The Warmth of Other Suns.
Integrating My Story, the Great Migration, and the American Story. Part I.
Because you cannot read everything contemporaneously, I finally read, loved, and, in truth, cannot quite get over Isabel Wilkerson’s 2010 masterpiece, The Warmth of Other Suns, The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.
From the Promotional Website:
“The Great Migration was the outpouring of six million African Americans from the Jim Crow South to the cities of the North and West, from the time of World War I until the 1970s. This was the first time in American history that American citizens had to flee the land of their birth just to be recognized as the citizens that they had always been. No other group of Americans has had to act like immigrants in order to be recognized as citizens.”
A MUST READ. Compelling. Powerful. Haunting. Lyrical. The narrative penetrated even my hard-hearted soul. Blessed are the journalists, for they will write history books that are a joy to read.
Wilkerson frames the Great Migration as the story of one group uniquely oppressed and pursued in the South under a caste system we know as Jim Crow. When presented with opportunity, this uniquely persecuted segment of our citizenry self-emancipated by fleeing to “alien soil” to hopefully “bloom” in the fullness of American notions of equality and justice. They flocked to a new world, which they found less welcoming, less free, and much less equal than they hoped. But, through their own agency, persevering through modest triumphs and demoralizing setbacks, they hammered out a society freer than the one they found.
I have my quibbles about her scholarship, but they do not amount to much. Most of my objections are insignificant. For example, the text identifies Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896, as an eight-to-one decision in which the Supreme Court provided the groundwork for a caste system that would last 60 years. Plessy, in fact, came down 7-1 (Justice David Brewer did not participate in the case). As I indicated, an easy mistake to make, one that I have made in my classes, and a detail not especially significant to the point.
Obviously, the most intriguing number in the Plessy division is the ONE, the dissent. Perhaps the most famous dissenting opinion in American jurisprudence in which Justice John M. Harlan posited the notion of a “color blind” constitution. Wilkerson never mentions Harlan, which is altogether fitting as this is not the story of white Supreme Court justices, even though Harlan also emphasized the word that forms the organizing principle of her narrative: caste.
“[I]n the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man…”
Perhaps more noteworthy (but only slightly), Wilkerson frames Plessy as “seminal” when it more accurately reflects a culmination. In truth, the Supreme Court of the United States incrementally laid the groundwork for this dramatic and significant betrayal of African American citizens for more than two decades. We rightly call Plessy a landmark decision, but the infamous case is neither innovative nor surprising and represents a capstone rather than a foundation.
But, once again, I say only slightly more noteworthy, as the mention of Plessy comes as a brief backgrounder in a few paragraphs on page 38 to merely offer context for the dire condition in which African Americans found themselves in the South.
My Only Point: I endorse this masterwork wholeheartedly with the caveat that the power of this monograph is not as a definitive history of Reconstruction, America’s Unfinished Revolution, or the Strange Career of Jim Crow. Rather, the transcendence of this narrative rests in the power of stories, true stories woven together in a mosaic of suffering, tragedy, violence, oppression, hope, resilience in the face of cruelty, self empowerment, failures, reassessment, and perseverance. More than 500 pages of gripping narrative, in which the good, the true, and the beautiful are on tragic display in every paragraph.
By her own account, in the first third of the book, Wilkerson set out to collect and relate the most absurd examples of segregation in the South. She depicts a world so divided racially that Birmingham made it illegal for a white man to play checkers with a black man. She relates the true story of a courtroom in North Carolina that maintained “separate but equal” Bibles for swearing in white and Black citizens. Presumably, tragically, painfully, the Bible for Black witnesses and jurors was in much less use, which explains the farcical search for the “Black Bible” when the need arose.
As she seasons the three main stories that make up the heart of the book with short historical vignettes, Wilkerson does not always adhere to a strict sense of chronology. She sometimes conflates periods such as the brief moment before Congressional Reconstruction and the Fourteenth Amendment (1865-67) with the long evolution of the Jim Crow South that followed the “unofficial end of Reconstruction” in 1877. For example, Wilkerson repeatedly mixes in the Black Codes of 1866 with her examples of unreasonable and oppressive norms targeted at Black Americans at the beginning of the Great Migration. Not exactly right. This discussion of the Black Codes should occupy a different space in an instructive timeline. Immediately following the end of the Civil War, unrepentant rebels vindictively instituted draconian measures reminiscent of the Slave Codes restricting the liberty of the newly freed people. Wilkerson fails to make clear this patchwork of impulsive and uncoordinated discriminatory laws, possible only because of the postwar chaos and the ambiguous constitutional status of the freedmen, proved short lived and provoked a swift and potent response from northern whites. Rather than create the architecture for a century of discrimination, the Black Codes precipitated the one high point of an otherwise dispiriting story, the implementation of “Radical Reconstruction” and the Reconstruction Amendments writing Black citizenship, the notion of “equal protection,” and Black suffrage into the Constitution. In reality, the creeping regime of laws and practices re-subjugating African Americans into second class citizenship took hold across the South in earnest decades after the decisive smashing of the Black Codes.
Finally, one other basic cautionary note concerning context.
The past is a different country; they speak a different language there.
The history of African Americans in the South during the early twentieth century exists within the context of life in the rural South. Wilkerson offers a vividly crushing account of picking cotton, detailing the drudgery, exhaustion, and hopelessness of this bleak fate. But it is worth noting that this was the ubiquitous economic system of the time and myriad white families were stuck in a similar system of sharecropping, working on “shares” on someone else’s property in a vicious cycle of debt and frustration.
African American friends my age recoil when white people (like my 81-year-old mother) boast of picking cotton in the old days. Although, like me, they never picked cotton, they know with absolute certainty, picking cotton as a white person was not the same as picking cotton as a Black person.
Fair Enough.
In real numbers, white sharecroppers in the South vastly outnumbered Blacks during the Jim Crow era. But, let us be serious, African Americans faced trials and obstacles that whites could only imagine. My aging white relatives maintain a whole host of legitimate resentments and authentic heartbreaks as well as humorous and heartwarming memories of their deprivation along the Brazos River corridor. In stark contrast to their African American neighbors, however, my people might easily move onto someone else’s place or appeal to the sheriff or take an offender to court or pull themselves up from their bootstraps through entrepreneurship or education or politics. My ancestors did not live in deadly fear of offending the superior class. For the most part, they did not risk life and limb speaking their mind or imagining a romantic relationship with a person of higher social rank. My white ancestors, learning in the modest public education systems of small town America, in a way intentionally and systematically denied Black Americans, could always draw on the power and promise implicit in the American Creed.
The First of Many Asides. One of my favorite family moments in recent years transpired when Supreme Court of the United States Justice Clarence Thomas visited Waco, Texas. In a community college gymnasium packed beyond capacity with more than 2,000 eager residents of McLennan County, Justice Thomas described his impoverished upbringing and threw a bone to audience members like my mom who grew up in rural poverty. Thomas quoted his grandfather on the difference in Black and white in those days, “son, poor is poor” (raising his voice to comic effect, dropping the “r” in poor, and pronouncing it with a long “o” in the country fashion). The line drew approving laughter from the mostly white audience. In fact, the whole evening now in my family lore is known as “poor is poor.” Frankly, in our current moment of political polarization, the reaction to such assertions mark a harsh cultural divide over our American past.
While we may debate the merits of the emotion, the sense of grievance is palpable. Be on notice, the diminishing generation of white people who grew up in the shadow of the Great Depression on farms with dirt roads, sway back horses, leaky roofs, no air conditioning, no electricity, no in-door plumbing, no running water, and scratching out an existence in the hot summers of Central Texas on land that that they did not own, hold fast to a story that differs markedly from the liberal scions of privilege who now authoritatively speak of white America as a monolithic tale of wealth and advantage.
It bears repeating, in terms of level setting and context, let us say it again, compared to poor whites, Black life in the South between the end of Reconstruction and the Civil Rights revolution of the mid 1960s proved much more violent, demeaning, deadly, enervating, and soul crushing. It was American apartheid—and the plight of an African American tilling the soil on shares was infinitely worse than his white counterpart. Having said that, my people remember themselves on the wanting and powerlessness side of the great societal divide between oppressors and desperation.
Although not an explicit thesis within the Warmth of Other Suns, Wilkerson depicts class and rank in between the lines. In the background, among the black community in the South, she paints deep divisions that conform to education, work status, property, sometimes the richness of hues within the so called colored community, and oftentimes attitudes toward work and crime and morality and gender.
Once again, it seems worth noting, a comparable dynamic also permeated the white South. White bankers and white sharecroppers lived very different lives—with many shades of variation in between. Back during the 1990s, I worked with a redheaded, fair-skinned white woman in her seventies. She lived in a household with three generations of single women, raising a toddler, desperately clinging to respectability in the midst of cultural upheaval and the vagaries of modern life. Although trained as a nurse, she worked part time as a cleaning lady at our local funeral home. She once told me how her father back in Louisiana forbade his daughters from picking cotton on their farm. The implication was clear: this labor line demarcated not only a racial divide but a class division as well. My mom’s family, the Kelly clan of Kosse, Texas, all six of them, father and mother and four children, all picked cotton in the blistering Central Texas sun—although there is still debate whether the “baby” ever pulled his fair share. And the Kellys appeared to all the world about as bronze-skinned as white folks could get in those days.
Wilkerson quite helpfully divides the Great Migration into three separate geographical paths: African Americans from the coastal Southeast (Florida, Eastern Georgia, and the Carolinas) moved north up what today we generally call the I-95 corridor, settling in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and various midsize urban points in between. Blacks in the middle of the South (Western Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas) moved north into the Midwest landing in Chicago, Detroit, and other industrial cities along the Great Lakes. And, especially revelatory for me, migrants from Texas and Louisiana most often made the trek West across the desert to California.
Wilkerson presents her three real-life heroes with the flair of the best literary characters. Ida Mae Gladney from Mississippi, brought three Southern-born children and a husband to Chicago in 1937. Through trials and tribulations and the sad cycles of life including the death of loved ones, she remained a rock of Christian faith, grace, and peace in the midst of traumatic changes during the twentieth century. George Starling, a young man with a prodigious intellect and great potential, left Wildwood, Florida, in the middle of the night and in fear for his life in 1945. He found safety in Harlem, where he and his wife raised two children who caused them much grief (when they were not causing each other much grief). George carved an independent place for himself via 35 years of tireless service as a Pullman Porter and owner of an apartment building in Harlem. Happy but haunted, George could never overcome what might have been in a world in which truth, justice, and the American way had applied to him. Robert Pershing Foster, the son of educators, veteran of the United States Army, and medical doctor and practicing surgeon, left Monroe, Louisiana, for Los Angeles, California, in 1953. Searching for the just rewards and status his skill and accomplishment would NEVER bring to a Black man in the South, Robert found his fortune in sun-soaked postwar Southern California.
Recounting these three stories based on comprehensive interviews she conducted during the 1990s with these three individuals, Wilkerson’s narrative leaps right off the page into our soul. She clearly spent enough time with the trio to fall in love with them—and, before we are finished, we do as well. These are American stories fit for consumption by all Americans that cannot fail to inspire us. As an elderly Ida Mae makes her way around Chicago during the 1990s in the last few pages of the book, I could not help but think of my grandmother, Grace Kelly (real name), who lost her husband to lung cancer in 1965. A handsome and vibrant woman in her late forties, mourning the loss of her life partner but perhaps also enjoying the autonomy of matriarchy, she eschewed romance and devoted herself fully to family and church for her second fifty years. God bless this extraordinary everywoman, her quiet strength and indomitable will held a family together and supported a community of faith by untold works of selfless devotion.
Wilkerson senses the Great Migration of Black Americans gets short shrift in our national story. Maybe. I have discussed this trope before as a misunderstanding of how history is taught and learned and what is actually possible through the presentation of history. For all those people who claim, “nobody ever taught me that in school,” I would ask for their attendance records and their notes. As I have posited previously, we history teachers cover much more than you remember. Any day in which I say something you actually hear and retain is a banner day in my classroom. Moreover, there is a lot to get to and a short time to get there.
Caveats aside, I disagree that we habitually, intentionally, or even thoughtlessly neglect the Great Migration. In my favorite American history survey text, GIVE ME LIBERTY by Eric Foner (Brief 6th Edition), ubiquitous in colleges and high schools across our land, the index lists numerous mentions under the Great Migration, a blue subject heading in one chapter, and a prime spot in the glossary of noteworthy American events and terms. On the other hand, it goes against my nature and my interest to say we have heard enough on this subject. Yes. More. Always more.
I am not kidding. READ THIS BOOK.
On the other hand, honestly (back to me), the Great Migration of white Americans during the same time period from the exact same places on similar paths into similar destinations may be increasingly harder to see in our current moment. Having taught this subject for twenty-five years, only when reading Wilkerson did I finally make the connection that this larger American story parallels my own family history.
Next time.
Another Aside. My Dad.
Tell the folks back home this is the Promised Land callin'
And the poor boy is on the line
Part II: Country Comes to Town. The Cruseturners and the Kellys cross the desert and find the Promised Land. Even as all that glitters is not gold.
Later.
Part III: Growing Up a Cruseturner in the San Fernando Valley. Sons and Fathers of the Great Migration.
The Capstone Essay: When the pursuit of art collides with cultural appropriation. Is it possible for all our stories to coexist in an American Narrative?