What I Am Reading: "The Warmth of Other Suns" by Isabel Wilkerson

The Warmth of Other Suns is about the Great Migration, the movement en masse of African Americans from the rural south to northern cities. The author, Isabel Wilkerson, Pulitzer-winning journalist, dates this internal movement as being from about 1915 to 1975. The book examines history through biography, recounting the lives of three migrants that Wilkerson spent extensive time with in the '90s.

There are three main subjects of the book, biographically. One is Ida Mae Gladney (1913-2004), a sharecropper who left Chickasaw County in Mississippi in 1937 after her husband's cousin was beaten and almost killed by a lynch posse for a theft that he did not actually commit. Ida Mae and her husband traveled the Illinois Central railway north, settling in Milwaulkee for a time before settling in Chicago, where the two of them lived a normal, blue collar life. She lived long enough to vote for Barack Obama for State Senator on the South Side.

Next is George Starling (1918-1998), who was born in Lake County, Florida. George received some college education, but at a pivotal point in his life, his father declined to pay for his last years of school. George went back to picking oranges, then traveled to Detroit to work during WW2. Upon returning to Florida (migrants of all kinds sometimes make multiple "crossings" before settling down), George felt empowered to demand more money for his picking crews, as the citrus growers were still feeling the pinch of the reduced manpower from the war. He and his fellow semi-union agitators were forced to run when the pickers, part of the same power structure as Sheriff Willis McCall, a notorious segregationist who was responsible for many "suspicious" deaths in custody, targeted them in 1945. George left abruptly for New York, where he took up work as a porter on the famous Great Migration trains of the Seaboard Air Line. Over the years, he helped many migrants find their way; after the civil rights legislation of the '60s desegregated transportation, he would advise African American travelers that they no longer had to move themselves to the Jim Crow car after crossing the north-south border below Washington. Notes on these border crossings is interesting - whether it was El Paso, DC, or the Ohio River, Blacks were free to change seats on the train when heading north, or knew when heading south that they were in increased danger and were restricted to certain cars and seats.

Finally, there was Dr. Robert Foster (1918-1997). Dr. Foster was the son of the school principal in a small Louisiana town. He went to school at Morehouse, and eventually married Alice, the daughter of Atlanta University President Rufus Clement, a linchpin of the African American urban bourgeois. Robert, however, did not want to live under Jim Crow; he became a surgeon, and did a stint in the military, stationed in Austria. As a side note: he had the option to be stationed in South Korea during the war; and if he had chosen it, M*A*S*H would have been a different show, as there would have been a Black surgeon in the war for the show's (racist-named) Black character to be based on (the absence of such historical example having caused the character's elimination). Anyway, after his military service, Dr. Foster made a perilous drive west to California in 1953, denied service by motels even after he had crossed out of Jim Crow territory. He set about establishing a medical practice in LA, doing menial work for other doctors and not making many inroads with migrant patients and the middle class network. Instead, he spread his name far and wide with more working class patients, and was eventually able to open his own practice. He coddled his patients, becoming very involved in their lives, and lived large as compensation for the inferiority he had been made to feel in the south. He had an excessive fondness for gambling, and traveled to Las Vegas many times.

This just scratches the surface of the ordinary, yet remarkable, lives of these three people, all of whom knew their own successes and heartbreaks. Beyond case studies of the Great Migration, there are innumerable anecdotes about growing up in a different time and place; not just the horrors and injustices of Jim Crow but details of, for example, walking to a one-room schoolhouse, a subject of considerable mythology but no modern experience. The three subjects of the book really come to life, and their stories are covered in extensive detail.

These three individuals were selected from a pool of over 1200 aged interviewees. In addition to their stories, Wilkerson brings broader historical and sociological details to the book, saying in her notes on the methodology that she hoped to bring the subject beyond scholarly circles, since most people don't realize the extent of the Great Migration, or know much beyond scant classroom details. She hoped to relate these more personal stories as well, of hardship and triumph. Most attention paid to the Great Migration focuses on the time period after WW1; in fact some view it a phenomenon of this time only; but WIlkerson tracks it as extending into the decade after the Civil Rights Era, as there was still lingering Jim Crow to flee.

The Great Migration first came to public attention in 1916, as the Chicago Defender made note of the departure of a contingent of African Americans from Atlanta. This famous newspaper would become an organ of the Migration, spread clandestinely throughout the south to advise travelers on how best to depart, and how to comport themselves in northern cities. The Great Migration was a "leaderless revolution" says Wilkerson, made up of the first generation of African Americans to never know slavery (neither during their working lives or their childhoods), and experience instead the ever-expanding Jim Crow caste system that was implemented at the end of the 19th century. Some migrants were agrarian workers, sharecroppers on cotton plantations who were often held in a form of wage slavery, where their bosses kept the books and might pay them for a year's work, or might claim that they were deeper in debt than when they started. Fewer than 1 in 5 African American sharecroppers saw a profit at the end of their year of backbreaking work. This alleged agrarian origin of the Migration has been the focus of much scholarly analysis, with some attribution of the cause of the Migration to the Boll Weevil blight of the 1920s, or to improved harvesting technology. However, Wilkerson says that by the '30s, only a third of migrants were agrarian, with more coming from town and urban settings. Additionally, improved harvesting technology seems (based on frequency of patents) to have come about as a result of reduced labor supply, not vice versa.

If there was an external catalyst for the Great Migration, it was northern recruiting during WW1, when factory agents seeking to replace departed workers brought about a surge in the number of African Americans moving to northern industrial centers for work. It came to the point where southern counties and states made such recruiting illegal, and made violent attempts to stop departures; but by the time the labor was no longer needed in wartime, the departures had become organic. Migrant communities maintained connections with their home territories, and often reproduced them in miniature. This led to the same patterns as are seen with overseas immigrants, where those traveling along well-worn feeder routes were able to land on their feet with the help of preexisting networks in the area. These movements were focused more in the '20s through the '40s, but they continued into the civil rights era, coming last to the isolated and rural pockets of the south.

In fact, Wilkerson often makes comparisons to European immigrants, those who were at the time also establishing their own home-away-from-home communities while also trying to assimilate into broader society (and having a much easier time of it because of their race). The African American migrants were often paid less; and contrary to hysteria at the time did not have as many children as European immigrants. One topic that I expected to come up but remained unaddressed was that the Great Migration likely brought its participants economic success (or at least sustenance) in the '20s and after because of restriction on overseas immigration in this era, and the need for other sources of labor. Despite these comparisons, Wilkerson says at the end that the participants she interviewed did not see themselves as immigrants, but as Americans.

Despite the fact that the Great Migration was partially in search of greater social and economic freedom from the dominion of Jim Crow, migrants of course did not often find themselves welcome in northern cities. There are many interesting passages regarding bias against the "country bumpkins" and their ways from earlier migrants and African Americans native to the north, and other internal divisions between different eras of migrants and migrants of different classes. These internal divisions were of course the least of their problems. They were crowded into ghettos and faced redlining and neighborhood covenants when they tried to leave the squalid and overcrowded parts of the cities they were herded into, and did not find much sympathy from the sociologists and urban policymakers of their respective day. However, despite contemporary hostile analyses, Wilkerson's numbers say that the migrants were usually more educated, on average, than those African Americans staying behind, were always closing the gap with northern blacks; were by the '50s more educated than both resident blacks and whites of their cities, and their children would come to be better educated, on average, than southern whites. They were more likely than resident blacks to be married, employed, and show other positive social indicators.

They faced violence in their new homes as well, especially when home-buyers or renters would try to push the bonds of their ghettos. Some of these race riots were started by neighboring European immigrants, some were started by white southern migrants who had traveled north as well for economic reasons. Beyond the threat of violence, migrants also faced prejudice from white coworkers, as the migrants' willingness to work for less drove down wages, and migrants were often brought in as scabs during strikes. Even when civil rights legislation in the '60s eliminated housing discrimination, African Americans still saw a death spiral in property values when they moved into white neighborhoods as the residents chose to flee rather than have them as neighbors, and profiteers were often able to buy the houses at a bargain and then gouge Black buyers.

Beyond these threats, Wilkerson returns several times to the temptations of the city, whether in her biographical sections or in her social analysis. Migrants saw some of their numbers ruin their lives, in her telling, through vice, and many lost children to drugs and gang violence. Sometimes those from rural or small-town backgrounds were guileless in the face of the city's temptations. The children of migrants did not grow up under the threat of the Jim Crow south, but had their own northern urban challenges to contend with. Many migrants could not understand their children's own frustrated aspirations to move beyond the desire for simple safety and any kind of employment, to tackle the new challenges that their generations faced.

Migrants may not have understood the generations they gave life to, but they kept strong social ties to their roots in the south, living in their enclaves in the cities, swapping information on shared places and people. They often sent their children south to get in touch with their roots; Emmett Till was one such northern-born child who was sent to his parents' hometown, where he was murdered. In fact, as the Jim Crow era ended, some former migrants returned to live in the south, and marveled at the social changes. The Great Migration itself brought about some of these changes, as it disrupted the fat-and-happy economic system within the south and created a political constituency for change in northern electorates. It also germinated major strands of American culture, including in music.

These changes to the country were for the better, but at the end, Wilkerson asks: was the very American pursuit of freedom worth it for the migrants themselves? Unlike earlier generations of scholars, she says yes. As noted above, statistically the migrants were better off than those who stayed, as well as being better off than many other groups. Some of these statistics have only come to scholarly attention recently. Despite earlier generations blaming Black migrants from the south as the cause of urban problems, Wilkerson concludes that any failures among the migrants were victims of social problems, not perpetrators of them. She says of Ida Mae, George, Robert, and other migrants, that "they may have made many mistakes in their lives, but leaving the South had not been one of them.”