Copyright © 2010 by Isabel Wilkerson All rights reserved Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc Our title The Warmth of Other Suns is taken from the final pages of the unrestored edition of Black Boy by Richard Wright Used by permission Permissions acknowledgments for previously published material can be found beginning on this page eISBN: 978-0-679-60407-5 www.atrandom.com v3.1 To my mother and to the memory of my father, whose migration made me possible, and to the millions of others like them who dared to act upon their dreams I was leaving the South To fling myself into the unknown.…1 I was taking a part of the South To transplant in alien soil, To see if it could grow differently, If it could drink of new and cool rains, Bend in strange winds, Respond to the warmth of other suns And, perhaps, to bloom — RICHARD WRIGHT CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication PART ONE IN THE LAND OF THE FOREFATHERS Leaving The Great Migration, 1915–1970 PART TWO BEGINNINGS Ida Mae Brandon Gladney The Stirrings of Discontent George Swanson Starling Robert Joseph Pershing Foster A Burdensome Labor The Awakening Breaking Away PART THREE EXODUS The Appointed Time of Their Coming Crossing Over PART FOUR THE KINDER MISTRESS Chicago New York Los Angeles The Things They Left Behind Transplanted in Alien Soil Divisions To Bend in Strange Winds The Other Side of Jordan Complications The River Keeps Running The Prodigals Disillusionment Revolutions The Fullness of the Migration PART FIVE AFTERMATH In the Places They Left Losses More North and West Than South Redemption And, Perhaps, to Bloom The Winter of Their Lives The Emancipation of Ida Mae Epilogue Notes on Methodology Afterword Acknowledgments Notes Permissions Acknowledgments About the Author PART ONE IN THE LAND OF THE FOREFATHERS Our mattresses were made of corn shucks and soft gray Spanish moss that from the trees.…1 From the swamps we got soup turtles and baby alligators and from the woods we got raccoon, rabbit and possum —MAHALIA JACKSON, Movin’ On Up LEAVING This land is first and foremost his handiwork.2 It was he who brought order out of primeval wilderness … Wherever one looks in this land, whatever one sees that is the work of man, was erected by the toiling straining bodies of blacks —DAVID L COHN, God Shakes Creation They fly from the land that bore them.3 — W H STILLWELL I CHICKASAW COUNTY, MISSISSIPPI, LATE OCTOBER 1937 IDA MAE BRANDON GLADNEY were closing in on the salt licks east of the oxbow lakes along the folds in the earth beyond the Yalobusha River The cotton was at last cleared from the eld Ida Mae tried now to get the children ready and to gather the clothes and quilts and somehow keep her mind o the churning within her She had sold o the turkeys and doled out in secret the old stools, the wash pots, the tin tub, the bed pallets Her husband was settling with Mr Edd over the worth of a year’s labor, and she did not know what would come of it None of them had been on a train before—not unless you counted the clattering local from Bacon Switch to Okolona, where, “by the time you sit down, you there,” as Ida Mae put it None of them had been out of Mississippi Or Chickasaw County, for that matter There was no explaining to little James and Velma the stu ed bags and chaos and all that was at stake or why they had to put on their shoes and not cry and bring undue attention from anyone who might happen to see them leaving Things had to look normal, like any other time they might ride into town, which was rare enough to begin with Velma was six She sat with her ankles crossed and three braids in her hair and did THE NIGHT CLOUDS what she was told James was too little to understand He was three He was upset at the commotion Hold still now, James Lemme put your shoes on, Ida Mae told him James wriggled and kicked He did not like shoes He ran free in the eld What were these things? He did not like them on his feet So Ida Mae let him go barefoot Miss Theenie stood watching One by one, her children had left her and gone up north Sam and Cleve to Ohio Josie to Syracuse Irene to Milwaukee Now the man Miss Theenie had tried to keep Ida Mae from marrying in the rst place was taking her away, too Miss Theenie had no choice but to accept it and let Ida Mae and the grandchildren go for good Miss Theenie drew them close to her, as she always did whenever anyone was leaving She had them bow their heads She whispered a prayer that her daughter and her daughter’s family be protected on the long journey ahead in the Jim Crow car “May the Lord be the first one in the car,” she prayed, “and the last out.” When the time had come, Ida Mae and little James and Velma and all that they could carry were loaded into a brother-in-law’s truck, and the three of them went to meet Ida Mae’s husband at the train depot in Okolona for the night ride out of the bottomland WILDWOOD, FLORIDA, APRIL 14, 1945 GEORGE SWANSON STARLING gave Lil George Starling a ride in his pickup truck to the train station in Wildwood through the fruit-bearing scrubland of central Florida.4 And Schoolboy, as the toothless orange pickers mockingly called him, boarded the Silver Meteor pointing north A railing divided the stairs onto the train, one side of the railing for white passengers, the other for colored, so the soles of their shoes would not touch the same stair He boarded on the colored side of the railing, a nal reminder from the place of his birth of the absurdity of the world he was leaving He was getting out alive So he didn’t let it bother him “I got on the car where they told me to get on,” he said years later He hadn’t had time to bid farewell to everyone he wanted to He stopped to say goodbye to Rachel Jackson, who owned a little café up on what they called the Avenue and the few others he could safely get to in the little time he had He gured everybody in Egypt town, the colored section of Eustis, probably knew he was leaving before he had climbed onto the train, small as the town was and as much as people talked It was a clear afternoon in the middle of April He folded his tall frame into the hard surface of the seat, his knees knocking against the seat back in front of him He was packed into the Jim Crow car, where the railroad stored the luggage, when the train A MAN NAMED ROSCOE COLTON 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 di er 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 T R HE IVER K EEPS R UNNING 154 “Why 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 o ces 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 Feet Long and 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.” T P HE RODIGALS 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 D ISILLUSIONMENT 165 Let’s not fool ourselves: Speech by Martin Luther King, Jr., May 17, 1956, MLK speech le, 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 171 The Clarks did not let: “Truman May Act in Cicero Case,” Chicago Defender, September 29, 1951, p 172 A mob stormed the apartment: Stephen Grant Meyer, As Long as They Don’t Move Next Door: Segregation and Racial Con ict in American Neighborhoods (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Little eld, 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 175 “bigoted idiots”: “Support Is Growing for Cicero Riot Victims,” Atlanta Daily World, p 176 “This is the root”: “Illinois Gov Blames Housing Shortage for Riot in Cicero,” Atlanta Daily World, October 21, 1951, p 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 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 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 R EVOLUTIONS 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 (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 not believe that the whites of Chicago would be any di erent 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 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 e orts 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 this”: “Dr King Is Felled by Rock: 30 Injured as He Leads Protesters; Many Arrested in Race Clash,” Chicago Tribune, August 6, 1966, p 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 sacri ce”: 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 ndings of a ve-year study of 22,000 census tracts conducted by University of Chicago sociologists Douglas S Massey and Nancy A Denton 202 kept a card le: “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 205 “About 74 percent”: Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York: Bantam Books, 1968), p T F HE ULLNESS OF THE M IGRATION 206 And so the root: Langston Hughes, “For Russell and Rowena Jelli e,” 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 “signi cantly 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 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 I N THE P LACES T HEY L EFT The only thing: Lonnie G Bunch III, “The Greatest State for the Negro: Je erson 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 Je erson 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 re on the unarmed people, killing twenty of them Edmonds became editor of The Liberator, a colored newspaper in Los Angeles Mr Edd, whose land: Chickasaw County Historical and Genealogical Society, Chickasaw County History, vol (Dallas: Curtis Media, 1997), p 430 on Willie Jim Linn and p 497 on Edd Monroe Pearson The people who had not gone: Ibid., p 10 “intemperate individuals”: Ibid “spent all their savings”: Mark Lowry II, “Schools in Transition,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 63, no (June 1973): pp 173, 178 In the meantime: Ibid., p 176 “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 “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 L OSSES 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 M ORE N ORTH AND W EST T HAN S OUTH 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 led as a result of a dispute with the West Los Angeles Veterans Administration Medical Center in Brentwood A ,P ND ERHAPS, TO B LOOM 19 Most of them care nothing: James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p 21 T W HE INTER OF T HEIR L IVES 20 That the Negro American: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, D.C.: United States Department of Labor, O ce 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 E PILOGUE 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 di erences between southern migrants and native northerners were considerably smaller than the corresponding di erence 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 di erence 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 Di erences Between Black and White Men in the North,” The American Journal of Sociology 80, no (May 1975): 1395–1407 30 Something deep inside: Long and Heltman, “Migration and Income Di erences 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 (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 (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 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 Blue eld, 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 ve 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 (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 (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 M ETHODOLOGY 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 PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Excerpts from Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin, copyright © 1955 and copyright © renewed 1983 by James Baldwin Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston BEACON PRESS: Excerpt from Act 1, Scene i, from The Piano Lesson by August Wilson, copyright © 1988, 1990 by August Wilson Reprinted by permission of Dutton Signet, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc DUTTON SIGNET, A DIVISION OF PENGUIN GROUP (USA) INC.: : Excerpts from 12 Million Black Voices by Richard Wright, copyright © 1940 by Richard Wright Reprinted by permission of John Hawkins & Associates, Inc., and the Estate of Richard Wright JOHN HAWKINS & ASSOCIATES, INC., AND THE ESTATE OF RICHARD WRIGHT Excerpt from Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston, copyright © 1942 by Zora Neale Hurston, copyright renewed 1970 by John C Hurston Excerpts from Black Boy by Richard Wright, copyright © 1937, 1942, 1944, 1945 by Richard Wright, copyright renewed 1973 by Ellen Wright Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS: : Excerpt from “For Russell and Rowena Jelli e,” excerpt from “One-Way Ticket,” and an excerpt from “The South” from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, copyright © 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes Reprinted by permission of Alfred A Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc Additional rights by permission of Harold Ober Associates Incorporated ALFRED A KNOPF, A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE, INC., AND HAROLD OBER ASSOCIATES INCORPORATED Excerpt from “The Two Harlems” by Arna Bontemps, American Scholar, Volume 14, No 2, Spring 1945, p 167, copyright © 1945 by The Phi Beta Kappa Society Reprinted by permission of The Phi Beta Kappa Society THE PHI BETA KAPPA SOCIETY: Excerpt from “Hide Nor Hair” by Percy May eld and Morton Craft, copyright © Tangerine Music Corporation All rights reserved Reprinted by permission Under license from the Ray Charles Marketing Group on behalf of Tangerine Music Corporation RAY CHARLES MARKETING GROUP: Excerpt from Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, copyright © 1996 by the University of North Carolina Press Reprinted by permission of the publisher, www.uncpress.unc.edu UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS: Excerpt from Chapter from The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, copyright © 1939, copyright renewed 1967 by John Steinbeck Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc VIKING PENGUIN, A DIVISION OF PENGUIN GROUP (USA) INC.: ABOUT THE AUTHOR ISABEL WILKERSON won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her reporting as Chicago bureau chief of The New York Times The award made her the rst black woman in the history of American journalism to win a Pulitzer Prize and the rst African American to win for individual reporting She won the George Polk Award for her coverage of the Midwest and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for her research into the Great Migration She has lectured on narrative writing at the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University and has served as Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University and as the James M Cox Jr Professor of Journalism at Emory University She is currently Professor of Journalism and Director of Narrative Non ction at Boston University During the Great Migration, her parents journeyed from Georgia and southern Virginia to Washington, D.C., where she was born and reared This is her rst book ... Foster—and for others like them, the circumstances of their migrations shaped who they were and defined the course of their fortunes or misfortunes and the lives of their descendants The events were... www.atrandom.com v3.1 To my mother and to the memory of my father, whose migration made me possible, and to the millions of others like them who dared to act upon their dreams I was leaving the South To fling... divided the stairs onto the train, one side of the railing for white passengers, the other for colored, so the soles of their shoes would not touch the same stair He boarded on the colored side of the