The Warmth of Other Suns (109 page)

93
I was a Southerner:
Zora Neale Hurston, “Backstage and the Railroad,”
Dust Tracks on a Road
(Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1942), p. 98.

94
“They have been our best”:
E. Franklin Frazier,
The Negro Family in Chicago
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932), pp. 108–9.

95
Businessmen jumped:
James R. Grossman,
Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 155.

96
“I got a sharecropper”:
Josh Sides,
L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), p. 50.

97
they ran notices:
Grossman,
Land of Hope
, pp. 156–57, on the effects of the Migration on churches in the North.

98
“They tried to insulate”:
Ibid., p. 139.

99
“The same class of Negroes”:
Frazier,
The Negro Family in Chicago
, p. 112.

100
A colored newspaper:
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. 304.

101
A survey of new migrants:
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), p. 19 on how migrants and nonmigrants viewed one another.

102
“like German Jews”:
Grossman,
Land of Hope
, p. 144.

103
“Those who have long been”:
“Our Part in the Migration,”
Chicago Defender
, March 17, 1917, p. 9.

104
“Well, their English”:
Douglas Henry Daniels,
Pioneer Urbanites: A Social and Cultural History of San Francisco (
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), p. 171.

105
“Eleanor”:
Ibid., p. 175.

106
“It is our duty”:
Chicago Defender
, March 17, 1917, and January 18, 1918, cited in Grossman,
Land of Hope
, pp. 144–45.

107
Don’t hang out the windows:
“A Few Do’s and Don’ts,”
Chicago Defender
, July 13, 1918, p. 16.

108
Don’t use vile language:
“Some Don’ts,”
Chicago Defender
, May 17, 1919, p. 20. 291

109
1. Do not loaf:
Grossman,
Land of Hope
, pp. 146–47.

110
We cannot escape:
James Baldwin,
Notes of a Native Son
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 20.

111
“
If you succeed”:
Congressional Record
, 75, Session 3, pp. 893, 873.

112
James Arthur Gay was perhaps:
Ed Koch, “Pioneering Civic Leader, Hotel Executive Gay Dies at 83,”
Las Vegas Sun
, September 13, 1999,
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/1999/sep/13/pioneering-civic-leader-hotel-executive-gay-dies-a/
.

113
“What do you suppose”:
Scott Nearing,
Black America
(New York: Schocken Books, 1929), p. 78; original reference: H. G. Duncan,
The Changing Race Relationship in the Border and Northern States
(Philadelphia, 1922), p. 77.

114
Campbell Soup plant:
“Business & Finance: Soup,”
Time
, September 2, 1929,
www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,7737779,00.html
.

115
“the great clocks of the sky”:
Robert Redfield,
Tepoztlán, A Mexican Village: A Study of Folk Life
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930), p. 83. Redfield describes the daily rhythms of life in his ethnography of a village in the Yucatán. His description could apply to rural people the world over who spend their days working the land. “In Tepoztlán,” he writes, “as in other simple societies, the pulse of life is measured more directly than it is with us by the great clocks of the sky.”

116
The plant turned out:
Al Chase, “Chicago to Have One of the World’s Largest Soup Factories,”
Chicago Daily Tribune
, November 20, 1927, p. C1.

117
“making conditions so unpleasant”:
Abraham Epstein,
The Negro Migrant in Pittsburgh
(New York: Arno Press, 1969), p. 32.

118
“friction in the washrooms”:
Chicago Commision on Race Relations,
The Negro in
Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922), p. 395.

119
“I find a great resentment”:
Ibid., pp. 394–95, on resistance to black workers at a millinery and on white women threatening to quit a laundry that introduced a black woman among them.

120
“Their presence and availability”:
Charles S. Johnson,
A Preface to Racial Understanding
(New York: Friendship Press, 1936), pp. 38–39.

121
By 1940:
St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton,
Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945), p. 227, Figure 16 from the 1940 Census.

122
“where no restaurant”:
Ben Green,
Before His Time: The Untold Story of Harry T. Moore, America’s First Civil Rights Martyr
(New York: Free Press, 1999), p. 5.

123
These were the dark:
Paul Ortiz,
Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 61.

124
“It is safe to predict”
: Green,
Before His Time
, p. 43, citing a quote in the
Tampa Morning Tribune
.

125
“We are in the hands”:
“Florida Topics,”
New York Freeman
, June 25, 1887.

126
Florida school boards:
Charles Johnson,
Patterns of Negro Segregation
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1943), p. 16.

127
the authorities fired:
Green,
Before His Time
, p. 85.

128
The three young men:
Ibid., p. 91.

129
The trial had been so tense:
Ibid., pp. 103–6, for a detailed account of the car chase after the Groveland trial.

130
Both men were from:
Ray Charles and David Ritz,
Brother Ray: Ray Charles’ Own Story
(New York: Da Capo Press, 1978), p. 165.

131
“even at a financial loss”:
Josh Sides,
L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 101–6.

132
“What on earth was it”:
Ralph Ellison,
Invisible Man
(New York: Vintage, 1995), p. 294 (reissue; originally published by Random House, New York, 1952).

133
“positions in either”:
Kimberley L. Phillips,
AlabamaNorth: African-American Migrants, Community and Working-Class Activism in Cleveland, 1915–1945
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), pp. 241–42.

134
Entire companies and classes:
Charles S. Johnson,
To Stem This Tide: A Survey of Racial Tension Areas in the United States
(Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1943), pp. 11–12.

135
Those on the lowest rung:
Brenda Clegg Gray,
Black Female Domestics During the Depression in New York City, 1930–1940
(New York: Garland Publishing, 1993), pp. 57, 58.

136
One was by:
Vivian Morris, “Slave Market” and “Domestic Price Wars,” in
A Renaissance in Harlem: Lost Essays of the WPA
, ed. Lionel C. Bascom (New York: Amistad Press, 1999), pp. 146–57.

137
In Chicago:
St. Clair Drake and Horace H. Cayton,
Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945, reprinted 1993), pp. 245–46.

138
“Someone would invariably”:
Gray,
Black Female Domestics
, p. 51.

139
One colored woman:
Keith Collins,
Black Los Angeles: The Maturing of the Ghetto, 1940–1950
(Saratoga, Calif.: Century Twenty One Publishing, 1980), pp. 53–54, cited in Kevin Leonard,
Years of Hope, Days of Fear: The Impact of World War II on Race Relations in Los Angeles
, pp. 40, 41.

140
turning back the hands:
Morris, “Slave Market,” p. 150.

141
One housewife:
Gray,
Black Female Domestics
, p. 61.

142
In many cases:
Ibid., p. 67.

143
Boy Willie:
August Wilson,
The Piano Lesson
(New York: Penguin Books, 1990), p. 20.

144
The bartender:
“Restaurant Keeper Who Breaks Dishes He Uses in Serving Negroes, Will Have to Get New Supply if This Plan Works,”
The Pittsburgh Courier
, February 14, 1931, p. A7, a story about black resistance to the practice of restaurants breaking the dishes used by blacks.

145
For several days:
Michael Lydon,
Ray Charles: Man and Music
(New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), p. 197. Ray Charles and David Ritz,
Brother Ray
(New York: Dial Press, 1978), p. 201.

146
After the dealer’s:
Charles and Ritz,
Brother Ray
, p. 201.

147
It was around that time:
Lydon,
Ray Charles
, p. 197.

148
They chose not to call:
Charles and Ritz,
Brother Ray
, p. 202; Lydon,
Ray Charles
, p. 198. These accounts differ in the timing and nature of Ray’s arrival at the hospital. His biographer’s account is more consistent with the sense of obligation and protocol with which Robert Foster was known to have treated his patients. Foster, honoring the patient-doctor privilege, did not speak in detail about individual patients.

149
“Naturally, I refused”:
Charles and Ritz,
Brother Ray
, p. 202.

150
“Everyone I met”:
Ibid.

151
The tour was a dream:
Lydon,
Ray Charles
, p. 198.

152
“one of the dearest”:
Charles and Ritz,
Brother Ray
, p. 202.

153
“Do you feel greater freedom”:
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. 98–101.

154
“Why do they come?”:
Ray Stannard Baker,
Following the Color Line
(New York: Doubleday, Page, 1908), p. 133.

155
“Every train, every bus”:
Interview with Manley Thomas, who migrated from Jackson, Tennessee, to Milwaukee in September 1950. Interview conducted June 26, 1998, in Milwaukee.

156
Arrington High:
Dan Burley, “Mississippi Escapee Yearns to Return,”
Chicago Defender
, February 24, 1958, p. A4.

157
Henry Brown:
Henry Box Brown,
Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown (
Manchester,
England: Lee and Glynn, 1851; reprint, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), p. 84.

158
Brown was in agony:
From the account by William Still from
The Underground Rail Road
on the arrival of Henry Box Brown at the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society offices. Cited in Appendix B of the 2008 reprint of
Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown
, pp. 160–63.

159
They locked the door:
Henry Box Brown,
Narrative of Henry Box Brown, Who Escaped from Slavery Enclosed in a Box 3 Feet Long and 2 Wide. Written from a Statement Made by Himself. With Remarks upon the Remedy for Slavery by Charles Stearns
(Boston: Brown and Stearns, 1849); cited in Alan Govenar,
African American Frontiers: Slave Narratives and Oral Histories
(Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2000), pp. 9–16.

160
many funeral directors:
Interviews with black funeral directors in Chicago and at an annual National Funeral Directors Association meeting in Norfolk, Virginia, yielded polite changes of subject when directors were asked about the issue of funeral home involvement in these escapes out of the South.

161
“That underground”:
Burley, “Mississippi Escapee Yearns to Return.”