The Uprooted

Chronicling the Great Migration

By Jill Lepore

In May of 1939, Ralph Ellison, who was twenty-six at the time, asked an old man hanging out in Eddie’s Bar, on St. Nicholas Avenue near 147th Street, “Do you like living in New York City?” The man said:

Ellison took all that down, on a nice neat form. He was asking because it was his job to ask: he was muddling through the Depression on a paycheck from the Works Progress Administration, which people liked to call the Whistle, Piss, and Argue department but which was something to do, anyway, and better than the dole. At its peak, the W.P.A.’s Federal Writers’ Project employed more than six thousand writers—from newspaper reporters to playwrights, anybody who used to make some kind of living by writing and couldn’t anymore—including Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, John Cheever, and Richard Wright. (At the time, one in four people in publishing was out of work.) It was mired in bureaucracy and inefficiency, you had to take a pauper’s oath to get hired, and the whole thing was axed, four years after it got started, by people in Congress who were convinced it was a Communist front. But, before that, Ellison and all those thousands of other writers chronicled American life by interviewing ordinary people.

They [FWP writers] also reinvented the interview and changed American journalism forever. The project’s folklore editor, Benjamin Botkin, had a mad, beautiful vision. He wanted to turn “the streets, the stockyards, and the hiring halls into literature.” From more than ten thousand interviews, the Writers’ Project produced some eight hundred books, including A Treasury of American Folklore and, in 1939, a volume called These Are Our Lives. That’s not counting the novels, though, which is where a lot of those interviews wound up. In Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award when it was published, in 1952, an old woman, up from the South, saves Ellison’s narrator, a newer arrival, after he collapses on Lenox Avenue, telling him, “You have to take care of yourself, son. Don’t let this Harlem git you. I’m in New York, but New York ain’t in me, understand what I mean?”

That man in Eddie’s Bar, who left Jacksonville, Florida, at the beginning of the First World War, was part of what historians call the Great Migration, which can be confusing, because historians also talk about the Great Migration of Puritans who left England between 1630 and 1641. There’s great, and then there’s great. The seventeenth-century migration to New England—twenty thousand people—was great because the Puritans thought it was great, and said so every time they got within ten paces of a pulpit: I am founding a city on a hill, a beacon unto the world! I am leading an errand into the wilderness! The twentieth-century migration from the Cotton Belt was great in numbers, but whether it was great for the people who made it was something to wonder about. Was this really the promised land? Was this, Seventh Avenue, home? “Should I have come here?” Richard Wright, who was born in Mississippi and moved to Chicago in 1927, asked, in Black Boy.

Between 1915 and 1918, five hundred thousand blacks left the South; 1.3 million between 1920 and 1930. They drove; they hitched rides; they saved till they could buy a train ticket. They went to cities, especially Chicago, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. They fled Jim Crow, laws put on the books after Reconstruction. Georgia was the first state to demand separate seating for whites and blacks in streetcars, in 1891; five years later came Plessy v. Ferguson. By 1905, every Southern state had a streetcar law, and more: in courthouses, separate Bibles; in bars, separate sections; in post offices, separate windows; in libraries, separate branches. In Birmingham, it was a crime for blacks and whites to play checkers together in a public park.

By the nineteen-seventies, after civil rights put an end to Jim Crow and the Great Migration stopped, six million people had left their homes. It was bigger than the Gold Rush. It was bigger than the Dust Bowl Okies. Before the Great Migration, ninety per cent of all blacks in the United States lived in the South; after it, forty-seven per cent lived someplace else. Today, more African-Americans live in the city of Chicago than in the state of Mississippi. In The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (Random House; $30), Isabel Wilkerson, who earned a Pulitzer while working as the [New York] Times’ Chicago bureau chief, and now directs the narrative-nonfiction program at Boston University, calls the exodus “the biggest underreported story of the twentieth century.”

To report that story, Wilkerson became something of a one-woman W.P.A. project. Her research took more than ten years, and is not unlike another chunk of work done by the Federal Writers’ Project: documenting the history of slavery, before its memory faded altogether. In the nineteen-thirties, about a hundred thousand people who had once been owned by other people were still alive. Writers’ Project writers fanned out to find them, and collected two thousand life stories. Before this, all that historians writing about slavery had was a handful of slave narratives by people who had escaped; accounts written, here and there, by travellers to the South; and tottering piles of letters and diaries left by slave-owners. Oral histories are, as evidence, not without problems. Much depends upon the sensitivity, acuity, and fidelity of the interviewer. But without those W.P.A. interviews—firsthand accounts by people who lived, for part of their lives, as slaves—much of the history of slavery would be unrecoverable.

Wilkerson, realizing that the generation of Americans who lived under Jim Crow won’t be around much longer, set out to talk to them. Her own parents left the South: her mother migrated from Georgia, her father from Virginia. She’d heard their stories from childhood. She wanted to hear more. She interviewed more than twelve hundred people, from all over the country. She found them at pensioners’ clubs, senior centers, and funerals, walking with walkers, hair grizzled. (“I hung around playgrounds; I hung around the street, the bars,” Ellison said of his W.P.A. interviews. “I went into hundreds of apartment buildings and just knocked on doors. I would tell some stories to get people going and then I’d sit back and try to get it down as accurately as I could. Sometimes you would find people sitting around on Eighth Avenue just dying to talk.”) Wilkerson spoke at length with three dozen people and then chose three, whom she interviewed for hundreds of hours. Her book is the story of those three lives, told, really, as an act of love. She takes her title from a passage in Wright’s Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth”:

And her deeply affecting, finely crafted and heroic book can be read as an elegant homage to Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States. (Wright’s text accompanied photographs taken by the Farm Security Administration.) Wright expressed, in vernacular, an argument of the Chicago School of sociologists, who, beginning in the nineteen-twenties, had been studying the Great Migration, crunching the numbers, calculating averages, compiling reports (presaging Moynihan’s), about black life in the urban North. “Perhaps never in history has a more utterly unprepared folk wanted to go to the city,” Wright wrote. In the Chicago School argument, the folk, in the city, crash into modernity; uprooting means loss, especially loss of community, an argument that has long been debated, and that Wilkerson doesn’t so much take on as steer clear of. Her folk don’t crash; they struggle, they study, they strive and even thrive.

More to the point, she doesn’t call them folk, and, for all that her work shares with Wright’s, her project has less in common with the documentary populism of the nineteen-thirties, which, like Chicago School sociology, was always about the collective (if you could just talk to enough people, take enough photographs, conduct enough surveys, you could, finally, record what it meant to be human), than with the new narrative journalism of the nineteen-sixties, which was always about the individual (if you could just find the right person to talk to, and it had to be an ordinary person, you could write the story of everyone). Wilkerson’s work, in other words, is more novelistic than documentary, more Invisible Man than 12 Million Black Voices:, and less Studs Terkel (another Writers’ Project writer) than J. Anthony Lukas (who, like Wilkerson, spent much of his career at the Times).

Wilkerson has taken on one of the most important demographic upheavals of the past century—a phenomenon whose dimensions and significance have eluded many a scholar—and told it through the lives of three people no one has ever heard of. Narrative nonfiction is risky; it has to be grabby, telling, and true. To bear analytical weight, it has to be almost frighteningly shrewd. In The Warmth of Other Suns:, three lives, three people, three stories, are asked to stand in for six million. Can three people explain six million? Do they have to? Your answers probably depend, mostly, on your intellectual proclivities. You’re reading this magazine; chances are you lean toward thinking that stories, good stories, explain. But if you’re an empiricist the only real way to decide is to see it tried. And so, of six million lives, of three stories, here’s one. 

Mae Ida Brandon was born in a wood house in Chickasaw County, Mississippi, in 1913. She was ornery, and a tomboy, and told people to call her Ida Mae—it sounded less old-fashioned—as soon as she could tell anybody what to do. She walked a mile to a one-room schoolhouse that went up to the eighth grade, which was as high as you could go, and where she was once whipped with a switch for misspelling Philadelphia, a place she had never heard of. She hated picking cotton, but she liked killing snakes. Once, when she was six or seven—sometime, anyway, before her father died—she rode a horse to the blacksmith’s to get a piece of plow sharpened, and the blacksmith’s two sons, white boys, dangled her over a well to watch her squirm. When she was thirteen, the Carter brothers, two black boys, said something to some white lady, as best she could remember, and were promptly lynched. “If it is necessary, every negro in the state will be lynched,” James. K. Vardaman had said in 1903, the year that he was first elected governor of Mississippi; the year Ida Mae was born was the year that he joined the U.S. Senate. In those years, by one reckoning, someone in the South was hanged or burned alive every four days. The rest of the Carters moved to Milwaukee, which Ida Mae hadn’t heard of, either.

George Gladney came to court Ida Mae Brandon in 1928, when she was fifteen and he was twenty-two, and though her mother, Miss Theenie, thought him too dark and too old (“He’s old enough for your daddy”), he was serious. “He wasn’t no smiling man,” Ida Mae said. In 1929, she married him. They moved to a cabin near the Natchez Trace, becoming sharecroppers for a man named Edd Pearson. They worked all day and all year, and at the end of it they usually broke even, which was considered lucky, because most sharecroppers ended up with nothing but debt to show for their labor, at least by the boss’s accounting.

A woman was expected to pick a hundred pounds of cotton a day. (“It was like picking a hundred pounds of feathers,” Wilkerson writes, “a hundred pounds of lint dust.” That description takes on more meaning, late in the book, after Wilkerson travels to Chickasaw with Ida Mae, and they pick a few bolls of cotton together.) Ida Mae learned to make blackberry cobbler and tomato pie. She kept chickens and wore a dress made out of a flour sack. Before long, she had her first baby, a girl they named Velma. It felt like thunder: “I could see the pain comin’ down on top of the house and keep comin’.” Another girl came soon enough but she was taken by the flux. The next was a boy, whom they named James, after a white boy in town Ida Mae took care of, thinking that it might bring him luck.

One night in 1937, someone knocked on the door—Mr. Edd and four other white men, with guns. They were looking for George’s cousin Joe Lee, sure that he had stolen some turkeys. They found him, sneaking out the back. They tied him with hog wire and dragged him to the woods and beat him with chains and then drove him to town and left him in jail. The turkeys, which had wandered off, wandered back in the morning. George got Joe Lee out of jail, and used grease to peel his clothes off him, because they were stuck on with blood. He went home and told Ida Mae, “This the last crop we making.” They sold almost everything they owned, piece by piece, on the sly, and told anyone who asked, “We just running out of room.” They got a ride in a truck from Miss Theenie’s house to the depot, carrying quilts and the children and a Bible and a box of fried chicken, and boarded the Mobile and Ohio Railroad. They stopped in Chicago. “What did it look like at that time, Chicago?” Wilkerson asked. “It looked like Heaven to me then,” Ida Mae said.

They got off the train in Milwaukee, where Ida Mae’s sister had gone. Ida Mae had told no one that she was pregnant, and now she wanted to go home to have the baby. She gave birth to a girl, in 1938, in Miss Theenie’s house, and named her Eleanor, for the First Lady. That year, Theodore Bilbo, a U.S. senator from Mississippi, helped filibuster against a bill that would make lynching a federal crime. “If you succeed in the passage of this bill,” Bilbo said, “you will open the floodgates of Hell.” When Ida Mae went back North, she didn’t go to Milwaukee; she went to Chicago, where George had found work as an iceman. In 1940, she went to a firehouse on the South Side of Chicago and voted, for the first time in her life. Roosevelt defeated Willkie. George got a job at the Campbell’s Soup factory. Ida Mae worked at Walther Memorial, as a hospital aide. She liked to watch the babies being born: “They always come out hollering.”

In 1966, when Ida Mae Gladney was fifty-three, Martin Luther King, Jr., came to Chicago. “Chicago has not turned out to be the New Jerusalem,” he told the crowd. (“They had him way up on something high,” Ida Mae recalled. “I never did get to see him good.”) The next year, Ida Mae and her family—James and Eleanor had married and had their own children—bought a house together, a three-family in South Shore, for thirty thousand dollars. Soon, every white family on the block had moved out. “Lord, they move quick,” Ida Mae said.

Isabel Wilkerson met Ida Mae Gladney in 1996, when Ida Mae was eighty-three years old. She was still living in the house that her family had bought in 1967, in the second-floor apartment. She sat, and looked out her bay window at the street. Watching her, Wilkerson writes, as if from her notebook:

They call Ida Mae “Grandma.” They warn her when not to come out, “because we don’t know what time we gon’ start shootin’.”

Not long after Wilkerson met Ida Mae, she went with her to a neighborhood-watch meeting, in Beat 421, at the South Shore Presbyterian Church. Beat 421 is in District 13, which, in 1997, had a new state senator. When Barack Obama came to Beat 421 to explain what state senators do, Ida Mae listened politely.

The story of Ida Mae Gladney’s life, as told by Wilkerson, makes an argument, or, really, a bunch of arguments. (It is also, of course, a compact history of the twentieth century.) In the Great Migration, initially more men than women left the South. Women went because their husbands decided to go; usually, they didn’t have much choice. People who went North were generally better educated than people who didn’t. Up to a point, their move follows the patterns of other immigrants, although, as Wilkerson writes, nearly everyone she spoke to balked at being called an immigrant. (Wilkerson considers the exodus “an unrecognized immigration.”) The Great Migration was not about the boll weevil, which is what economists often concluded. Cotton was getting harder to grow; the soil was exhausted; the boll weevil had arrived; everyone was broke.

But, of the twelve hundred people she interviewed, Wilkerson points out, none of them, when asked why they left the South, mentioned the boll weevil. Instead, they talked about Jim Crow, and about lynching, and about violence and humiliation and misery—Ida Mae being held by the ankles by two white boys over a well, where if she were dropped no one would ever find her. “We cannot fight back,” Wright wrote, “we have no arms; we cannot vote; and the law is white.” There was surely no escaping it, except you did hear stories. Ellison interviewed a man in Harlem named Leo Gurley, who told him a tall tale about a man named Sweet, in Florence, South Carolina. “He was one sucker who didn’t give a damn bout the crackers,” Gurley said. “Sweet could make hisself invisible.”

Leaving the South took extraordinary fortitude. What dreams and disappointments the North and the West held no one could have foreseen. Wilkerson, somewhat too sketchily, considers postwar urban history—white flight, the closing of factories (that Campbell’s Soup factory has been closed for more than two decades), the disappearance of industrial jobs. Now that there’s no more Jim Crow, she observes, there’s “hypersegregation”: in the 2000 census, Detroit’s population was eighty per cent black; Dearborn’s was one per cent. Most often, she outlines debates about what historians call “the second ghetto,” only to dismiss them. “Perhaps it is not a question of whether the migrants brought good or ill to the cities they fled to or were pushed or pulled to their destinations,” she writes, “but a question of how they summoned the courage to leave in the first place or how they found the will to press beyond the forces against them and the faith in a country that had rejected them for so long.”

The questions of social scientists (What is the structure of poverty?) and of policymakers (How can this be fixed?) are not Wilkerson’s questions. “We watch strange moods fill our children, and our hearts swell with pain,” Wright wrote. “The streets, with their noise and flaring lights, the taverns, the automobiles, and the poolrooms claim them, and no voice of ours can call them back.” When Ellison read 12 Million Black Voices, he fell apart. He wept and wept. He wrote to Wright, “God! It makes you want to write and write and write, or murder.” He wrote and wrote. The people on Ida Mae’s street, Wilkerson tells us, echoing Wright, “are the lost grandchildren of the Migration.” This is narrative nonfiction, lyrical and tragic and fatalist. The story exposes; the story moves; the story ends. What Wilkerson urges, finally, isn’t argument at all; it’s compassion. Hush, and listen. 

That old man in Eddie’s Bar told Ralph Ellison, in 1939, “Son, if Ah had-a got New York in me Ahd a-been dead a long time ago.” When Ida Mae Gladney visited Mississippi with Isabel Wilkerson, someone asked, “Ida Mae, you gonna be buried down here?” “No,” she said. “I’m gonna be in Chicago.” She lived to be ninety-one. She died in her sleep, in 2004, at home. She had spent years sitting in a baby-blue plastic-covered armchair, looking out at the streets of her city. “The half ain’t been told,” she once said. Wilkerson took that down.

Source: NewYorker

Isabel Wilkerson Director, Narrative Nonfiction Program Professor, Journalism Isabel Wilkerson, as Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times, won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for her coverage of the historic floods in the Midwest and for her profile of a ten-year-old boy growing up with a man’s obligations on the South Side of Chicago. The award made her the first black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism and the first black American to win for individual reporting in the history of the prizes. She also won the George Polk Award for her coverage of the Midwest and was named Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalists.

Wilkerson spent most of her journalism career at The Times, and her work has been widely anthologized. She has come to be known for nonfiction narratives that combine the disciplines of journalism and ethnography. She has written extensively on issues of social policy and the human condition, as well as on major stories of the day, such as the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the challenges of upward mobility for the Times’ 2005 series and book, Class in America.—Boston University

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A Treasury of American Folklore By Benjamin Botkin Botkin embraced the ever-evolving state of folklore. According to him, folklore was not static but ever changing and being created by people in their daily lives. He developed his novel approach to American folklore while teaching in Oklahoma and later working in the federal government during the late 1930s and early '40s. His book Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery was the first book to use oral narratives of formerly enslaved African Americans as legitimate historical sources. While many researchers viewed folklore as a relic from the past, Botkin and other New Deal folklorists insisted that American folklore played a vibrant role in the present, drawing on shared experience and promoting a democratic culture.—Wikipedia

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Black Exodus The Great Migration from the American South Edited by Alferdteen Harrison What were the causes that motivated legions of black southerners to immigrate to the North? What was the impact upon the land they left and upon the communities they chose for their new homes? Perhaps no pattern of migration has changed America's socioeconomic structure more than this mass exodus of African Americans in the first half of the twentieth century. Because of this exodus, the South lost not only a huge percentage of its inhabitants to northern cities like Chicago, New York, Detroit, and Philadelphia but also its supply of cheap labor. Fleeing from racial injustice and poverty, southern blacks took their culture north with them and transformed northern urban centers with their churches, social institutions, and ways of life. In Black Exodus eight noted scholars consider the causes that stimulated the migration and examine the far-reaching results.

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B.B. King Thrill Is Gone  /  B.B. King-The Thrill is Gone with lyrics

B.B. King - The Thrill Is Gone ft. Tracy Chapman  / B.B. King—The Thrill Is Gone

B. B. King & Eric Clapton—The Thrill Is Gone  / B. B. King—The Thrill Is Gone (1993)

B.B. King is the greatest living exponent of the blues and considered by many to be the most influential guitarist of the latter part of the 20th century. His career dates back to the late forties and despite now being in his eighties he remains a vibrant and charismatic live performer. B.B. King has been a frequent visitor to the Montreux festival, appearing nearly 20 times, so choosing one performance was no easy task. This 1993 concert will surely rank as one of his finest at any venue. With a superb backing band and a great set list its a must for any blues fan.

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The Thrill is Gone   The thrill is gone The thrill is gone away The thrill is gone baby The thrill is gone away You know you done me wrong baby And you'll be sorry someday The thrill is gone It's gone away from me The thrill is gone baby The thrill is gone away from me Although I'll still live on But so lonely I'll be The thrill is gone It's gone away for good Oh, the thrill is gone baby Baby its gone away for good Someday I know I'll be over it all baby Just like I know a good man should You know I'm free, free now baby I'm free from your spell I'm free, free now I'm free from your spell And now that it's all over All I can do is wish you well

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Africa Unite                        By Bob Marley   Africa, Unite 'Cause we're moving right out of Babylon And we're going to our father's land How good and how pleasant it would be Before GOD and man, yeah To see the unification of all Africans, yeah As it's been said already let it be done, yeah We are the children of the Rastaman We are the children of the Higher Man Africa, unite 'cause the children wanna come home Africa, unite 'cause we're moving right out of Babylon And we're grooving to our father's land How good and how pleasant it would be Before GOD and man To see the unification of all Rastaman, yeah As it's been said already let it be done I tell you who we are under the sun We are the children of the Rastaman We are the children of the Higher Man So, Africa, unite, Africa, unite Unite for the benefit of your people Unite for it's later than you think Unite for the benefit of your children Unite for it's later than you think Africa awaits its creators, Africa awaiting its creators Africa, you're my forefather cornerstone Unite for the Africans abroad, unite for the Africans a yard Africa, Unite

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The Slave Ship

By Marcus Rediker

The Katrina Papers, by Jerry W. Ward, Jr. $18.95  /  The Richard Wright Encyclopedia (2008)

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AALBC.com's 25 Best Selling Books

 

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#19 - John Oliver Killens: A Life of Black Literary Activism by Keith Gilyard

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The Warmth of Other Suns The Epic Story of America's Great Migration By Isabel Wilkerson Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a sharecropper's wife, left Mississippi for Milwaukee in 1937, after her cousin was falsely accused of stealing a white man's turkeys and was almost beaten to death. In 1945, George Swanson Starling, a citrus picker, fled Florida for Harlem after learning of the grove owners' plans to give him a "necktie party" (a lynching). Robert Joseph Pershing Foster made his trek from Louisiana to California in 1953, embittered by "the absurdity that he was doing surgery for the United States Army and couldn't operate in his own home town." Anchored to these three stories is Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Wilkerson's magnificent, extensively researched study of the "great migration," the exodus of six million black Southerners out of the terror of Jim Crow to an "uncertain existence" in the North and Midwest. Wilkerson deftly incorporates sociological and historical studies into the novelistic narratives of Gladney, Starling, and Pershing settling in new lands, building anew, and often finding that they have not left racism behind. The drama, poignancy, and romance of a classic immigrant saga pervade this book, hold the reader in its grasp, and resonate long after the reading is done.

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Common Ground A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families By  J. Anthony Lukas The climax of this humane account of ten years in Boston that began with news of Martin Luther King's assassination, is a watershed moment in the city's modern history—the 1974 racist riots that followed the court-ordered busing of kids to integrate the schools. To bring understanding to that moment, Lukas, a former New York Times journalist, focuses on two working-class families, headed by an Irish-American widow and an African-American mother, and on the middle-class family of a white liberal couple. Lukas goes beyond stereotypes, carefully grounding each perspective in its historical roots, whether in the antebellum South, or famine-era Ireland. In the background is the cast of public figures—including Judge Garrity, Mayor White, and Cardinal Cushing—with cameo roles in this disturbing history that won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.

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The White Masters of the World

From The World and Africa, 1965

By W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois’ Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization (Fletcher)

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Ancient African Nations

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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan  /  The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll  /  Only a Pawn in Their Game

Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for Slavery / George Jackson  / Hurricane Carter

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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg

The Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804  / January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of Haiti 

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posted 4 September 2010