Disintegration (5 page)

But white Atlantans were in a mood to believe the worst. White mobs began to gather, and they were well-armed, liberally inebriated, and hell-bent on revenge. Black Atlanta came under all-out attack.

White rioters pillaged black businesses, sometimes aiming for specific targets but settling for what was available. A mob smashed its way into a barbershop looking for the proprietor, Alonzo Herndon, a former slave who had become a wealthy businessman with extensive real estate holdings, a stake in an insurance company, and three profitable barbershops. When the mob arrived, Herndon had left for the day and the shop was closed. Momentarily disappointed, the rioters simply crossed the street to another barbershop—an establishment that had nothing at all to do with Herndon—where they smashed the place up, and, for good measure, killed all the barbers.

The whites continued their rampage through Atlanta’s black neighborhoods for three days and nights. Crowded, bustling Decatur Street, with its black restaurants and saloons, was perhaps the epicenter, but black Atlantans were not truly safe anywhere in the city. A century later, the death toll remains unclear. Estimates of the number of blacks killed range from twenty-five to more than one hundred; most scholars agree that only two whites died, one of them from a heart attack.

DuBois wrote an anguished poem about the riot called “A Litany of Atlanta.” One stanza goes:

DuBois’s stature rose in the wake of the Atlanta Race Riot of 1906. Support among black Americans for Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist strategy declined. And the movement toward absolute separation of the races throughout the South became complete.

In Atlanta, the riot gave new impetus to the effort to shove black residents and businesses into segregated neighborhoods south and east of downtown—Sweet Auburn, Brownsville, University Central District, and the Old Fourth Ward on the east side, encompassing what once was Darktown. As Baker noted, “After the riot was over many Negro families, terrified and feeling themselves unprotected, sold out for what they could get—I heard a good many pitiful stories of such sudden and costly sacrifices—and left the country, some going to California, some to Northern cities.”
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Baker’s
Following the Color Line
quotes a letter from a young black man who joined the post-riot exodus out of Atlanta:

The full psychological impact of the Atlanta riot may be incalculable, but one specific result is clear. Many whites—even those who disapproved of mob violence, lynching, and the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan—were deeply shaken by the many instances during the melee in which blacks displayed the will and the means to fight back. Segregationists pointed to the resistance as proof that they were right—that blacks had to be kept down, had to be kept in their place. Measures to deny black citizens the vote throughout the South were perfected. Public accommodations were labeled whites only and blacks only; merchants began requiring black patrons to enter through the back door. This whole blueprint for the New South was codified into law as a way of delineating two ostensibly “separate but equal” societies. Black Atlanta was effectively walled off from the rest of the city, left to make its own way in the world. The long, dark night of Jim Crow segregation had fallen.

* * *

Jim Crow was bad in the cities of the South, but in small towns and rural areas it was all but intolerable. The system of sharecropping
that tied many families to the land and mired them in poverty was almost as oppressive as slavery. There was no question of voting rights or fair treatment by the courts. The Klan was in its heyday, and blacks impertinent enough to demand to be treated as full citizens ran a very real risk of being lynched—the whole point of Klan-style terrorism was to make examples of “troublemakers” so that everyone else would stay in line. Black schools were kept inferior by design, which meant parents could not even dream that the next generation would have a better life. Faced with such a hopeless situation, many African Americans just packed up and left.

They went north, seeking prosperity and freedom, in a series of waves known collectively as the Great Migration. You could plot their destinations by following the routes of the nearest rail lines—families from North and South Carolina settled in Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Newark, Boston; those from Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia tended to end up in Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, St. Louis, Kansas City, Detroit; and many migrants from Texas and Louisiana headed west to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, and Seattle. New York City, as usual, was a magnet for newcomers from all over. Between 1910 and 1940, an estimated 1.6 million black Americans from the South moved north and west; between 1940 and 1970, another five million followed. Their impact could hardly have been more transformative. In Chicago, for example, African Americans went from 2 percent of the city’s population in 1910 to 33 percent in 1970.
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The migrants found jobs in the steel mills of Gary, the shipyards of Philadelphia, the automobile factories of Flint, the meat-packing plants of Kansas City. They found better schools for their children and escape from the threat of terrorists in
white robes. What they didn’t find, for the most part, was anything like the Valhalla of racial integration and harmony that many had expected.

On one level, the newly arrived African Americans were just like the other hyphenated ethnic groups that had arrived in their turn—except, of course, they didn’t use hyphens in those days. The Irish, the Italians, and the Poles were not yet assimilated, and they saw black newcomers from the South as competitors for jobs—and later, after the newcomers were settled, for political patronage. In that sense, African Americans were just another ethnic clan. As had been the routine with the other clans, new arrivals gravitated toward neighborhoods where a support system was already in place: relatives or acquaintances from the same Southern town who could offer temporary lodgings; a job or at least the rumor of employment; the phone number of someone who might know someone who could open the right doors; the possibility of making quick friendships with experienced city dwellers who knew the ropes. But these reasons only partly explain why blacks ended up in segregated enclaves like Harlem in New York City or Bronzeville in Chicago. There was, and is, something stubbornly powerful about race as a dividing line.

Chicago, to take perhaps the clearest example, was a young city with no history of slavery or Jim Crow—a city whose first nonindigenous settler had been Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, a black man. Illinois had progressive laws that outlawed segregation in education and public accommodations. Yet blacks were confined to the sprawling South Side through a web of racially restrictive housing covenants that put most fashionable North Side neighborhoods off-limits. In other words, the private sector did what the public sector would not. The South
Side eventually grew to become—and remains today—the biggest and most populous black-majority neighborhood in the country.

To be sure, there were exceptions. My father, Harold I. Robinson, was a statistic in the Great Migration. He was born in 1916 in Canon, Georgia, a small town in the northeast part of the state. This was during a relatively brief stopover in the family’s journey north, which took years to complete; each of his five siblings was born in a different city. They made it all the way to Michigan and settled in Ann Arbor—then, as now, a liberal-minded college town whose views on social issues were radically ahead of their time. My father attended integrated Ann Arbor High School, then went on to study at the University of Michigan and earn his law degree at Wayne State University in Detroit. An African American man whose entire secondary and postsecondary education came at integrated institutions was a great rarity.

Still, when he was called to serve his country in World War II my father was relegated to racially segregated units. The friends of his that I met from his Michigan years were African American. Even with his atypical background, he grew up with a profound sense of himself as a black man who belonged to a black community that was not allowed to participate fully in the social, political, and economic life of its country—a community that had to construct a social, political, and economic life of its own.

That was the case throughout the country. It’s true that racial segregation in the South, enforced by law and terror, wasn’t the same as racial segregation in the North and West, which was often enforced by housing covenants but also had to do with custom and clan. It’s true that the hybrid segregation
in a city like Washington, caught between North and South, was different from either system in its purest form. But whatever the formalities, it can be said that for most of the twentieth-century black Americans lived in mostly black or all-black neighborhoods and towns—a beige, tan, and brown archipelago of humanity constituting a separate “nation” that could meaningfully be called “black America.”

Today, that once-indivisible nation persists in memory, imagination, and discourse—but not in the real world.

* * *

When I was growing up in the late 1950s and early 1960s, my own private black America was essentially a college town. Orangeburg, South Carolina, is home to two historically black colleges, Claflin University and South Carolina State University, which sit side by side just a couple of hundred yards from the house, built by my great-grandfather, where I grew up. My mother, Louisa S. Robinson, was head librarian at Claflin for decades; my father taught at the school for a time; my great-aunt, who lived with us, was at various times head nurse at both schools. The Claflin and SCSU campuses were as familiar to me as my own backyard. Orangeburg, with a “metropolitan” population of around fifteen thousand, was said to be home to more black PhDs per capita than any other city or town in the nation. Indeed, most of the adults I knew were associated with either Claflin or SCSU, and so many of them had advanced degrees that I remember hearing the grown folks gossip about the father of one of my good friends: What was wrong with the man, people whispered, that it was taking him so long to earn his doctorate?

From first grade through junior high I attended Felton Training School, which was housed on the SCSU campus in an old Rosenwald schoolhouse. There’s a story behind that building and thousands like it. In 1912, Booker T. Washington approached Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears, Roebuck and Co., with a request. Rosenwald was a philanthropist who had given money to Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, and Washington wanted permission to use some of the funds to build six simple schoolhouses in rural Alabama to serve black communities where educational facilities were either substandard or nonexistent. Rosenwald agreed, and after the schools were built he was so proud of the results that he formed a foundation to build schoolhouses for black students throughout the South. By 1928, one of every three rural and smalltown black students in the Southern states was learning in a Rosenwald schoolhouse. Rosenwald had architects develop standard floor plans and elevations, depending on how large a building was needed and which direction it faced—the buildings were designed with big windows to take maximum advantage of natural light. Felton was built in 1925 according to “Floor Plan 400”—a “four-teacher community school” meant to be situated facing east or west. Each of the four classrooms housed two grades, and each of the four teachers—Mrs. Clinkscales, Mrs. White, Mrs. Edwards, and Mrs. Lewis—was skilled enough and formidable enough to teach two classes of unruly children at the same time.

Just before I graduated, officials at SCSU decided to build a low-slung, modern-style “new Felton”—better in every way as an educational facility, but lacking the old Felton’s history and soul. This was before the concept of historic preservation had fully penetrated the national consciousness, and the old Rosenwald
building was promptly razed. When the Democratic Party held its first presidential debate of the 2008 campaign at SCSU, the anchor desk for MSNBC, where I was doing commentary, was just yards from where the old Felton had stood. Chris Matthews and the rest of my colleagues must have wondered why I kept gazing at the parking lot across the street rather than at the camera, and why my eyes kept tearing up.

The families of many Felton students had something to do with one or the other of the two colleges. I also had classmates, however, whose parents were farmers or merchants. Not one of the Felton families was truly rich but most were comfortable; a few were poor. What we had in common was being black.