The Warmth of Other Suns (108 page)

10
Do you remember:
Charles H. Nichols, ed.,
Arna Bontemps–Langston Hughes Letters, 1925–1967
(New York: Dodd, Mead, 1980), p. 24.

11
In South Carolina:
Graham Russell Hodges,
Studies in African History and Culture
(New York: Garland, 2000), p. 155.

12
Some of my people:
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. 97–98.

13
The earliest departures:
Emmett J. Scott,
Negro Migration During the War (
New York: Oxford University Press, 1920), p. 13.

14
Instead of the weakening stream:
E. G. Ravenstein, “The Laws of
Migration,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society
52, no. 2 (1889), p. 278. “The most striking feature of the northern migration was its individualism,” Emmett J. Scott wrote in 1920, as if the Migration were over.

15
“A large error”:
Florette Henri,
Black Migration: Movement North, 1900–1920
(Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1975), p. 72.

16
Robert Fields:
Interview with Robert Fields in Chicago, 1995.

17
Eddie Earvin:
Interview with Eddie Earvin in Chicago, May 1995, after having been given his name at a reunion at DuSable High School.

  1
The lazy, laughing South:
Langston Hughes, “The South,”
The Crisis
, June 1922.

  2
Timidly, we get:
Richard Wright,
12 Million Black Voices
(New York: Viking Press, 1941), pp. 99–100.

  3
A blue haze:
Arna Bontemps, “The Two Harlems,”
American Scholar
, Spring 1945, p. 167.

  4
Maybe we can start again:
John Steinbeck,
The Grapes of Wrath
(New York: Viking Press, 1939; updated edition New York: Penguin Books, 1997), p. 89.

  5
They went to court:
“Covenant Suit Arguments on August 22,”
Los Angeles Sentinel
, July 31, 1947, p. 3, gives an overview of the case as it is about to go before the court.

  6
a small contingent:
Lawrence Brooks de Graaf, “Recognition, Racism and Reflections on the Writing of Western Black History,”
Pacific Historical Review
44, no. 1 (February 1975): 23.

  7
strongly discouraged:
Lawrence Brooks de Graaf, “Negro Migration to Los Angeles, 1930–1950,” dissertation submitted to the University of California, Los Angeles, May 1962, p. 14.

  8
By 1900:
Ibid., p. 16.

  9
“Even the seeming”:
Octavia B. Vivian,
The Story of the Negro in Los Angeles County
(Washington, D.C.: Federal Writers’ Project, Works Progress Administration, 1936), p. 31.

10
“In certain plants”:
Ibid., p. 33.

11
There were no Chinaberry:
Clifton Taulbert,
The Last Train North
(Tulsa, Okla.: Council Oaks Books, 1992), pp. 43–44.

12
had toiled:
It is not known precisely why there was a two-and-a-half-year delay in getting word to the slaves in Texas. One theory was that a messenger bearing the news of freedom was murdered on his way to Texas. Another was that slave masters deliberately withheld the news to keep their unpaid labor for as long as they could. Another was that there simply weren’t enough Union troops in Texas to enforce the Proclamation, which was dated January 1, 1863. The announcement read by the Union troops in the form of General Order no. 3 was as follows: “
The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and free laborer
” (available at
www.juneteenth.com
). Also see “An Obscure Texas Celebration Makes Its Way Across the U.S.,”
The New York Times
, June 18, 2004.

13
“If I were half:”
Abraham Epstein,
The Negro Migrant in Pittsburgh
(New York: Arno Press, 1969 reissue of 1918 original), p. 27.

14
Epstein found:
Ibid., p. 24.

15
Should I have come:
Richard Wright,
Black Boy
(New York: HarperCollins, 1993), pp. 306–7.

16
A map:
Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy,
Anyplace but Here
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1945), p. 164.

17
Beloit, Wisconsin:
Morton Rubin, “Migration Patterns from a Rural Northeastern Mississippi Community,”
Social Forces
39, no. 1, Oct. 1, 1960–May 1961, pp. 59–66. See also Paul Geib, “From Mississippi to Milwaukee: A Case Study of the Southern Black Migration to Milwaukee, 1940–1970,
The Joural of Negro History
83, no. 4 (Autumn 1998): 229–48.

18
Gary:
The Jackson Family of singers, including Michael and Janet, probably the most famous natives of Gary, Indiana, had roots in the South like most other black people born in Gary in the past century. The singing group’s father, Joseph, was born in Fountain Hill, Arkansas, in 1929 and went to Chicago, just west of Gary, when he was eighteen. The group’s mother, the former Katherine Scruse, was born in Barbour County, Alabama, and brought to East Chicago, Indiana, by her parents when she was four. Joseph and Katherine met in the Chicago area and married in November 1949. Their nine surviving children were born in Gary.

19
But, as in the rest:
Joe William Trotter, Jr.,
Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915–1945
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 42.

20
“They are superior”:
Ibid., p. 55.

21
“only did the dirty work”:
Ibid., p. 47. 245
even those jobs:
Ibid., p. 152.

22
“never did”:
Ibid., p. 167.

23
The first blacks in Harlem:
James Riker,
Revised History of Harlem (City of New York): Its Origin and Early Annals
(New York: New Harlem Publishing, 1904), p. 189; cited in Gilbert Osofsky,
Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York, 1890–1930
(New York: Harper and Row, 1963), p. 83.

24
The trouble began:
Iver Bernstein,
The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); cited in Leslie M. Harris,
In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1826–1863
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

25
By 1930:
Osofsky,
Harlem
, p. 130 on population, p. 139 on sleeping in shifts, p. 129 for Adam Clayton Powell quote.

26
“a growing menace”:
Harlem Magazine
, February 1914, p. 21; cited in Osofsky,
Harlem
, p. 107.

27
Panicked property owners:
Osofsky,
Harlem
, pp. 105–7.

28
White leaders tried:
The New York Age
, August 29 and November 14, 1912; January 9, 1913.

29
White leaders warned:
Osofsky,
Harlem
, p. 108.

30
“rent to colored”:
Ibid., p. 110.

31
NOTICE:
New York Urban League, “Twenty-four Hundred Negro Families in Harlem: An Interpretation of the Living Conditions of Small Wage Earners,” typescript, Schomburg Collection, 1927, p. 7; cited in Osofsky,
Harlem
, p. 110.

32
“The basic collapse”:
Osofsky,
Harlem
, p. 109.

33
“servants of the rich”:
Jervis Anderson,
This Was Harlem, 1900–1950
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Noonday Press, 1981), pp. 321–22.

34
It had a marble:
Ibid., pp. 308–9.

35
Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company:
John N. Ingham and Lynne B. Feldman,
African-American Business Leaders: A Biographical Dictionary
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994), pp. 58–65. William Nickerson, one of the founders of Golden State Mutual Life Insurance, left Houston, Texas, for Los Angeles in 1921 and attributed his migration to the fact that “things were happening in the state, one of which was the riot [Longview, Texas, in 1919 and perhaps Tulsa in 1921]. So becoming disgusted,” he said, “I decided to take my wife and eight children and move to California.” Four years later, he would become one of the founders of the largest black-owned insurance company in the state.

36
“I didn’t think”:
Jim Pinson, “City School Board Seat Won by Negro,”
The Atlanta Constitution
, May 15, 1953, p. 1.

37
“For the first time”:
“Negro Is Victor in Atlanta Vote; Defeats White School Board Member, 22,259 to 13,936—Mayor Renominated,”
The New York Times
, May 15, 1953; “Atlanta Negro Is Elected to Board of Education,”
New York Herald Tribune
, May 15, 1953, p. 1.

38
I walked to the elevator:
Richard Wright,
Black Boy
(New York: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 303.

39
“With few exceptions”:
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.

40
“The inarticulate and resigned masses”:
E. Franklin Frazier,
The Negro Family in Chicago, 1939
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932), pp. 80, 84.

41
“a tangle of pathology”:
Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
The Negro Family: The Case for National Action
(Washington, D.C.: Office of Policy Planning and Research, United States Department of Labor, 1965), p. 23.

42
“the differential in payments”:
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “The Crisis in Welfare,”
The Public Interest
, Winter 1968, pp. 3–29.

43
“It is the higher”:
Karl E. Taeuber and Alma F. Taeuber, “The Changing Character of Negro Migration,”
The American Journal of Sociology
70, no. 4 (January 1965): 429–41.

44
“As the distance”:
Everett S. Lee, “A Theory of Migration,”
Demography
3, no. 1 (1966): 57.

45
“Migrants who overcome”:
Ibid., pp. 55–56.

46
“The move to northern”:
J. Trent Alexander, “The Great Migration in Comparative Perspective: Interpreting the Urban Origins of Southern Black Migrants to Depression-Era Pittsburgh,”
Social Science History
, Fall 1998, pp. 358–60. Alexander’s analysis of census data found that, in 1940, only thirty-seven percent of black migrants to northern cities were from rural areas. Two-thirds were from towns with populations of 2,500 or more (p. 365).

47
“Most Negro migrants”:
Taeuber and Taeuber, “The Changing Character of Negro Migration,” pp. 430–32.

48
“averaged nearly two more years”:
Stewart E. Tolnay, “Educational Selection in the Migration of Southern Blacks, 1880–1990,”
Social Forces
, December 1998, pp. 492–97.

49
A 1965 study:
Frank T. Cherry, “Southern In-Migrant Negroes in North Lawndale, Chicago, 1949–1959: A Study of Internal Migration and Adjustment,” unpublished dissertation, University of Chicago, Department of Sociology, September 1965, p. 71.

50
“There is no support”:
Ibid., p. 98.

51
“were
not
of lower”:
Taeuber and Taeuber, “The Changing Character of Negro Migration,” pp. 429–41.

52
the 1965 census study:
Ibid., p. 439.

53
“resemble in educational levels”:
Ibid., pp. 436–39.

54
“Black men who have been”:
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): 1396–97.

55
“more successfully avoided poverty”:
Larry H. Long and Kristin A. Hansen, “Selectivity of Black Return Migration to the South,”
Rural Sociology
42, no. 3 (Fall 1977): 318. Based on a paper presented at the annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, Atlanta, March 30–April 2, 1977.

56
“not willing to risk”:
Wen Lang Li and Sheron L. Randolph, “Return Migration and Status Attainment Among Southern Blacks,”
Rural Sociology
47, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 395.

57
It made them “especially goal oriented”:
Larry H. Long and Lynne R. Heltman, “Migration and Income Differences between Black and White Men in the North,”
The American Journal of Sociology
90, no. 6 (May 1975): 1406.

58
In San Francisco, for instance:
Charles S. Johnson, Herman H. Long, and Grace Jones,
The Negro Worker in San Francisco
(San Francisco: YWCA, the Race Relations Program of the American Missionary Association, and the Julius Rosenwald Fund, May 1944), pp. 15–23.

59
“more family-stable”:
Thomas C. Wilson, “Explaining Black Southern Migrant Advantage in Family Stability: The Role of Selective Migration,”
Social Forces
80, no. 2 (December 2001): 555–71.

60
“Colored pupils sometimes occupy”:
W. A. Daniel, “Schools,” in
Negro Problems in the Cities
, ed. T. J. Woofter (College Park, Md.: McGrath Publishing, 1928), p. 183.

61
“is literally forced”:
Ibid.

62
James Cleveland Owens:
William J. Baker,
Jesse Owens: An American Life
(New York: Free Press, 1986), p. 16.

63
The boy’s first day:
Ibid., p. 19.

64
It made headlines:
Larry Schwartz, “Owens Pierced a Myth,”
http://espn.go.com/sportscentury/features/00016393.html
.

65
“I wasn’t invited”:
Susan Robinson, “A Day in Black History: Jesse Owens,”
www.gibbsmagazine.com/Jessie%20Owens.htm
.

66
“My son’s victories”:
Donald McRae,
Heroes Without a Country: America’s Betrayal of Joe Louis and Jesse Owens
(New York: Ecco, 2002), p. 168.

67
“a narrow tongue”:
St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton,
Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945), p. 12.

68
There were temptations:
Ibid., p. 438. See Frazier,
The Negro Family in Chicago
, p. 103, on the mulatto woman running the biggest poker games on the South Side.

69
This was the landing place:
Drake and Cayton,
Black Metropolis
, pp. 610–11.

70
“rude cabin”:
A. T. Andreas,
History of Chicago: From the Earliest Period to the Present Time
(Chicago: A. T. Andreas, 1884), pp. 70, 71.

71
“A few goats”:
Edith Abbott,
The Tenements of Chicago, 1908–1935
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936), pp. 121–23.

72
“Families lived without light”:
Ibid., p. 126.

73
“Negro migrants confronted”:
Ibid., p. 117.

74
“attics and cellars”:
Abraham Epstein,
The Negro Migrant in Pittsburgh
(New York: Arno Press, 1969), p. 13. Originally published by the University of Pittsburgh in 1918.

75
New arrivals often paid:
Chicago Commission on Race Relations,
The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922), p. 93.

76
“The rents in the South Side”:
Abbott,
The Tenements of Chicago
, p. 125.

77
Dwellings that went:
Thomas Jackson Woofter,
Negro Problems in Cities
(New York: Harper and Row, 1928), p. 127.

78
“Lodgers were not disposed”:
Epstein,
The Negro Migrant in Pittsburgh
, p. 8.

79
Whites saw the migrants:
Chicago Commission on Race Relations,
The Negro in Chicago
, p. 3.

80
“A colored boy swam”:
Carl Sandburg,
The Chicago Race Riots
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1919), p. 3.

81
“on a white man’s complaint”:
Chicago Commission on Race Relations,
The Negro in Chicago
, p. 4.

82
Blacks stabbed a white peddler:
Ibid., p. 10.

83
Two white men:
Ibid., p. 11.

84
White gangs stormed:
Ibid., pp. 1–6.

85
Initially, they came:
James N. Gregory,
The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), p. 16.

86
“By the conversation”:
Alfred McClung Lee and Norman D. Humphrey,
Race Riot
(New York: Dryden Press, 1943), p. 81.

87
“the immigration”:
U.S. Department of Labor, Division of Negro Economics,
Negro Migration in 1916–17
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1919), p. 131.

88
“stabbed, clubbed and hanged”:
Oscar Leonard, “The East St. Louis Pogrom,”
Survey
, July 14, 1917, p. 331; cited in Herbert Shapiro,
White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), p. 116.

89
The police:
Chicago Commission on Race Relations,
The Negro in Chicago
, pp. 71–78.

90
With a sense of urgency:
Ibid., pp. 640–51.

91
“where they drank”:
Arna Bontemps, “The Two Harlems,”
The American Scholar
, Spring 1945, p. 168.

92
There’ll be brown skin mammas:
Frank Byrd, “Rent Parties,” in
A Renaissance in Harlem: Lost Essays of the WPA
, ed. Lionel C. Bascom (New York: Amistad Press, 1999), pp. 59–67.