The Warmth of Other Suns (48 page)

“If people saw you and liked you,” he began, “it’s your job to charm ’em, show how efficient you were.”

He spent many lonely hours crisscrossing neighborhoods in South Central Los Angeles, far from the Becks’ and the manicured places he wanted to be, conducting those insurance examinations.

Then, in May, a month after he had arrived in Los Angeles, he got word from Atlanta: President Clement had beaten the longest of odds and been elected to the Board of Education. He had defeated an incumbent, 22,259 votes to 13,936 votes, in an election in which Red-baiting
detractors tried to get him disqualified in the eleventh hour and his opponent, who had been on the board since 1927, had been so confident that he didn’t even campaign.

“I didn’t think the people were ready for this,” his opponent, J.
³⁶
H. Landers, told
The Atlanta Constitution
.

The win made Clement the first colored man to win a major office in Georgia since Reconstruction and was significant enough to merit a story in
The New York Times
and articles in
Time
and
Newsweek
. “For the first time since Reconstruction days,” the
Times
wrote, “a Negro won nomination to Atlanta’s Board of Education.”
³⁷

The news filtered back as Robert was knocking on doors collecting urine samples and still boarding with the Becks. He was feeling even more isolated and alone and could not let on to anyone back home the truth of his situation. Just as he was needing to muster more faith than ever, the South chose a rare instance to let slip a colored victory—and to President Clement, no less, the man who had never thought Robert measured up, who had taken over his role as the head of his own family, and who second-guessed his every decision, even his choice to leave the South. Robert was struggling with that choice at that very moment and now could not escape his father-in-law’s triumph because it was national news.

Robert was now feeling the accumulated weight of all the pressure he was under. With the Clements unwittingly gaining a greater hold on Alice and the girls as President Clement rose in stature, Robert fretted over his options. He had to get himself established, and soon. He devised a new plan to gain a foothold in Los Angeles: he now decided to canvass physicians door-to-door to try to build up referrals. He would market himself at the big middle-class churches in town. He would court potential patients wherever he could and dress in such a way that they wouldn’t forget him.

So, in between insurance exams, he went from building to building, office to office, up and down Jefferson Avenue and off Vermont and Figueroa, tracking down physicians like a homeless man looking for change. He knocked on glass doors with a doctor’s name etched on them as he dreamed his, too, would be one day. He sucked in his pride and took in a deep breath and tried introducing himself to physicians who knew or thought little of him to get into their good graces. He showed them his surgery credentials and asked if they wouldn’t mind referring cases to him if they didn’t do surgery themselves.

“That was met with poor success,” Robert said. Here he was, a perfect
stranger from someplace down south—Louisiana, was it?—asking for a favor. The big-city doctors who happened to beat him to California or had grown up there didn’t take to it kindly. “So you took a lump in the jaw and kept on to the next office.”

He made his pitch again and again and got the same response. “All the cordiality in the world,” Robert said. “They would say, ‘I’ve been using Dr. XYZ for all these years. Show me one good reason I should change to you.’ ”

He didn’t have an answer then, but he was determined that one day he would. So he set about trying to make a name for himself the best he knew how. He started going to churches even though he was rarely seen in them otherwise. He decided to put on his loudest, most ostentatious suit and tie so the people would remember him. He made a show of dropping more than he really could afford when the collection plate came his way, enough for the church people to be sure to notice. He asked the ministers if they would introduce him to their congregations from the pulpit as they did politicians and visitors from back South.

“I didn’t have any responses,” he said.

But Golden State Insurance kept sending him out, and those after-hours insurance examinations were adding up. So he decided to turn his attention to the people themselves. He was doing more and more of those exams, and the anonymous working-class colored people of South Central L.A., many newly arrived from Texas or Arkansas or parts of Louisiana that Robert did not know, began to notice this smooth-talking physician, who looked more like a high roller than a doctor in his loud, tailored suits and stingy-brim hats and who made you feel as though you were the most important person in the world.

He conducted enough of those examinations and collected enough of those critical vials of urine to move into an apartment west of Crenshaw, near the Becks. He had been in Los Angeles a couple of months, getting himself set up, and could send for Alice and the girls now. His name was now forming on the lips of cleaning ladies and laborers, gamblers and seamstresses, postal workers and stevedores scattered all over South Central who wanted a doctor they could relate to, the humble and exuberant people who would eventually become the foundation of everything he would ever do in Los Angeles and among the most loyal people ever to enter his life.

UNKNOWINGLY
, the migrants were walking into a headwind of resentment and suspicion. They could not hide the rough-cast clothes ill suited for northern winters or the slow syrup accents some northerners could not decipher. They carried with them the scents of the South, of lye soap and earthen field. They had emerged from a cave of restrictions into wide-open, anonymous hives that viewed them with bemusement and contempt. They had been trained to walk humbly, look down when spoken to. It would take time to learn the ways of the North.

What they could not have realized was the calcifying untruths they would have to overcome on top of everything else. As soon as the North took note of the flood of colored people from the South, sociologists and economists began studying the consequences of their arrival and drawing conclusions about who these people were and why they were coming.

“With few exceptions,” wrote the economist Sadie Mossell of the migration to Philadelphia, “the migrants were untrained, often illiterate, and generally void of culture.”
³⁹

“The inarticulate and resigned masses came to the city,” wrote the preeminent sociologist E.
⁴⁰
Franklin Frazier of the 1930s migration to Chicago, adding that “the disorganization of Negro life in the city seems at times to be a disease.”

In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an official in the U.S. Department of Labor, called the inner cities after the arrival of the southern migrants “a tangle of pathology.”
⁴¹
He argued that what had attracted southerners like Ida Mae, George, and Robert was welfare: “the differential in payments between jurisdictions
has
to encourage
some
migration toward urban centers in the North,” he wrote, adding his own italics.
⁴²

Their reputation had preceded them. It had not been good. Neither was it accurate. The general laws of migration hold that the greater the obstacles and the farther the distance traveled, the more ambitious the migrants. “It is the higher status segments of a population which are most residentially mobile,” the sociologists Karl and Alma Taeuber wrote in a 1965 analysis of census data on the migrants, published the same year as the Moynihan Report.
⁴³
“As the distance of migration increases,” wrote the migration scholar Everett Lee, “the migrants become an increasingly superior group.”
⁴⁴

Any migration takes some measure of energy, planning, and forethought. It requires not only the desire for something better but the willingness to act on that desire to achieve it. Thus the people who undertake such a journey are more likely to be either among the better educated of their homes of origin or those most motivated to make it in the New World, researchers have found. “Migrants who overcome a considerable set of intervening obstacles do so for compelling reasons, and such migrations are not taken lightly,” Lee wrote.
⁴⁵
“Intervening obstacles serve to weed out some of the weak or the incapable.”

The South had erected some of the highest barriers to migration of any people seeking to leave one place for another in this country. By the time the migrants made it out, they were likely willing to do whatever it took to make it, so as not to have to return south and admit defeat. It would be decades before census data could be further analyzed and bear out these observations.

One myth they had to overcome was that they were bedraggled hayseeds just off the plantation. Census figures paint a different picture. By the 1930s, nearly two out of every three colored migrants to the big cities of the North and West were coming from towns or cities in the South, as did George Starling and Robert Foster, rather than straight from the
field. “The move to northern cities was dominated by urban southerners,” wrote the scholar J.
⁴⁶
Trent Alexander. Thus the latter wave of migrants brought a higher level of sophistication than was assumed at the time. “Most Negro migrants to northern metropolitan areas have had considerable previous experience with urban living,” the Taeuber study observed.
⁴⁷

Overall, southern migrants represented the most educated segment of the southern black population they left, the sociologist Stewart Tolnay wrote in 1998. In 1940 and 1950, colored people who left the South “averaged nearly two more years of completed schooling than those who remained in the South.”
⁴⁸
That middle wave of migrants found themselves, on average, more than two years behind the blacks they encountered in the North.

But by the 1950s, those numbers would change. As the Migration matured, the migrants would arrive with higher levels of education than earlier waves of migrants and thus greater employment potential than both the blacks they left behind and the blacks they joined. A 1965 study of ninety-four migrants to Chicago, most of them from Mississippi and Arkansas, found that thirteen percent were illiterate (defined as having five or fewer years of schooling), compared to forty-five percent of the people in the southern counties they came from.
⁴⁹
The migrants and the blacks they encountered in the poor west side neighborhood of North Lawndale had roughly the same amount of schooling—an average of about eight years, the study found. “There is no support,” the sociologist Frank T.
⁵⁰
Cherry wrote, for the notion of “a less-well-educated” pool of migrants entering Chicago “than it already has.”

A seminal study that would be published that same year went even further. Across the North as a whole, the post–World War II migrants “were
not
[italics in original] of lower average socioeconomic status than the resident Negro population,” the Taeubers wrote in their 1965 census analysis of migrants arriving north from 1955 to 1960.
⁵¹
“Indeed, in educational attainment, Negro in-migrants to northern cities were equal to or slightly higher than the resident
white
population.”

Against nearly every assumption about the Migration, the 1965 census study found that the migrants of the 1950s—particularly those who came from towns and cities, as had George Starling and Robert Foster—had more education than even the northern white population they joined.
⁵²
The percentage of postwar black migrants who had graduated from high school was as high as or higher than that of native whites
in New York, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and St. Louis and close to the percentage of whites in Chicago.

As for blacks who had the advantage of having come from the urban South, the percentage who had graduated from high school was higher than that of the whites they joined, by significant margins in some cases, in each of the seven northern cities the study examined.

In Philadelphia, for instance, some thirty-nine percent of the blacks who had migrated from towns or cities had graduated from high school, compared with thirty-three percent of the native whites. In Cleveland, forty percent of migrants from the urban South were high school graduates compared to thirty-one percent of the native whites. This was the case for George Starling, Robert Foster, and hundreds of thousands of other colored migrants from the small-town South, who, it turns out, often had as much as or more education than those they met, colored or white, in the cities to which they fled, though they were often looked down upon.