The Warmth of Other Suns (111 page)

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.

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

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.

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.

  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.