The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by
Isabel Wilkerson
My rating:
5 of 5 stars
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'If all of their dream[sic] does not come true,' the Chicago Defender wrote at the start of the Great Migration, 'enough will come to pass to justify their actions.'"
I remember about 8 years ago, I was helping my maternal-grandfather clean the graveyard of the family church in central Virginia that my mother's family belongs to. As I was raking-up over some of the graves, I noticed that a particular section of them were of people who died during the 1910s-1920s and that I did not recognize the family names at all. My grandfather informed me that most of those families moved out of Amherst County years ago. I was curious when he said, as laconic as possible, that "they simply got tired of living here and left," and that was all he would say about it. As I finished getting those dead leaves off those dead people, the thought of those folks and families stayed with me--stays with me still. They were the beginning of the greatest population shift in modern U.S. history. Of course, this wasn't totally lost on my grandfather as his younger brothers would be among the last people to participate in that mass exodus of the American South. It would be called The Great Migration.
[A quick formatting note for this review: I am listing the songs that relate to The Great Migration--either about the folks on the move or by them. Though it has never been explored, I am surprised how much music these travelers made or had made about them. Also, whenever possible, when I name a person who left the South, I will list their origin and the year they left/joined The Great Migration in parenthesis.]
Sweet Home Chicago by Robert JohnsonThat this is one of the all-time great history-books ever written is beyond doubt now. Journalist
Isabel Wilkerson, had already had her name in the history-books for being the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Journalism in 1994, she then decided to write a history of her parents’ generation which quickly became a wider history of The Great Migration. Between the end of the American Civil War and 1914, 90 percent of the African-Americans in the United States of America lived in the American South, the region that most of their African ancestors had been shipped to since August of 1619. Beginning with WWI, 6-7 million would leave the South for the Northeast, Mid-West and West. Some would go as far as Hawaii and Alaska for the sole objective of citizenship-rights. They left their old-country--their "patria" of the American South--some until the adequate enforcement of the 14th & 15th Amendment to the US Constitution, but most for good. It would radically change the whole country and every African-American family existing today are either children of these people or at least has them in their family.
My paternal-grandmother's parents were a part of the first wave to leave the South (from North Carolina), though they did not go North proper, but settled into the "gateway city" for Black Southerners of the Atlantic-Coast, Washington, D.C., where my grandmother and father were born. Washington was a gateway city because though it was not as harsh as other Southern cities, it was still a Jim Crow city and it had as many people leaving it as coming into it. The "proto-Migration" of black folks from the Deep South that started after the American Civil War usually saw Washington, D.C. as the primary destination.
The weird thing about academics when it comes to naming something....it's not always accurate. This is one of those things as the "migrants" were not actually migrants. When they left, they left for good. If they moved again it was usually to another "receiving station" of the Migration such as the Duckworth family, who left the South for Chicago and then left Chicago for the Los Angeles suburb of Compton. Anywhere, but back to the dystopian-hell that was the South. When the phenomenon was happening, there was no adequate or accurate name to describe it, but now there is.
Immigration Blues by Duke Ellington (Washington D.C.; 1923)
According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees what we would roughly define these 6+ million people as are internally-displaced persons (IDPs). The UNHCR report
Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement defines IDPs as "
persons or groups of persons who have been forced or obliged to flee or to leave their homes or places of habitual residence, in particular as a result of or in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalized violence, violations of human rights or natural or human-made disasters, and who have not crossed an internationally recognized State border." These were people who, despite having citizenship, were greatly persecuted by their home country. It was a fact celebrated by many a politician in the South and Border States and not taken seriously by those outside said states.
Dear Old Southland by the Noble Sissle Orchestra feat. Sidney Bechet (New Orleans; 1919)
This movement of IDPs from the South lasted from the beginning of the First World War and lasted until the end of the Vietnam War. It occurred in 3 waves: the first from 1915 to 1938, the second from 1941 to 1952, the last from 1953 to 1975. The book forms a narrative around three people who made the trip out of the South during the three waves. Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, who left Chickasaw County, Mississippi in 1937; George Swanson Starling, who left Eustis, Florida in 1945; and Cpt. Dr. Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, who left Monroe, Louisiana in 1953. They were all of different economic-classes and would never meet each other and would all go to different cities at different times. They are some amazing characters.
Move On Up A Little Higher, Pts. 1 & 2 Mahalia Jackson (New Orleans; 1927)
Ida Mae Gladney is the true heroine of this book. She was as close to a real-life
Alyosha Karamazov as you can get. Her life in the South was in the notoriously brutal regime of Mississippi as a sharecropper along with her husband. She was not particularly good at the job, but her husband George made up for it. The incident that saw them leave was the brutal beating of her cousin-in-law for being accused of stealing a chicken that was not stolen.
Living For The City by Stevie WonderThe tragic George Starling. After reading this book, Starling's life inspired me to read some
Franz Kafka. It was as if Kafka and
Euripides were given free-rein over the man's life. He and his family lived in Florida as orange-grove pickers. He aspired to be a chemist and wanted a college degree. This was hard, given the disdain that whites have towards the idea of African-Americans getting a college education. He managed two years of college before being cut-off by his father who saw no point in a black man getting an education in the South. This led...to a series of unfortunate decisions on Starling's part. He found himself attempting unionize workers in the orange grove where he worked, which worked for a time, then certain workers, informed on him to the white management (in a style that would have made Stalin proud) and Starling found himself sneaking out of town hours before he was to be lynched in the orange-grove.
What Would I Do Without You by Ray Charles (Albany, Ga; 1948)
Robert Foster, the
Epicurean. Foster was the son of a lower-middle class educator in Monroe, LA. That makes him the wealthiest and educated of the three profiled. He was driven-religiously by the fact that he did not feel he should be disrespected just because of what he looked like. He became a graduate of Morehouse College (and medical school) and married into the family of one Rufus Clement, the Headmaster of Atlanta University who infamously
disposed of W.E.B. Du Bois from the university over their ideological differences. Clement and Foster were never to get along, because of the former's disdain of the others desire to leave the South. When it became apparent that any attempt to expand his practice in Monroe would be met with hostile resistance from white doctors coupled with his experience being stationed in allied-occupied Austria meant that the decision to go to Los Angeles was decided for Dr. Foster.
Hobo Blues by John Lee Hooker (Tutwiler, Miss; 1943). John Lee Hooker is an interesting case. His musical career spanned from Memphis to his time wandering out of the South into Los Angeles and his long-term home of Detroit, before spending his final years in southern California. He wrote songs about his life-long journey through the country throughout his life.
Deciding to leave the South is one thing, the leaving part was dangerous. The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments had made African-Americans citizens, but the destruction of Reconstruction and
Plessy v. Ferguson introduced
de facto serfdom in the American South and second-class citizenship in the United States as a whole. When the first black folks left the South, it garnered little notice, but when WWI came to an end and the IDPs kept going, it set off panic in & out of the South. Southern oligarchs did not want their serfs leaving as they could be under-paid or put in debt-peonage quite easily. Whites in the North & Mid-west, many of who themselves were immigrants, did not want to compete with, go to school with or live in the same neighborhoods as African-Americans. The South would intensify the vagrancy laws of the "black codes" and arrest and imprison any African-Americans caught in train stations or trains, while cities outside of (and inside of) the former-Confederacy & border states would use
restrictive covenants, mass incarceration, mob-violence and
de facto racial segregation that one observes in most parts of Latin America. None of this worked because, whites underestimated the desire of African-Americans to be treated like equal citizens & African Americans were already in the country
as citizens. These were free citizens, not fugitive slaves (though they were treated as such). Arrington High may have the most extraordinary story of his escape from the South, having to be broken out of an insane asylum in Mississippi (he was in there because he advocated integration publicly. Not joking) and shipped to Chicago...in a coffin.
Henry Box Brown-style. For literary references to the White Southerners' view of The Great Migration, I recommend
The Displaced Person by
Flannery O'Connor &
The Jungle by
Upton Sinclair.
Ida Mae and George took the train to Chicago and New York City, respectively. Foster did something different. Robert Foster decided to take the most dangerous car ride an existence. through the Southwest, detour to Mexico for tequila, and go to Los Angeles. Foster, mistakenly believed that Jim Crow stopped in Texas, and did not assume to look for any safe places for blacks in New Mexico, Arizona or Nevada. The
Plessy ruling applied to all-50 states, so the Southwest and certain mid-west states had the same apartheid-laws as the South. His trip to see friends in Texas and his tequila-run in Mexico would become costly mistakes when it became clear that no motel or hotel in New Mexico or Arizona would take him. He stopped when he could, but ended up driving 20-hour stretches with little sleep nearly dying on several occasions from hallucinating while in the desert. I can't do it justice...this story is worth the price of the book alone. The success he found in Los Angeles afterwards, including some famous clientele, was well-earned. I won't tell anymore about the profilies than that, because I want this book to be read by you and not just you reading me.
Hide nor Hair by Ray Charles. If you were going to listen to one song mentioned in this review, this one is the most important one to listen to.
The fate of the people in this book was as multifaceted as you could imagine. All wanted the promise land, but not all would get it. The establishing of bases in places like South-Central, South-Side and Harlem gave African-Americans still in the South a support system, an influx of money to support families in the "Old Country," and it would spread African-American culture around the world, given that LA and NYC were the main cultural centers for spreading American culture outside the USA. Domestically, southern food, religion, music and politics would become truly national. New Orleans Jazz went to New York City; Mississippi Blues went to Chicago and became Chicago Blues. The arts and sciences would benefit as never before. Away from the caste system of the South African-Americans could innovate as any citizens did and play a role in the country's destiny. Ida Mae Gladney would cast her first vote in the swing-state of Illinois and be part of the 2% difference that re-elected Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940. An IDP named
Frank Marshall Davis (Arkansas City, KS; 1927) would find his efforts at being a radical artist stymied in the continental USA, during the Cold War and would move to Honolulu, Hawaii and become an accidental mentor to a young
Barack Obama, trying to understand his place in the great drama of the color-line.
Tennessee by Arrested DevelopmentI could type three reviews worth of prose on this book and subject given I have very near-history on it being related to and descended from that 6-7 million people driven-out of the South because of its wanton cruelties. The book is named for a line from
Richard Wright (Roxie, Miss.; 1927) in his book about this very subject
Black Boy: "
I was taking a part of the South
To transplant in alien soil...
Respond to the warmth of other suns
And, perhaps, to bloom."
If one had to name all the names of these people and their kids it would drive one insane. I no longer clean graveyards and my father and his father-in-law are dead. But the memories and legacies of those who went to those other suns, grew in those other suns, and benefited from the success of those under the other suns endures. Recently we saw the death of one of these millions,
Aretha Franklin (Memphis; 1944), who in January of 1972 gave a gospel performance at the New Missionary Temple Baptist Church for the "migrants" or "internally-displaced persons" living in Los Angeles. One of the songs sung was
Precious Memories with James Cleveland, the son of Southerners, reminiscing back and hoping toward easier times. Times that may or may not ever exist, may or may not ever existed, but that they had to do their part to deliver on and honor.
Most of the last survivors are dying-out--the youngest are in their 50s, this book was meant to put their history in their voice and not some distant academic's, as had previously been the case. Wilkerson had planned to take only 2 years off from journalism to promote the book, yet she is still in high demand over it which is amazing in itself. I liked her methodology, but was felt that her attempt at renaming certain terminology became distracting at times, though I got used to it. That the only "complaint" to be had. She does the sort of job you'd expect from a Pulitzer-winning journalist and her notes and sources are as incredible as the main text. So great a work cannot be praised enough.
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Over the decades, perhaps the wrong questions have been asked about the Great Migration. Perhaps it is not a question of whether the migrants brought good or ill to the cities they fled to or were pushed or pulled to their destinations, but a question of how they summoned the courage to leave in the first place or how they found the will to press beyond the forces against them and the faith in a country that had rejected them for so long. By their actions, they did not cream the American Dream, they willed it into being by a definition of their own choosing. They did not ask to be accepted but declared themselves the Americans that perhaps few others recognized but that they had always been deep within their hearts."
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