The Warmth of Other Suns

The preliminaries

• For all its upheaval, the Civil War had left most blacks in the South no better off economically than they had been before.
• But one thing had changed: after the war, the federal government took over much of the South’s affairs during a period known as Reconstruction, and newly freed people were able to exercise rights previously denied.
  • For instance, they could vote, marry, or go to school, and the more ambitious could enroll in black colleges or run for office.
• But by the mid-1870s, in the face of southern hostility, the North withdrew, and whites in the South began undoing many legal protections, recreating the caste system founded under slavery.
  • And during this time, newspapers frequently advertised violence against blacks, often alerting readers to the time and place of a lynching. In spectacles that could go on for hours, whites tortured and mutilated black men and women, hung or burned them alive, all before festive crowds of as many as several thousand white citizens.
  • Across the South, a black person was hanged or burned alive every four days from 1889 to 1929.
• Then, around the turn of the 20th century, Jim Crow laws came into being–laws that regulated every aspect of black people’s lives, solidified the southern caste system, and prohibited even the most casual and incidental contact between races.
  • During this time, a generation came into the world unlike any other in the South. It was made up of young people with no personal recollection of slavery, but who chafed under Jim Crow.
  • And it appeared that young whites had grown more hostile to blacks than even their slaveholding ancestors had been.
    • For example, Harry T. Moore, the NAACP’s chief organizer for all of Florida in the 1940s, was spurred to action when a young colored boy sent a Christmas card to a whitegirl, who showed the card to her father–a group of white men captured the boy, tortured him, and drowned him.
  • In everyday interactions, a black person could not contradict a white person or speak unless spoken to first, etc.–the consequences for the slightest misstep were swift and brutal–all blacks lived with the reality that no black person was completely safe.

The Great Migration – general information

The beginnings

• The Great Migration began sometime in the middle of WWI. The North faced a labor shortage, since the war had cut the supply of European workers, and it cast its gaze on the servant class of the South.
  • Northern recruiters would stride through groupings of colored people in the South and urge them to go north for work. Some 555,000 colored people left the South during the decade of the First World War.
• WWII set off a virtual stampede.
  • For example, there had been only 124,306 colored people in 1940 in California, but over the rest of the decade the population almost quadrupled.
• The Great Migration was not a seasonal, contained, or singular event; it was a statistically measurable demographic phenomenon, largely based on railroad and bus lines.

Life in the North

• In the North, most colored migrants were funneled into the lowest-paying jobs in the harshest industries, such as iron and steel foundries and slaughtering and meatpacking.
• In response to influxes of black migrants, disaffected whites often incited riots, and thus, riots would becomes to the North what lynchings were to the South, each a display of white uncontained rage directed toward the scapegoats of their condition.
  • Each riot pitted two groups that had more in common with each other than either of them realized.
  • Both sides were often made up for rural and small-town people in search of the American Dream, relegated to the worst jobs by industrialists. Many struggled to raise families in a cold, alien place far from their homelands–they were essentially the same people except for the color of their skin.
• Wherever colored labor was introduced, a sense of insecurity washed over the working class people who were already there, an unease that was economically not without merit but rose to hysteria.
  • In the South, the caste system that held down the wages of colored people also undercut white earning power, who could not get higher pay as long as colored people were forced to accept subsistence wages.
  • Northern industrialists noticed this, and they hired colored workers as strikebreakers and resorted to them to keep their labor costs down.
  • The ceiling was even lower and the options fewer for colored women.
    • By 1940, two out of every 3 colored women in Chicago were servants–only a fraction of colored women (7%) were hired to do clerical work, compared to 43% of white women.
• As for housing, many people in Chicago and other big cities feared that the arrival of colored people in an all-white neighborhood automatically lowered property values.
  • In actuality, the decline in property values was a by-product of the fear itself.
  • The instability of a white neighborhood under pressure from the possibility of integration set off a downward cycle of anticipation, where worried whites no longer bought homes in white neighborhoods that might attract colored residents even if none lived there at the time.
  • Rents and purchase prices fell in an attempt to attract white residents. But with prices falling and futures uncertain, lenders made it difficult to get mortgages.
  • Panicked whites sold at low prices, giving the homeowners who remained little incentive to invest any further. Thus, many white neighborhoods began declining even before colored residents arrived.
• Newcomers were also confronted by the Northern Paradox, whereby almost everybody was against discrimination in general, but almost everybody practiced discrimination in their personal lives, by not allowing blacks into unions or club houses, certain jobs, etc., and white neighborhoods avoiding social interaction overall. 

Personal Stories

Mississippi – 1937 – Ida Mae Brandon Gladney

• As a young girl, Ida Mae knew that an invisible hand ruled her life and the lives of all the colored people in the south–they lived on separate land, had separate parking spaces, and colored people had to step off the curb when they passed a white person in town.
  • When she was a child, she overheard grownups whispering about two colored boys who spoke to a white lady, and white people took the boys and hung them, and the grownups wept. The families of the boys left for Milwaukee–signaling to Ida Mae that there was a window out.
• Ida Mae spent time picking cotton and she hated it.
  • Cotton-picking was one of the most backbreaking forms of labor ever known.
    • It took some 70 bolls to make a single pound of cotton. 
    • It meant reaching past the branches into the flower and pulling a lock of cotton the size of a walnut out, doing this 7,000 times and turning around and doing the same thing the next day and the day after that. Hands cramped and after 12 hours of picking every day, the pickers could barely stand up straight.
• One night, a neighbor accused Ida Mae’s cousin of stealing turkeys–a group of men came, tied the cousin’s hands and beat him with chains. The next morning, the turkeys wandered back on their own. After this, Ida Mae and her husband decided to leave for Chicago.
• In Chicago, Ida Mae found the living conditions not much better and in some places worse–families lived without light, heat, and water.
  • Black migrants confronted a solid wall of prejudice and great disadvantages–new arrivals often paid twice the rent charged the whites they had just replaced for ill-kept housing. 
  • This started a pattern of overcharging and underinvestment in black neighborhoods that created the foundation for decades of economic disparities in the urban north.
• Ida Mae and her family, faced with many economic woes, struggled to make ends meet but persevered by taking menial job after menial job.
  • Many years later, people would forget about the quiet successes of everyday people like Ida Mae. In debates over welfare and pathology, America would overlook people like her in its fixation with the underclass. Few experts trained their sights on the unseen masses of migrants like her.

Louisiana – 1953 – Robert Joseph Pershing Foster

• Robert’s parents were teachers. White teachers and principals were making $630 a year while the colored ones were paid a third of that, $215 a year.
  • The disparity in pay had far-reaching effects. It meant that even the most promising of colored people had to labor knowing that they were underpaid by more than half.
    • Being so behind meant that it would be basically impossible to accumulate the assets their white counterparts could, and that they would have less to leave succeeding generations than similar white families. And this wealth deficit would only balloon over the generations.
  • A Louisiana school superintendent said that much of the money allocated to colored children is spent on the education of the white children. The system, undoubtedly, was set against the advancement of colored children and families.
• Eventually, though, Robert got into college – Morehouse, in 1937.
  • Few people, white or black, in Ouachita County, Louisiana had the chance to go to college. Resentments ran deep, especially when it came to a colored child going to college when some were still debating whether they were worth educating at all. After college, he headed to medical school in Tennessee, a place far from his dreams.
• He soon joined the army, where thousands of colored soldiers before him fought valiantly in Europe, but returned home to a Jim Crow South that expected them to go back to the servile position they left–most soldiers resented it.
  • He became a very capable surgeon, but he noticed more and more things like how whenever a white woman needed surgery, they never let him in the operating room.
• Robert decided to head to California–the trip there was filled with indignities and difficulties, and upon arrival, he was met with a surprising amount of resentment from blacks living in California.
  • For example, when he was trying to set up a practice by going house to house, he was alarmed when a black woman refused to let him treat her.
  • Colored doctors in the South were revered, but colored people in California didn’t have to go to colored doctors if they didn’t want to.
    • That is, the very system that instilled privilege and superiority in southern whites also instilled a sense of inferiority in their colored workers, and when they got the chance to get all that had been denied, some sought out whatever they were convinced was superior–and thus white.
  • Robert experienced a by-product of integration that affected nearly every black business when the doors of segregation flung open–rejection by black customer base.

The expansive, lingering effects of the Great Migration

• The Great Migration would not end until the 1970s, when the South finally began to change.
  • By then nearly half of all black Americans–some 47%–would be living outside the South, compared to 10% when the Migration began.
  • And when it was over, few Americans had not been touched by it. The descendants of those who left the South were raised in a world their ancestors could not have comprehended.
• Perhaps the most significant measure of the Great Migration was the act of leaving itself–the Migration, in some sense, was its own point. The achievement was in making the decision to be free and acting on that decision, wherever they ended up.
  • That is, by walking away one by one, millions of African-American southerners altered the course of their own, and all of America’s, history.
  • Its imprint is everywhere in urban life. The configuration of the cities, the social geography of black and white neighborhoods, the spread of the housing projects, the rise of a black middle class, and the waves of suburbanization–all of these grew, from the response of everyone touched by the Great Migration.
• There were many stereotypes of the migrants.
  • Closer analysis of newly available census records has found that, contrary to those stereotypes, black migrants were actually more likely to be married and to raise their children in two-parent households, and less likely to bear children out of wedlock. They had higher rates of participation in the labor force, lower levels of unemployment, higher incomes, and lower levels of poverty and welfare dependency.
  • So many might not have existed if there hadn’t been a Great Migration–James Bladwin, Michelle Obama, Miles Davis, Spike Lee, Toni Morrison, Denzel Washington, and more. Their life chances were drastically altered because a parent or grandparent made the hard decision to leave.
• When viewing the Great Migration as a whole, it is critical to remember the things migrants left behind and the people they might not see again.
  • Perhaps the greatest single act of family disruption and heartbreak among black Americans in the 20th century was the result of the hard choices made by those on either side of the Great Migration. 

• Robert’s marriage to Alice Clement, the daughter of the intimidating Rufus Clement, who was the head of one of the most elite colored universities in the country
• The Detroit Riots of 1943 – the first major riot in which blacks fought back as earnestly as the whites – it was only after Detroit that riots became known as primarily urban phenomena, ultimately centered on inner-city blacks venting their frustrations on the ghettos that confined them
• The history of blacks who lived in California, beginning in the eighteenth century
• The importance of voting–to the Democrats in the North, each new arrival form the South was a potential new vote in their column
• The South’s response to the trickle–and then a flood–of migrants, and how the South’s actions intensified the desire to leave
• Ida Mae’s experience at Emmett Till’s funeral 
• The incredible migration story of George Swanson Starling, through which the author reveals the difficult, unfair sharecropping system