The Warmth of Other Suns (49 page)

Indeed, when it came to their black counterparts, the Taeuber study found that, in every major city the migrants fled to, a higher percentage of migrants had completed at least one year of high school than the black population they joined—sixty-one percent of migrants compared to fifty-three percent of native blacks in New York, fifty-six percent of migrants compared to fifty-two percent of native blacks in Chicago, sixty-three percent of migrants compared to fifty-four percent of native blacks in Cleveland, sixty-six percent of migrants compared to fifty-four percent of black natives in Washington, D.C., sixty percent of migrants compared to forty-eight percent of native blacks in Philadelphia, and so on.

The migrants, the Taeubers found, “resemble in educational levels the whites among whom they live,” and they tended to be “of substantially higher socioeconomic status, on the average, than the resident Negro population.”
⁵³
The researchers added that “these findings are at variance with most previous discussions of Negro migration.”

The misconceptions about the migrants carried over to their presumed behavior upon arrival. Contrary to popular convention, the migrants were more likely to be married and remain married, less likely to bear children out of wedlock, and less likely to head single-parent households than the black northerners they encountered at their destinations. They were more likely to be employed, and, due to their willingness to work longer hours or more than one job, they actually earned
more as a group than their northern black counterparts, despite being relegated to the lowliest positions.

“Black men who have been out of the South for five years or more are, in every instance, more likely to be in the labor force than other black men in the North,” wrote Larry H.
⁵⁴
Long and Lynne R. Heltman of the Census Bureau in 1975. They found that, among young black men in the North, fifteen percent of those born in the North were jobless as against nine percent of the southern migrants they studied. “The same pattern applies to all other age groups and to the West,” the census found.

Whatever their educational level, the migrants “more successfully avoided poverty,” wrote Long and his colleague Kristin A.
⁵⁵
Hansen of the Census Bureau, “because of higher rates of labor force participation and other (unmeasured) characteristics.”

There developed several theories as to why. One was that, because of the migrants’ hard-laboring lives in the South, they had “a stronger attachment to the labor force as a result of their work-oriented values,” Long and Hansen wrote. Another explanation pointed to disadvantages facing the northern-born blacks in the migrants’ destinations—“exposure to drugs, crime and other conditions in big cities that may be handicaps in obtaining and holding jobs.”

There is yet another possible reason—that the migrants who would make it out of the South and outlast others who gave up and returned home were a particularly resilient group of survivors. “The migration of blacks out of the South has clearly been selective of the best educated,” Long and Hansen wrote. “It is possible that the least capable returned, leaving in the North a very able and determined group of migrants.”

Those who would tough it out in the North and West were “not willing to risk relocation in the South because of possible greater advantages in their current location,” wrote the sociologists Wen Lang Li and Sheron L.
⁵⁶
Randolph in a 1982 study of the migrants.

This would suggest that the people of the Great Migration who ultimately made lives for themselves in the North and West were among the most determined of those in the South, among the most resilient of those who left, and among the most resourceful of blacks in the North, not unlike immigrant groups from other parts of the world who made a way for themselves in the big cities of the North and West.

There appeared to be an overarching phenomenon that sociologists call a “migrant advantage.” It is some internal resolve that perhaps exists in any immigrant compelled to leave one place for another. It made
them “especially goal oriented, leading them to persist in their work and not be easily discouraged,” Long and Heltman of the Census Bureau wrote in a 1975 report.
⁵⁷
In San Francisco, for instance, the migrants doubled up like their Chinese counterparts and, as in other cities, tended to “immigrate as groups and to remain together in the new environment for purposes of mutual aid,” wrote the sociologist Charles S.
⁵⁸
Johnson.

The willingness to do whatever it took to survive appeared to offer some protection from the ills surrounding them, North and South. The San Francisco study found that the migrants were half as likely to be separated, divorced, or widowed as the blacks they encountered upon arrival. Overall, wherever they went, they tended to be “more family-stable compared both to those they left behind at their origin and those they encountered at their destination,” the sociologist Thomas Wilson wrote in 2001.
⁵⁹
“They are less likely to bear children outside of marriage and less likely to be divorced or separated from their spouses.”

The findings, he wrote, “are once again clearly at odds with earlier claims that family dysfunction was carried north by southern migrants.”

Still, the stereotypes persisted despite the evidence and extended to even the youngest migrants. The children, having emerged from one-room schoolhouses with their southern English, were often labeled retarded by northern school officials, regardless of their native abilities. Segregation was not the law, but northerners would find creative ways to segregate the migrant children from the white children when so inclined.

“Colored pupils sometimes occupy only the front seats or the back seats,” wrote the researcher W.
⁶⁰
A. Daniel in 1928. “They are grouped on one side, or occupy alternate rows; sometimes they are seated without regard to race; or they share seats with white pupils, a method used regularly by one teacher for punishing white pupils.”

The absurdities of the South seemed to follow the migrants north despite their efforts to escape. One migrant child faced altogether different seating and circumstances in each classroom he entered. In this case, the student, Daniel wrote, “is literally forced to take the back seat” in one classroom.
⁶¹
“In another room, he is the president of his class, and in another the editor of the paper, in another in charge of the tool room, while in another he is expected to do more than his share of menial tasks.”

It was in the early 1920s that a little boy named James Cleveland Owens migrated with his sharecropper parents from Oakville, Alabama,
to Cleveland, Ohio, when he was nine years old.
⁶²
The city of Cleveland was the Promised Land to colored people in his part of Alabama, as reflected by his middle name. The parents had debated for months over whether to leave, the mother anxious to do so, the father, having been beaten down by sharecropping, worried and fearful. As they prepared to leave, the little boy happened to bump into his father while they were packing for the train. The father put both hands on his son’s shoulders to steady himself but quickly removed them out of embarrassment. Only then did the boy realize that his father’s hands were “shaking with fright.”

The boy’s first day of school in the North, he was assigned to a grade lower than the one he’d been in where he had come from, and the teacher couldn’t understand his southern accent.
⁶³
When she asked him his name, he said he was called J.C. The teacher misheard him and, from that day forward, called him Jesse instead. So did everyone else in this new world he was in. He would forever be known as Jesse Owens, not by his given name. He would go on to win four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, becoming the first American in the history of track and field to do so in a single Olympics and disproving the Aryan notions of his Nazi hosts.

It made headlines throughout the United States that Adolf Hitler, who had watched the races, had refused to shake hands with Owens, as he had with white medalists.
⁶⁴
But Owens found that in Nazi Germany, he had been able to stay in the same quarters and eat with his white teammates, something he could not do in his home country. Upon his return, there was a ticker-tape parade in New York. Afterward, he was forced to ride the freight elevator to his own reception at the Waldorf-Astoria.

“I wasn’t invited to shake hands with Hitler,” he wrote in his autobiography.
⁶⁵
“But I wasn’t invited to the White House to shake hands with the President either. I came back to my native country, and I could not ride in the front of the bus. I had to go to the back door. I couldn’t live where I wanted. Now, what’s the difference?”

It would take the arrival of millions of more migrants and many more decades of perseverance on their part and on the part of protesters for human rights before they would truly become accepted.

But his father, a man of few words who had come north with the greatest reluctance and worry, was overcome with the enormity of the moment and how it had come to be. His son had had the chance to go to
good schools, run on real tracks, and be coached at Ohio State University, rather than spend his life picking cotton. “My son’s victories in Germany,” Henry Owens said, “force me to realize that I made the best move of my life by moving out of the South.”
⁶⁶

MISS THEENIE HAD BEEN RIGHT
about her daughter. Ida Mae was expecting when she left Mississippi with her husband and two little ones in the fall of 1937. That spring, she returned south for the express purpose of having the baby in the familiar hands of a midwife. She had heard that up north, doctors strapped women down when they went into labor, and she wasn’t going to submit to that kind of barbarity. So she gave birth to her last child in Miss Theenie’s house, on May 28, 1938. It was a baby girl, and Ida Mae named her Eleanor, like the first lady of the land, Eleanor Roosevelt.

She kept the baby in Mississippi until she was plump and strong and then carried her and little James and Velma north on the Illinois Central sometime in August to rejoin her husband. Only this time, Ida Mae didn’t return to Milwaukee. She got off in Chicago, the city of skyscrapers and Montgomery Ward that she had thought was Heaven when she first set foot in the North.

While she was away giving birth, George had left Milwaukee, having found little work and given up on the prospects of making a living there. One of his brothers had settled in Chicago. So George turned to the bigger city with its steel mills, blast furnaces, slaughterhouses, and tanneries. He would have been willing to take just about anything to feed his family, having stooped to pick cotton all his life, but what he found first was a job on another man’s ice wagon.

Up and down the rutted streets they went, steering the horse and wagon in the early-morning hours, delivering ice to the colored people in their cold-water flats on the South Side.

“Iceman! Iceman!” they shouted as they steered.

“Bring me fifty pounds!” someone would yell from the window of a three-flat.

“Bring me a hundred!” came an order from another.

George slung a rug across his shoulders and hoisted a block of ice on his back to carry it up the tenement steps. He was used to hauling a hundred pounds of cotton in a day for fifty cents. Now he could make that with each fifty-pound block of ice. And he was delivering a lot of it. Ice melted fast in the summer heat. Some people needed to replenish their iceboxes every day. He was already making more money than in Mississippi, and not under the shotgun scrutiny of a planter. It was stoop labor, and he couldn’t do it forever. But it would have to do for now.

By the time Ida Mae got back with the baby and little James and Velma, he had secured for his family a one-room basement apartment among the frail tenements and dilapidated lean-tos in the roped-off colored section of town.