, in finally relenting to give an interview, said, “Well, if I am going down, it will be for a good cause.” McGovern, Anatomy of a Lynching, p. xi.

64 “never had a negro”: Ben Green, Before His Time: The Untold Story of Harry T. Moore, America’s First Civil Rights Martyr (New York: Free Press, 1999), p. 244.

65 “he might be accused”: McGovern, Anatomy of a Lynching, p. 6.

ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER

66 The paneled door: Unless otherwise indicated, all references to Robert Pershing Foster are based on numerous interviews and visits with him from April 1996 to July 1997.

67 1,139 pupils: See “Louisiana States,” Chicago Defender, October 10, 1931, p. 19, regarding the number of students at Monroe Colored High.

68 the church broke into an uproar: “Two Murdered in Baptist Church Riot: Four Others Wounded During Free for All Fight,” Chicago Defender, September 17, 1932, p. 1.

69 “the doors of the church”: “Eight Wounded, One Killed in Church Fight,” Atlanta Daily World, September 8, 1932, p. 2.

70 In Louisiana in the 1930s: D. T. Blose and H. F. Alves, Biennial Survey of Education in the U.S., Statistics of State School Systems, 1937–38, U.S. Office of Education Bulletin, 1940, no. 2, p. 137. Cited in Charles S. Johnson, Patterns of Negro Segregation(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1943), p. 16.

71 The disparity in pay: Thomas M. Shapiro, The Hidden Cost of Being African-American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 47.

72 lopsided division of resources: W. D. Weatherford and Charles S. Johnson, Race Relations: Adjustment of Whites and Negroes in the United States (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1934), pp. 358–59, on disparity of investment in white schools and colored schools in the South.

73 “The money allocated”: Robert A. Margo, Race and Schooling in the South, 1880–1950: An Economic History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 44, citing Carleton Washburne, Louisiana Looks at Its Schools (Baton Rouge: Louisiana Educational Survey Commission, 1942), p. 111.

74 “If these Negroes become”: see Ray Stannard Baker, Following the Color Line (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1908), p. 295, for quote lamenting the effect of education for black southerners.

75 Sherman, Texas: Arthur F. Raper, The Tragedy of Lynching (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933; reprinted Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2003), pp. 319–55.

76 And I’d whisper: Mahalia Jackson with Evan McLeod Wylie, Movin’ On Up (New York: Hawthorne Books, 1966), p. 36.

77 Gilbert and Percy Elie: Interview with Gilbert Elie, who migrated from Grenada, Mississippi, to Akron, Ohio. Conducted in Grenada, Mississippi, May 29, 1996.

78 Hundreds of miles away: Interview with Virginia Hall, a migrant from North Carolina, in Brooklyn, New York, February 22, 1998.

A BURDENSOME LABOR

79 “one of the most backbreaking”: Donald Holley, The Second Great Emancipation: The Mechanical Cotton Picker, Black Migration and How They Shaped the Modern South (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000), p. xii.

80 It took some seventy: See ibid., p. 9, for a description of the basic mechanics of picking and the number of bolls per pound of seed cotton.

81 “begin to dream”: Rupert B. Vance, Human Factors in Cotton Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1929), p. 135, quoting the author Henry K. Webster from “Slaves of Cotton,” American Magazine, July 1906, p. 19.

82 “The first horn”: Ulrich B. Phillips, in Vance, Human Factors in Cotton Culture, p. 47.

83 Sometime in the 1930s: Interviews with Lasalle Frelix, a migrant from Brookhaven, Mississippi, in Chicago, 1996.

84 A bale of cotton: William C. Holley and Lloyd E. Arnold, Changes in Technology and Labor Requirements in Crop Production: Cotton, National Research Project Report no. A-7 (Philadelphia: Works Progress Administration, September 1937), pp. 19–54. Also Ronald E. Seavoy, The American Peasantry: Southern Agricultural Labor and Its Legacy: A Study in Political Economy, 1850–1995 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998), pp. 37–47, cited in Holley, The Second Great Emancipation, p. 56.

85 The other brother: Interviews with Reuben Blye in Eustis, Florida, July 1997 and July 1998.

86 In North Carolina: Gilbert Thomas Stephenson, “The Separation of the Races in Public Conveyances,” The American Political Science Review 3, no. 2 (May 1909): 200–201.

87 standing in the way: David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), pp. 491–92.

88 “The result of this action”: Ibid., p. 495; Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 22; W. E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (New York: International Publishers, 1968), p. 323.

89 “There was no earthly”: Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, pp. 493–95.

90 His northern friends thought: Ibid., p. 495, citing Shirley Graham Du Bois, His Day Is Marching On: A Memoir of W. E. B. Du Bois (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1971), p. 71.

91 In the winter of 1919: Richard Panek, “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cosmologist,” The New York Times, July 25, 1999, available at www.nytimes.com.

92 It would confirm: Alexander S. Sharov and Igor D. Novikov, Edwin Hubble, the Discoverer of the Big Bang Universe, trans. Vitaly Kisin (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 9, 10, 29–35.

THE AWAKENING

93 You sleep over a volcano: Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 132–33. Gilmore recounts a debate on a summer night in 1901 in Charlotte, North Carolina, between two well-educated young women, Addie Sagers and Laura Arnold, on the topic “Is the South the Best Home for the Negro?” Sagers argued against going north, where, she said, the only jobs open to blacks were “bell boy, waiter, cook or house maid,” and where northern unions excluded blacks from their ranks. Arnold, her debate opponent, railed against the violence, segregation, and disenfranchisement of blacks in the South. She agreed that “the unknown was frightening,” but added, “if the Puritans could cross the oceans in small boats, surely North Carolina’s African-Americans could board northbound trains.” Gilmore notes that Arnold’s “received more points than any other speech that night.” Two weeks later, Arnold “took her own advice and moved to Washington, D.C.”

94 I am in the darkness: Emmett J. Scott, “Additional Letters of Negro Migrants, 1916–1918,” The Journal of Negro History 4, no. 4 (October 1919): 412–45, quote on p. 440. This letter, dated May 13, 1917, was one of several hundred letters from anxious black southerners, written primarily to the Chicago Defender and collected and published by Emmett Scott in two series of articles at the end of World War I.

95 a fight broke out: Alfred McClung Lee and Norman D. Humphrey, Race Riot (New York: Dryden Press, 1943), p. 26.

96 The Detroit riots: Ibid., p. 28.

97 A colored teacher: William H. Chafe, Raymond Gavins, and Robert Korstad, eds., Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South (New York: New Press, in association with Lyndhurst Books of the Center for Documentary Studies of Duke University), p. 201.

98 Enlisting widespread interest: “Alice Clarissa Clement to Wed Robert Foster: She Is a Spelman 1941 Graduate,” Chicago Defender, June 21, 1941, p. 18.

99 The Atlanta Daily World: “Miss Clement Is Wed to Robert P. Foster Tuesday,” Atlanta Daily World, December 25, 1941, p. 3.

100 “because they were taking”: Baker, Following the Color Line, p. 250.

101 In the spring of 1919: “Army Uniform Cost Soldier His Life,” Chicago Defender, April 5, 1919, p. 1.

102 Pitocin: The use of pitocin, a synthetic form of the hormone oxytocin, has grown more controversial in the decades since the Korean War, as more women seek natural childbirth with as few artificial inducements as possible. The emphasis on natural childbirth was not the prevailing view during the time of Pershing Foster’s army service and was in fact considered the slower, more natural, and perhaps more progressive alternative to the cesareans preferred and commonly performed by many doctors of the era.

103 fifty million dollars a year: Citrus Growing in Florida, Bulletin no. 2, New Series, State of Florida, Department of Agriculture, October 1941, p. 5.

104 It was an illegal form: Terrell H. Shofner, “The Legacy of Racial Slavery: Free Enterprise and Forced Labor in Florida in the 1940s,” The Journal of Southern History 47, no. 3 (August 1981): 414–16. The case against the Sugar Plantation Company in the Everglades was ultimately unsuccessful in the southern court system, which was sympathetic to the planters and hostile to the federal government, and may have in fact emboldened some planters to continue forcing colored people to work against their will. But it offered evidence and made public the extent of the alleged abuses. The company managed to evade prosecution when a Florida judge quashed the indictment.

105 Willis Virgil McCall: John Hill, “A Southern Sheriff’s Law and Disorder,” The St. Petersburg Times, November 28, 1999. See also Greg Lamm, “Willis V. McCall: Blood, Hatred, Fear: The Reign of a Traditional Southern Sheriff,” Leesburg (Fla.) Commercial, May 20, 1987, p. A1.

106 In February: Shofner, “The Legacy of Racial Slavery,” pp. 421–422.

107 McCall struck: “Terrorism Being Used to Frustrate Justice,” The Atlanta Daily World, June 30, 1945, p. 1.

108 “leaving all their possessions”: “Harlem Pair Tells of McCall’s Acts,” New York Amsterdam News, November 24, 1951, p. 1.

109 “returns to the grower”: “Lake County Growers Shown Management Theories in Grove Tour,” The Sunday Orlando Sentinel Star, December 21, 1941, p. 22.

110 four dollars and forty cents: Ibid., pp. 30–36.

111 2.6 million citrus trees: “Citrus Shipments Up 15% over Last Week; Tangerines in Van,” The Sunday Orlando Sentinel Star, November 30, 1941, p. 10. See also “Growing Conditions,” The Sunday Orlando Sentinel Star, December 28, 1941, p. 19. For ranking of citrus industry by county, see Fruit and Vegetable Crops of Florida: A Compendium of Information on the Fruits and Vegetables Grown in Florida (Tallahassee: Florida State Department of Agriculture, August 15, 1945).

112 “the killing of a Negro”: Wilbur J. Cash, The Mind of the South (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1941), p. 129.

113 Later, in 1879: Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas After Reconstruction (New York: Knopf, 1977), pp. 109–10, 184–85.

114 Immigration plunged: Florette Henri, Black Migration: Movement North, 1900–1920 (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1975), p. 52. Original data on immigration of 1,218,480 in 1914 plunging to 110,618 in 1918 from the U.S. Census.

115 So the North: David L. Cohn, God Shakes Creation (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1935), p. 335.

116 The recruiters would stride: James R. Grossman, Land of Hope (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 70.

117 “As the North”: “Why the Negroes Go North,” Literary Digest 77, no. 7 (May 19, 1923): 14, quoting The Times-Picayune (New Orleans). Appears in Grossman, Land of Hope, p. 43.

118 “Where shall we get”: Montgomery Advertiser, quoted in “Negro Moving North,” Literary Digest 53, no. 15 (October 7, 1916): 877; from Grossman, Land of Hope, p. 40.

119 “Black labor”: Columbia State, quoted in Emmett J. Scott, Negro Migration During the War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1920), p. 156, and Grossman, Land of Hope, p. 40.

120 “It is the life”: Report of the Industrial Commission on Agriculture and Agricultural Labor, vol. 10 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1901), pp. 382–83, 518; cited in Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), p. 27.

121 “With all our crimes”: Cohn, God Shakes Creation, p. 205.

122 “We must have”: The Macon Telegraph, September 15, 1916, p. 4.

123 “Why hunt for the cause”: Montgomery Advertiser, a letter in response to “Exodus of the Negroes to Be Probed,” September 1916.

124 “If you thought”: George Brown Tindall, Emergence of the New South, 1913–1945 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), p. 149; cited in Henri, Black Migration, p. 75.

125 “Conditions recently”: U.S. Department of Labor, Division of Negro Economics, Negro Migration in 1916–1917 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1919), p. 63.

126 Macon, Georgia, required: St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945), p. 59.

127 “Every Negro”: U.S. Department of Labor, Negro Migration in 1916–1917, p. 12.

128 The chief of police: Grossman, Land of Hope, p. 44.

129 In Brookhaven, Mississippi: Scott, Negro Migration During the War, p. 77.

130 In Albany, Georgia: U.S. Department of Labor, Negro Migration in 1916–17, p. 110.

131 In Summit, Mississippi: Grossman, Land of Hope, p. 48, from Junius B. Wood, The Negro in Chicago (Chicago: Chicago Daily News, 1916), p. 9; Scott, Negro Migration, p. 73; Chicago Defender, August 26, 1916; Emmett J. Scott, “Additional Letters of Negro Migrants of 1916–1918,” Journal of Negro History, October 1919, p. 451; William F. Holmes, “Labor Agents and the Georgia Exodus,” South Atlantic Quarterly 79 (1980), pp. 445–46, on dispersal of Georgia migrants at train station.

132 “served to intensify”: Willis D. Weatherford and Charles S. Johnson, Race Relations: Adjustment of Whites and Negroes in the United States (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1934), p. 339.

133 some migrants: Scott, Negro Migration During the War, p. 77.

134 one man disguising himself: Interviews with Ruby Lee Welch Mays Smith, Chicago, January–October 1996.

135 one delegation: David L. Cohn, Where I Was Born and Raised (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967), pp. 340–45. Managers at King and Anderson plantation went to Chicago to convince sharecroppers to come back in the 1940s; cited in Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land (New York: Knopf, 1991), pp. 47–48.

136 In the 1920s: Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922), p. 104.

137 “Owing to the scarcity”: U.S. Department of Labor, Negro Migration in 1916–17, p. 96.

138 Men hopped freight trains: Grossman, Land of Hope, p. 40.

139 “One section gang”: Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy, Anyplace but Here (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1945), p. 164.

140 the weeds grew up: Grossman, Land of Hope, p. 40.

BREAKING AWAY

141 I was leaving: Richard Wright, Black Boy (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 493.

142 Of the few who got: Hortense Powdermaker, After Freedom: A Cultural Study of the Deep South (New York: Viking Press, 1930), pp. 86–87.

143 “How a man treats”: Ibid., p. 86.

144 Like one planter: Based on a letter sent to me by Ruth McClendon of Waukegan, Illinois. She heard me speaking about the Great Migration on WBEZ-FM, the public radio station in Chicago. The letter, dated August 17, 1995, was three pages, handwritten on yellow legal paper. In it, she shared the story of her grandparents leaving Alabama for Illinois during World War I.

145 Pershing was working: Ozeil Fryer Woolcock, “Social Swirl,” Atlanta Daily World, March 8, 1953, p. 3, and March 15, 1953, p. 18. Both stories are useful in that they confirm the general timing of Robert Foster’s departure. They note that he went to see his wife and daughters in Atlanta in early to mid-March before his migration trip to California. On Friday, March 13, 1953, the latter story notes, he was feted with “a small impromptu party by his wife, Alice Clement Foster, who invited a few former college mates in for an evening of dancing and chatting. The residence was most colorful with the St. Patrick motif, assisting Mrs. Foster was her mother, Mrs. Rufus E. Clement.” The story said that Robert was to leave Atlanta that Tuesday, which would have been March 17. Robert would head back to Monroe one last time before his migration, as he would have to pass through Louisiana en route to California. There, he had at least two weeks to spend time with his own family and friends and to prepare for the long journey ahead. When he later recounted the time leading up to his departure, he went on at length about his final weeks in Monroe and the pre-Easter send-off given him by his close friends and family in his hometown, marking the beginning of his journey out of the South. He never mentioned the visit to Atlanta or the party given him by his in-laws, which suggests it did not figure into his definition of his migration journey or the moment of his emotional break from the South. It also reflected how he viewed the more formal, socially correct world of the Clements compared to the humbler circles of his origins, which seemed to have greater meaning to him.

146 I pick up my life: Langston Hughes, One-Way Ticket (New York: Knopf, 1949), p. 61.

147 “Migratory currents flow”: E. G. Ravenstein, “The Laws of Migration,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, no. 2 (June 1889): 284.

148 “They are like”: Ibid., p. 280.

149 Some participants: Joe William Trotter, Jr., Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915–1945 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985). Trotter recounts the especially convoluted migration of a man, identified as J.H., who was “born in Canton, Mississippi. At 16, he went to Memphis, Tennessee. From Memphis he went to Sapulpa, Oklahoma. From Sapulpa he went to the army and to France. After the war [World War I] he settled in Kansas City. From Kansas City [he migrated to] Chicago and then Milwaukee at the age of 40. He has lived in Milwaukee for six years.” The account was originally published by the Milwaukee Urban League in its 1942–1943 Annual Report.

150 “go no further”: Ravenstein, “Laws of Migration,” p. 250.

151 “The more enterprising”: Ibid., p. 279.

PART III: EXODUS

  1 There is no mistaking: The Cleveland Advocate, April 28, 1917.

  2 We look up at: Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices (New York: Viking Press, 1941), p. 92.

THE APPOINTED TIME OF THEIR COMING

  3 A toddler named Huey Newton: Dennis Hevesi, “Huey Newton Symbolized the Rising Black Anger of a Generation,” The New York Times, August 23, 1989, p. 37.

  4 Another boy from Monroe: Bill Russell, Second Wind: The Memoirs of an Opinionated Man (New York: Fireside, 1979), pp. 24–27.

  5 It carried so many: Hollis R. Lynch, The Black Urban Condition: A Documentary History, 1866–1971 (New York: Crowell, 1973), pp. 425–32. The black population of Chicago rose from 30,150 in 1900 to 44,103 in 1910, the last census before the Migration statistically began, and rose to 1,102,620 in 1970. In Detroit, the black population rose from 4,111 in 1900 to 5,741 in 1910 and 660,428 in 1970.

  6 the Illinois Central: John F. Stover, History of the Illinois Central Railroad (New York: Macmillan, 1975), p. 15 on its founding, p. 89 on Lincoln’s role.

  7 Later, it was the first stop: Ray Stannard Baker, Following the Color Line (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1908), p. 113.

  8 “How a colored man”: Robert Russa Moton, What the Negro Thinks (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1929), p. 82. See also Bertram Wilbur Doyle, The Etiquette of Race Relations in the South: A Study in Social Control (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1937), p. 156. Doyle was a professor of sociology at Fisk University.

  9 a family from Beaumont: Interview with Pat Botshekan in Los Angeles, March 18, 1996.

CROSSING OVER

10 Do you remember: Charles H. Nichols, ed., Arna Bontemps–Langston Hughes Letters, 1925–1967 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1980), p. 24.

11 In South Carolina: Graham Russell Hodges, Studies in African History and Culture (New York: Garland, 2000), p. 155.

12 Some of my people: 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. 97–98.

13 The earliest departures: Emmett J. Scott, Negro Migration During the War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1920), p. 13.

14 Instead of the weakening stream: E. G. Ravenstein, “The Laws of Migration,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 52, no. 2 (1889), p. 278. “The most striking feature of the northern migration was its individualism,” Emmett J. Scott wrote in 1920, as if the Migration were over.

15 “A large error”: Florette Henri, Black Migration: Movement North, 1900–1920 (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1975), p. 72.

16 Robert Fields: Interview with Robert Fields in Chicago, 1995.

17 Eddie Earvin: Interview with Eddie Earvin in Chicago, May 1995, after having been given his name at a reunion at DuSable High School.

PART IV: THE KINDER MISTRESS

  1 The lazy, laughing South: Langston Hughes, “The South,” The Crisis, June 1922.

CHICAGO

  2 Timidly, we get: Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices (New York: Viking Press, 1941), pp. 99–100.

NEW YORK

  3 A blue haze: Arna Bontemps, “The Two Harlems,” American Scholar, Spring 1945, p. 167.

LOS ANGELES

  4 Maybe we can start again: John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Viking Press, 1939; updated edition New York: Penguin Books, 1997), p. 89.

  5 They went to court: “Covenant Suit Arguments on August 22,” Los Angeles Sentinel, July 31, 1947, p. 3, gives an overview of the case as it is about to go before the court.

  6 a small contingent: Lawrence Brooks de Graaf, “Recognition, Racism and Reflections on the Writing of Western Black History,” Pacific Historical Review 44, no. 1 (February 1975): 23.

  7 strongly discouraged: Lawrence Brooks de Graaf, “Negro Migration to Los Angeles, 1930–1950,” dissertation submitted to the University of California, Los Angeles, May 1962, p. 14.

  8 By 1900: Ibid., p. 16.

  9 “Even the seeming”: Octavia B. Vivian, The Story of the Negro in Los Angeles County (Washington, D.C.: Federal Writers’ Project, Works Progress Administration, 1936), p. 31.

10 “In certain plants”: Ibid., p. 33.

THE THINGS THEY LEFT BEHIND

11 There were no Chinaberry: Clifton Taulbert, The Last Train North (Tulsa, Okla.: Council Oaks Books, 1992), pp. 43–44.

12 had toiled: It is not known precisely why there was a two-and-a-half-year delay in getting word to the slaves in Texas. One theory was that a messenger bearing the news of freedom was murdered on his way to Texas. Another was that slave masters deliberately withheld the news to keep their unpaid labor for as long as they could. Another was that there simply weren’t enough Union troops in Texas to enforce the Proclamation, which was dated January 1, 1863. The announcement read by the Union troops in the form of General Order no. 3 was as follows: “The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and free laborer” (available at www.juneteenth.com). Also see “An Obscure Texas Celebration Makes Its Way Across the U.S.,” The New York Times, June 18, 2004.

13 “If I were half:” Abraham Epstein, The Negro Migrant in Pittsburgh (New York: Arno Press, 1969 reissue of 1918 original), p. 27.

14 Epstein found: Ibid., p. 24.

TRANSPLANTED IN ALIEN SOIL

15 Should I have come: Richard Wright, Black Boy (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), pp. 306–7.

16 A map: Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy, Anyplace but Here (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1945), p. 164.

17 Beloit, Wisconsin: Morton Rubin, “Migration Patterns from a Rural Northeastern Mississippi Community,” Social Forces 39, no. 1, Oct. 1, 1960–May 1961, pp. 59–66. See also Paul Geib, “From Mississippi to Milwaukee: A Case Study of the Southern Black Migration to Milwaukee, 1940–1970, The Joural of Negro History 83, no. 4 (Autumn 1998): 229–48.

18 Gary: The Jackson Family of singers, including Michael and Janet, probably the most famous natives of Gary, Indiana, had roots in the South like most other black people born in Gary in the past century. The singing group’s father, Joseph, was born in Fountain Hill, Arkansas, in 1929 and went to Chicago, just west of Gary, when he was eighteen. The group’s mother, the former Katherine Scruse, was born in Barbour County, Alabama, and brought to East Chicago, Indiana, by her parents when she was four. Joseph and Katherine met in the Chicago area and married in November 1949. Their nine surviving children were born in Gary.

19 But, as in the rest: Joe William Trotter, Jr., Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915–1945 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 42.

20 “They are superior”: Ibid., p. 55.

21 “only did the dirty work”: Ibid., p. 47. 245 even those jobs: Ibid., p. 152.

22 “never did”: Ibid., p. 167.

23 The first blacks in Harlem: James Riker, Revised History of Harlem (City of New York): Its Origin and Early Annals (New York: New Harlem Publishing, 1904), p. 189; cited in Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York, 1890–1930 (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), p. 83.

24 The trouble began: Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); cited in Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1826–1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

25 By 1930: Osofsky, Harlem, p. 130 on population, p. 139 on sleeping in shifts, p. 129 for Adam Clayton Powell quote.

26 “a growing menace”: Harlem Magazine, February 1914, p. 21; cited in Osofsky, Harlem, p. 107.

27 Panicked property owners: Osofsky, Harlem, pp. 105–7.

28 White leaders tried: The New York Age, August 29 and November 14, 1912; January 9, 1913.

29 White leaders warned: Osofsky, Harlem, p. 108.

30 “rent to colored”: Ibid., p. 110.

31 NOTICE: New York Urban League, “Twenty-four Hundred Negro Families in Harlem: An Interpretation of the Living Conditions of Small Wage Earners,” typescript, Schomburg Collection, 1927, p. 7; cited in Osofsky, Harlem, p. 110.

32 “The basic collapse”: Osofsky, Harlem, p. 109.

33 “servants of the rich”: Jervis Anderson, This Was Harlem, 1900–1950 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Noonday Press, 1981), pp. 321–22.

34 It had a marble: Ibid., pp. 308–9.

35 Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company: John N. Ingham and Lynne B. Feldman, African-American Business Leaders: A Biographical Dictionary (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994), pp. 58–65. William Nickerson, one of the founders of Golden State Mutual Life Insurance, left Houston, Texas, for Los Angeles in 1921 and attributed his migration to the fact that “things were happening in the state, one of which was the riot [Longview, Texas, in 1919 and perhaps Tulsa in 1921]. So becoming disgusted,” he said, “I decided to take my wife and eight children and move to California.” Four years later, he would become one of the founders of the largest black-owned insurance company in the state.

36 “I didn’t think”: Jim Pinson, “City School Board Seat Won by Negro,” The Atlanta Constitution, May 15, 1953, p. 1.

37 “For the first time”: “Negro Is Victor in Atlanta Vote; Defeats White School Board Member, 22,259 to 13,936—Mayor Renominated,” The New York Times, May 15, 1953; “Atlanta Negro Is Elected to Board of Education,” New York Herald Tribune, May 15, 1953, p. 1.

DIVISIONS

38 I walked to the elevator: Richard Wright, Black Boy (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 303.

39 “With few exceptions”: Sadie Tanner Mossell, “The Standard of Living Among One Hundred Negro Migrant Families in Philadelphia,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 98 (November 1921): 216.

40 “The inarticulate and resigned masses”: E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in Chicago, 1939 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932), pp. 80, 84.

41 “a tangle of pathology”: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, D.C.: Office of Policy Planning and Research, United States Department of Labor, 1965), p. 23.

42 “the differential in payments”: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “The Crisis in Welfare,” The Public Interest, Winter 1968, pp. 3–29.

43 “It is the higher”: Karl E. Taeuber and Alma F. Taeuber, “The Changing Character of Negro Migration,” The American Journal of Sociology 70, no. 4 (January 1965): 429–41.

44 “As the distance”: Everett S. Lee, “A Theory of Migration,” Demography 3, no. 1 (1966): 57.

45 “Migrants who overcome”: Ibid., pp. 55–56.

46 “The move to northern”: J. Trent Alexander, “The Great Migration in Comparative Perspective: Interpreting the Urban Origins of Southern Black Migrants to Depression-Era Pittsburgh,” Social Science History, Fall 1998, pp. 358–60. Alexander’s analysis of census data found that, in 1940, only thirty-seven percent of black migrants to northern cities were from rural areas. Two-thirds were from towns with populations of 2,500 or more (p. 365).

47 “Most Negro migrants”: Taeuber and Taeuber, “The Changing Character of Negro Migration,” pp. 430–32.

48 “averaged nearly two more years”: Stewart E. Tolnay, “Educational Selection in the Migration of Southern Blacks, 1880–1990,” Social Forces, December 1998, pp. 492–97.

49 A 1965 study: Frank T. Cherry, “Southern In-Migrant Negroes in North Lawndale, Chicago, 1949–1959: A Study of Internal Migration and Adjustment,” unpublished dissertation, University of Chicago, Department of Sociology, September 1965, p. 71.

50 “There is no support”: Ibid., p. 98.

51 “were not of lower”: Taeuber and Taeuber, “The Changing Character of Negro Migration,” pp. 429–41.

52 the 1965 census study: Ibid., p. 439.

53 “resemble in educational levels”: Ibid., pp. 436–39.

54 “Black men who have been”: Larry H. Long and Lynne R. Heltman, “Migration and Income Differences Between Black and White Men in the North,” The American Journal of Sociology 80, no. 6 (May 1975): 1396–97.

55 “more successfully avoided poverty”: Larry H. Long and Kristin A. Hansen, “Selectivity of Black Return Migration to the South,” Rural Sociology 42, no. 3 (Fall 1977): 318. Based on a paper presented at the annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, Atlanta, March 30–April 2, 1977.

56 “not willing to risk”: Wen Lang Li and Sheron L. Randolph, “Return Migration and Status Attainment Among Southern Blacks,” Rural Sociology 47, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 395.

57 It made them “especially goal oriented”: Larry H. Long and Lynne R. Heltman, “Migration and Income Differences between Black and White Men in the North,” The American Journal of Sociology 90, no. 6 (May 1975): 1406.

58 In San Francisco, for instance: Charles S. Johnson, Herman H. Long, and Grace Jones, The Negro Worker in San Francisco (San Francisco: YWCA, the Race Relations Program of the American Missionary Association, and the Julius Rosenwald Fund, May 1944), pp. 15–23.

59 “more family-stable”: Thomas C. Wilson, “Explaining Black Southern Migrant Advantage in Family Stability: The Role of Selective Migration,” Social Forces 80, no. 2 (December 2001): 555–71.

60 “Colored pupils sometimes occupy”: W. A. Daniel, “Schools,” in Negro Problems in the Cities, ed. T. J. Woofter (College Park, Md.: McGrath Publishing, 1928), p. 183.

61 “is literally forced”: Ibid.

62 James Cleveland Owens: William J. Baker, Jesse Owens: An American Life (New York: Free Press, 1986), p. 16.

63 The boy’s first day: Ibid., p. 19.

64 It made headlines: Larry Schwartz, “Owens Pierced a Myth,” http://espn.go.com/sportscentury/features/00016393.html.

65 “I wasn’t invited”: Susan Robinson, “A Day in Black History: Jesse Owens,” www.gibbsmagazine.com/Jessie%20Owens.htm.

66 “My son’s victories”: Donald McRae, Heroes Without a Country: America’s Betrayal of Joe Louis and Jesse Owens (New York: Ecco, 2002), p. 168.

67 “a narrow tongue”: St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945), p. 12.

68 There were temptations: Ibid., p. 438. See Frazier, The Negro Family in Chicago, p. 103, on the mulatto woman running the biggest poker games on the South Side.

69 This was the landing place: Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, pp. 610–11.

70 “rude cabin”: A. T. Andreas, History of Chicago: From the Earliest Period to the Present Time (Chicago: A. T. Andreas, 1884), pp. 70, 71.

71 “A few goats”: Edith Abbott, The Tenements of Chicago, 1908–1935 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936), pp. 121–23.

72 “Families lived without light”: Ibid., p. 126.

73 “Negro migrants confronted”: Ibid., p. 117.

74 “attics and cellars”: Abraham Epstein, The Negro Migrant in Pittsburgh (New York: Arno Press, 1969), p. 13. Originally published by the University of Pittsburgh in 1918.

75 New arrivals often paid: Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922), p. 93.

76 “The rents in the South Side”: Abbott, The Tenements of Chicago, p. 125.

77 Dwellings that went: Thomas Jackson Woofter, Negro Problems in Cities (New York: Harper and Row, 1928), p. 127.

78 “Lodgers were not disposed”: Epstein, The Negro Migrant in Pittsburgh, p. 8.

79 Whites saw the migrants: Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago, p. 3.

80 “A colored boy swam”: Carl Sandburg, The Chicago Race Riots (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1919), p. 3.

81 “on a white man’s complaint”: Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago, p. 4.

82 Blacks stabbed a white peddler: Ibid., p. 10.

83 Two white men: Ibid., p. 11.

84 White gangs stormed: Ibid., pp. 1–6.

85 Initially, they came: James N. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), p. 16.

86 “By the conversation”: Alfred McClung Lee and Norman D. Humphrey, Race Riot (New York: Dryden Press, 1943), p. 81.

87 “the immigration”: U.S. Department of Labor, Division of Negro Economics, Negro Migration in 1916–17 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1919), p. 131.

88 “stabbed, clubbed and hanged”: Oscar Leonard, “The East St. Louis Pogrom,” Survey, July 14, 1917, p. 331; cited in Herbert Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), p. 116.

89 The police: Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago, pp. 71–78.

90 With a sense of urgency: Ibid., pp. 640–51.

91 “where they drank”: Arna Bontemps, “The Two Harlems,” The American Scholar, Spring 1945, p. 168.

92 There’ll be brown skin mammas: Frank Byrd, “Rent Parties,” in A Renaissance in Harlem: Lost Essays of the WPA, ed. Lionel C. Bascom (New York: Amistad Press, 1999), pp. 59–67.

TO BEND IN STRANGE WINDS

93 I was a Southerner: Zora Neale Hurston, “Backstage and the Railroad,” Dust Tracks on a Road (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1942), p. 98.

94 “They have been our best”: E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932), pp. 108–9.

95 Businessmen jumped: James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 155.

96 “I got a sharecropper”: Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), p. 50.

97 they ran notices: Grossman, Land of Hope, pp. 156–57, on the effects of the Migration on churches in the North.

98 “They tried to insulate”: Ibid., p. 139.

99 “The same class of Negroes”: Frazier, The Negro Family in Chicago, p. 112.

100 A colored newspaper: Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922), p. 304.

101 A survey of new migrants: Charles S. Johnson, Herman H. Long, and Grace Jones, The Negro Worker in San Francisco (San Francisco: YWCA, the Race Relations Program of the American Missionary Association, and the Julius Rosenwald Fund, May 1944), p. 19 on how migrants and nonmigrants viewed one another.

102 “like German Jews”: Grossman, Land of Hope, p. 144.

103 “Those who have long been”: “Our Part in the Migration,” Chicago Defender, March 17, 1917, p. 9.

104 “Well, their English”: Douglas Henry Daniels, Pioneer Urbanites: A Social and Cultural History of San Francisco (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), p. 171.

105 “Eleanor”: Ibid., p. 175.

106 “It is our duty”: Chicago Defender, March 17, 1917, and January 18, 1918, cited in Grossman, Land of Hope, pp. 144–45.

107 Don’t hang out the windows: “A Few Do’s and Don’ts,” Chicago Defender, July 13, 1918, p. 16.

108 Don’t use vile language: “Some Don’ts,” Chicago Defender, May 17, 1919, p. 20. 291

109 1. Do not loaf: Grossman, Land of Hope, pp. 146–47.

THE OTHER SIDE OF JORDAN

110 We cannot escape: James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 20.

111 “If you succeed”: Congressional Record, 75, Session 3, pp. 893, 873.

112 James Arthur Gay was perhaps: Ed Koch, “Pioneering Civic Leader, Hotel Executive Gay Dies at 83,” Las Vegas Sun, September 13, 1999, http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/1999/sep/13/pioneering-civic-leader-hotel-executive-gay-dies-a/.

113 “What do you suppose”: Scott Nearing, Black America (New York: Schocken Books, 1929), p. 78; original reference: H. G. Duncan, The Changing Race Relationship in the Border and Northern States (Philadelphia, 1922), p. 77.

114 Campbell Soup plant: “Business & Finance: Soup,” Time, September 2, 1929, www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,7737779,00.html.

115 “the great clocks of the sky”: Robert Redfield, Tepoztlán, A Mexican Village: A Study of Folk Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930), p. 83. Redfield describes the daily rhythms of life in his ethnography of a village in the Yucatán. His description could apply to rural people the world over who spend their days working the land. “In Tepoztlán,” he writes, “as in other simple societies, the pulse of life is measured more directly than it is with us by the great clocks of the sky.”

116 The plant turned out: Al Chase, “Chicago to Have One of the World’s Largest Soup Factories,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 20, 1927, p. C1.

117 “making conditions so unpleasant”: Abraham Epstein, The Negro Migrant in Pittsburgh (New York: Arno Press, 1969), p. 32.

118 “friction in the washrooms”: Chicago Commision on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922), p. 395.

119 “I find a great resentment”: Ibid., pp. 394–95, on resistance to black workers at a millinery and on white women threatening to quit a laundry that introduced a black woman among them.

120 “Their presence and availability”: Charles S. Johnson, A Preface to Racial Understanding (New York: Friendship Press, 1936), pp. 38–39.

121 By 1940: St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945), p. 227, Figure 16 from the 1940 Census.

122 “where no restaurant”: Ben Green, Before His Time: The Untold Story of Harry T. Moore, America’s First Civil Rights Martyr (New York: Free Press, 1999), p. 5.

123 These were the dark: Paul Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 61.

124 “It is safe to predict”: Green, Before His Time, p. 43, citing a quote in the Tampa Morning Tribune.

125 “We are in the hands”: “Florida Topics,” New York Freeman, June 25, 1887.

126 Florida school boards: Charles Johnson, Patterns of Negro Segregation (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1943), p. 16.

127 the authorities fired: Green, Before His Time, p. 85.

128 The three young men: Ibid., p. 91.

129 The trial had been so tense: Ibid., pp. 103–6, for a detailed account of the car chase after the Groveland trial.

130 Both men were from: Ray Charles and David Ritz, Brother Ray: Ray Charles’ Own Story (New York: Da Capo Press, 1978), p. 165.

131 “even at a financial loss”: Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 101–6.

COMPLICATIONS

132 “What on earth was it”: Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1995), p. 294 (reissue; originally published by Random House, New York, 1952).

133 “positions in either”: Kimberley L. Phillips, AlabamaNorth: African-American Migrants, Community and Working-Class Activism in Cleveland, 1915–1945 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), pp. 241–42.

134 Entire companies and classes: Charles S. Johnson, To Stem This Tide: A Survey of Racial Tension Areas in the United States (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1943), pp. 11–12.

135 Those on the lowest rung: Brenda Clegg Gray, Black Female Domestics During the Depression in New York City, 1930–1940 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1993), pp. 57, 58.

136 One was by: Vivian Morris, “Slave Market” and “Domestic Price Wars,” in A Renaissance in Harlem: Lost Essays of the WPA, ed. Lionel C. Bascom (New York: Amistad Press, 1999), pp. 146–57.

137 In Chicago: St. Clair Drake and Horace H. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945, reprinted 1993), pp. 245–46.

138 “Someone would invariably”: Gray, Black Female Domestics, p. 51.

139 One colored woman: Keith Collins, Black Los Angeles: The Maturing of the Ghetto, 1940–1950 (Saratoga, Calif.: Century Twenty One Publishing, 1980), pp. 53–54, cited in Kevin Leonard, Years of Hope, Days of Fear: The Impact of World War II on Race Relations in Los Angeles, pp. 40, 41.

140 turning back the hands: Morris, “Slave Market,” p. 150.

141 One housewife: Gray, Black Female Domestics, p. 61.

142 In many cases: Ibid., p. 67.

143 Boy Willie: August Wilson, The Piano Lesson (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), p. 20.

144 The bartender: “Restaurant Keeper Who Breaks Dishes He Uses in Serving Negroes, Will Have to Get New Supply if This Plan Works,” The Pittsburgh Courier, February 14, 1931, p. A7, a story about black resistance to the practice of restaurants breaking the dishes used by blacks.

145 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.

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

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

148 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.

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

150 “Everyone I met”: Ibid.

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

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

153 “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

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

155 “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.

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

157 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.

158 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.

159 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.

160 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.

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

THE PRODIGALS

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

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

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

DISILLUSIONMENT

165 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.

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

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

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

169 “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.

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

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

172 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.

173 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.

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

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

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

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

178 “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.”

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

180 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.

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

182 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.

183 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

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

185 “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.

186 “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.

187 “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.”

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

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

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

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

192 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.

193 “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.

194 “I have seen many demonstrations”: Ibid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

201 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.

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

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

204 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.

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

THE FULLNESS OF THE MIGRATION

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

207 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.

208 white immigrants: Ibid., p. 34.

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

210 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.”

211 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. 418 “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

  2 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.

  3 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.

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

  5 “intemperate individuals”: Ibid.

  6 “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.

  7 In the meantime: Ibid., p. 176.

  8 “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.

  9 “he dropped dead”: Ibid., p. 207.

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

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

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

13 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

14 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.

15 “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

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

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

18 “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

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

THE WINTER OF THEIR LIVES

20 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.

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

EPILOGUE

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

23 “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.

24 “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.

25 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 relatives 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.

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

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

28 “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.

29 “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.

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

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

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

33 “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.

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

35 “Since 1924”: “4,733 Mob Action Victims Since ’82, Tuskegee Reports,” Montgomery Advertiser, April 26, 1959.

36 The mechanical cotton picker: Donald Holley, The Second Great Emancipation: The Mechanical Cotton Picker, Black Migration, and How They Shaped the Modern South (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas, 2000), pp. 38–40.

37 Still, many planters: Ibid., p. 101.

38 “Much of this labor”: Harris P. Smith, “Late Developments in Mechanical Cotton Harvesting,” Agricultural Engineering, July 1946, p. 321. Smith, the chief of the division of agricultural engineering at the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station, presented this paper at a meeting of the American Society of Agricultural Engineers at Fort Worth, Texas, in April 1946. See also Gilbert C. Fite, “Recent Changes in the Mechanization of Cotton Production in the United States,” Agricultural History 24 (January 1950): 28, and Oscar Johnston, “Will the Machine Ruin the South?” Saturday Evening Post 219 (May 31, 1947): 37.

39 “If all of their dream”: “Our Part in the Exodus,” Chicago Defender, March 17, 1917, p. 9.

40 Toni Morrison: Toni Morrison’s parents migrated from Alabama to Lorraine, Ohio. Diana Ross’s mother migrated from Bessemer, Alabama, to Detroit, her father from Bluefield, West Virginia. Aretha Franklin’s father migrated from Mississippi to Detroit. Jesse Owens’s parents migrated from Oakville, Alabama, to Cleveland when he was nine. Joe Louis’s mother migrated with him from Lafayette, Alabama, to Detroit. Jackie Robinson’s family migrated from Cairo, Georgia, to Pasadena, California. Bill Cosby’s father migrated from Schuyler, Virginia, to Philadelphia, where Cosby was born. Nat King Cole, as a young boy, migrated with his family from Montgomery, Alabama, to Chicago. Condoleezza Rice’s family migrated from Birmingham, Alabama, to Denver, Colorado, when she was twelve. Thelonious Monk’s parents brought him from Rocky Mount, North Carolina, to Harlem when he was five. Berry Gordy’s parents migrated from rural Georgia to Detroit, where Gordy was born. Oprah Winfrey’s mother migrated from Kosciusko, Mississippi, to Milwaukee, where Winfrey went to live as a young girl. Mae Jemison’s parents migrated from Decatur, Alabama, to Chicago when she was three years old. Romare Bearden’s parents carried him from Charlotte, North Carolina, to New York City. Jimi Hendrix’s maternal grandparents migrated from Virginia to Seattle. Michael Jackson’s mother was taken as a toddler from Barbour County, Alabama, by her parents to East Chicago, Indiana; his father migrated as a young man from Fountain Hill, Arkansas, to Chicago, just west of Gary, Indiana, where all the Jackson children were born. Prince’s father migrated from Louisiana to Minneapolis. Sean “P. Diddy” Combs’s grandmother migrated from Hollyhill, South Carolina, to Harlem. Whitney Houston’s grandparents migrated from Georgia to Newark, New Jersey. The family of Mary J. Blige migrated from Savannah, Georgia, to Yonkers, New York. Queen Latifah’s grandfather migrated from Birmingham, Alabama, to Newark. Spike Lee’s family migrated from Atlanta to Brooklyn. August Wilson’s mother migrated from North Carolina to Pittsburgh, following her own mother, who, as the playwright told it, had walked most of the way.

41 “almost exactly at the norm”: Otto Klineberg, Negro Intelligence and Selective Migration (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935), pp. 43–45. The IQ tests were of ten-year-old girls in Harlem, divided on the basis of how long they had lived in New York. Those in New York for less than a year scored 81.8, those in New York one to two years scored 85.8, those in New York for three to four years scored 94.1, and those born in New York scored 98.5. Other studies—of boys or with the use of other measurements—found what Klineberg described as an “unmistakable trend” of improved intellectual performance the longer the children were in the North.

42 Klineberg’s studies: “Otto Klineberg, Who Helped Win ’54 Desegregation Case, Dies at 92,” The New York Times, March 10, 1992.

43 Jean Baptiste Point DuSable: Bessie Louise Pierce, A History of Chicago, vol. 1 (New York: Knopf, 1937), pp. 12, 13. Pierce describes Point DuSable as having been the son of a man from “one of France’s foremost families” and says “that his mother was a Negro slave.” Christopher R. Reed, “In the Shadow of Fort Dearborn: Honoring DuSable at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933–1934,” Journal of Black Studies 21, no. 4 (June 1991): 412.

44 Jan Rodrigues: Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 12–13.

45 “In the simple process”: Lawrence R. Rodgers, Canaan Bound: The African American Great Migration Novel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), p. 186.

NOTES ON METHODOLOGY

  1 It is important: 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. xxiii, xxiv.