The Warmth of Other Suns (91 page)

13
“Oftentimes, just to go”:
John Dollard,
Caste and Class in a Southern Town
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1937), p. 302.

14
In Chicago alone:
U.S. Census Bureau, Census 2000 Redistricting Data (Public Law 94-171) Summary File, Table PL1. In 2000, the black population was 1,084,221 in the city of Chicago and 1,033,809 in the state of Mississippi.

15
“folk movement”:
McMillen, “The Migration and Black Protest in Jim Crow Mississippi,” p. 81.

16
Farragut:
Union naval officer David G. Farragut, who rose to admiral, led the capture of the South’s largest city during the Battle of New Orleans in April 1862.

17
ten thousand:
Allan H. Spear,
Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 209.

18
“I went to the station”:
Scott,
Negro Migration During the War
, p. 41.

19
into the words of:
Lawrence R. Rodgers,
Canaan Bound: The African-American Great Migration Novel
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), pp. x, xiii. The author notes that, among scholars, “the Great Migration, for many years, remained primarily an academic sideshow displaying only limited signs of penetrating the realm of national popular discourse and culture.” However, in the arts, the Great Migration and the resulting issues of “movement and identity have, over the entire history of published black literature, occupied the center of African American consciousness.” On p. 3, he adds, “As one of the most widely shared experiences of black America, migration, whether through force or volition, has remained a central subject of black literature and folklore.” Blyden Jackson, professor of literature emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, wrote that “no event, large or small, … has had an impact equal in mass or gavity upon the consciousness of black writers.” Blyden Jackson, “Introduction,” in
Black Exodus
, p. xv.

20
“Less has been written”:
Gregory,
The Southern Diaspora
, p. 5.

21
the language changes:
Writers navigating the language of intolerance often struggle with how to convey old attitudes and norms with the authenticity the work demands but with the grace and sensitivity required to reach current and future generations. On issues of race and ethnicity, the debate often centers on how best to describe black Americans when the names for the group change with the political fashions of the times and with the origins and intentions of the speaker regarding whatever term is at issue. Based on my many interviews with people from the era, the term “colored” was the most common word they used among themselves. This is not to say that prominent blacks of the day did not use the term “Negro,” many arguing that its capitalization bestowed greater status on a group hungry for recognition. But ordinary blacks seemed to wince at how the word could be so easily corrupted by the ruling class, coming out “nigra” instead of the more formal-sounding “Negro,” and thus they tended to use the term somewhat derisively in everyday conversation. As for the N-word itself, I have chosen to use it only where required for context, which turned out to be rarer than might be assumed. I chose to use great care out of an acknowledgment of the violence and loss of life that often accompanied its utterance. On the whole, I found that people who had most felt the sting of the word and the violence that undergirded it were less likely to use the word in casual speech than people who had never had to step off a sidewalk because of the color of their skin.

22
“Compared with northern-born”:
Stewart E. Tolnay, “The African American ‘Great Migration’ and Beyond,”
Annual Review of Sociology 29
(2003): 219.

P
ART
II: B
EGINNINGS

  1
This was the culture:
Richard Wright,
Black Boy
(New York: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 303.

I
DA
M
AE
B
RANDON
G
LADNEY

  2
From the open door:
Unless otherwise indicated, all references to Ida Mae Gladney are based on continual interviews and conversations with her from May 1996 to August 2004.

  3
Calhoun City, Mississippi:
Interview with Jarvis Enoch, Ida Mae’s nephew and a professor at Tennessee State University, in September 1998 in Nashville, about his experiences growing up in Calhoun City, Mississippi, in the 1940s and 1950s.

  4
“hardware of reality”:
Carrie Mae Weems,
Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment
, a film directed and narrated by Weems (Atlanta: Savannah College of Art and Design with the National Black Arts Festival, 2008).

T
HE
S
TIRRINGS OF
D
ISCONTENT

  5
Everybody seems to be:
Macon Telegraph
, Editorial, September 15, 1916, p. 4.

  6
One of the earliest:
“Race Labor Leaving,”
Chicago Defender
, February 5, 1916, p. 1. Though this is what scholars have cited as the earliest known reference to a group of colored people leaving the South during World War I, it can logically be assumed that other parties left before them in the early stages of the war without telling anyone of their intentions. The full headline was “Race Labor Leaving. Much Concern over Possible Shortage of Labor—Exodus Steady—Treatment Doesn’t Warrant Staying.” The paragraph read: “Selma, Ala., Feb. 4—The white people of the extreme South are becoming alarmed over the steady moving of race families out of the mineral belt. Hundreds of families have left during the past few months and the stream is continuing. Every effort is being made to have them stay, but the discrimination and the race prejudice continues as strong as ever. Not many years ago there was a dearth of labor in this part of the country and the steerage passengers from Europe were sought. They cannot do the work of the race men, as they do not understand. Local editorials in white papers are pleading with the business men to hold the race men if possible.”

  7
“treatment doesn’t warrant staying”:
Ibid.

  8
the long and violent hangover:
Some historians have termed the period between Reconstruction and the early twentieth century the Nadir. See Rayford Logan,
The Negro in American Life and Thought, The Nadir: 1887–1901
(New York: Dial Press, 1954).

  9
“I find a worse state”:
Robert Preston Brooks,
The Agrarian Revolution in Georgia, 1865–1912
, doctoral dissertation (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1914; reprinted New York: AMS Press, 1971), pp. 413–14.

10
“They will almost”:
“Laborers Wanted,”
Southern Cultivator
, March 1867, a letter from a writer identified by the initials G.A.N. of Warrenton, Georgia, dated February 2, 1867, APS Online, p. 69.

11
The fight over:
Harvey Fireside,
Separate and Unequal: Homer Plessy and the Supreme Court Decision That Legalized Racism
(New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004).

12
Fourteenth Amendment:
The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, of 1868, enacted to establish the rights of freed slaves after the Civil War, reads as follows: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

13
Fifteenth Amendment:
The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, of 1880, granting freed slaves the right to vote, reads: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

14
“If it is necessary”:
Ray Stannard Baker,
Following the Color Line
(New York: Doubleday and Page, 1908), p. 245 for Hoke Smith quotation, p. 246 for Vardaman remark on lynching.

15
“The only effect”:
Jackson
(Mississippi)
Weekly Clarion-Ledger
, July 30, 1903, quoted in
The Oratory of Southern Demagogues
, ed. Calvin McLeod Logue and Howard Dorgan (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), p. 73.

16
Fifteen thousand:
“Summary Punishment Administered by Mob,”
Hobart
(Oklahoma)
Republican
, May 16, 1916, p. 1.

17
“My son can’t learn”:
“Waco Horror Stirs to Action,”
Savannah Tribune
, July 8, 1916, page 4. “Supreme Penalty for Murder Paid by Negro Ghoul,”
Monroe News-Star
, March 5, 1935, p. 1—an example of newspaper headlines of the Migration era in the town where Pershing Foster grew up.

18
someone was hanged:
Arthur F. Raper,
The Tragedy of Lynching
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933), p. 36.

19
“insult to a white person”:
Ibid.

20
stealing seventy-five cents:
Baker,
Following the Color Line
, p. 176.

21
“perhaps most”:
Herbert Shapiro,
White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery (
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), p. 32.

22
Soon Klansmen:
Documented History of the Incident Which Occurred at Rosewood, Florida, in January 1923
, an investigation submitted to the Florida Board of Regents, December 22, 1993, p. 2. This seventy-nine-page report, commissioned by the State of Florida and conducted by a team of historians from the University of Florida, the State University of Florida, and Florida A&M University, provides a detailed account of the mob attack on the colored town of Rosewood and of the political and racial climate leading to the massacre, including the rebirth and rise to prominence of the Klan.

23
“was much less”:
Wilbur J. Cash,
The Mind of the South
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1941), pp. 124–25.

24
White citizens, caught up:
The years and locations of the major riots of this era were: Wilmington, North Carolina (1898); Atlanta (1906); Springfield, Illinois (1908); East St. Louis, Illinois (1917); and Charleston; Nashville; Omaha; Elaine, Arkansas; Longview, Texas; Chicago; and Washington, D.C., among other places, in 1919, the year following the end of World War I.

25
“I hope and trust”:
Frederick Douglass, “The Lessons of the Hour,” an address to the Metropolitan A.M.E. Church, Washington, D.C., delivered January 9, 1894 (Baltimore: Press of Thomas & Evans, 1894), p. 23.

26
It was during that time:
See Gilbert Thomas Stephenson, “The Separation of the Races in Public Conveyances,”
The American Political Science Review
3, no. 2 (May 1909): 181 on the origins of the term “Jim Crow” and the first Jim Crow laws in Massachusetts, 1841. See also Ronald L. F. Davis, “Creating Jim Crow,”
http://www.jimcrowhistory.org/history/creating2.htm
, as well as David Hinckley, “Natural Rhythm: Daddy Rice and the Original Jim Crow,” New York
Daily News
, May 27, 2004. Mississippi, in 1865, required separate seating for all colored people except those “traveling with their mistresses, in the capacity of nurses.” Florida, in 1865, made no such allowances and punished people of either race with standing in a “pillory for one hour” or a whipping “not exceeding thirty nine stripes.” Texas, in 1866, simply required every railroad company to “attach to each passenger train run by said company one car for the special accommodation of Freedmen.”

27
Streetcars:
C. Vann Woodward,
The Strange Career of Jim Crow
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 97–102.

28
“The measure of”:
Howard Thurman,
The Luminous Darkness: A Personal Interpretation of the Anatomy of Segregation and a Ground of Hope
(New York: Harper and Row, 1965), pp. 70–71. Thurman, a prominent theologian in the mid–twentieth century and a migrant himself, was born in Daytona Beach, Florida, in 1899. He was the dean of Rankin Chapel at Howard University and later the dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University, where he became a mentor of Martin Luther King, Jr., while King was a seminary student at the university.