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February 16 - March 26, 2025
Richard Wright, the bard of the Great Migration. He gave voice to the fears and yearnings of his fellow migrants through his novel Native Son and his autobiography, Black Boy. He had been a sharecropper’s son in Natchez, Mississippi. He defected to the receiving station of Chicago, via Memphis, in December 1927, to feel, as he put it, “the warmth of other suns.”
What few people seemed to realize or perhaps dared admit was that the thick walls of the caste system kept everyone in prison. The rules that defined a group’s supremacy were so tightly wound as to put pressure on everyone trying to stay within the narrow confines of acceptability.
In 1896, in the seminal case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court sided with the South and ruled, in an eight-to-one vote, that “equal but separate” accommodations were constitutional. That ruling would stand for the next sixty years.
Alexander Hamilton Stephens, was “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.” This new government, Stephens declared, “is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
The only way that someone as proud and particular as Pershing could survive in the time and place he was in was to put his mind somewhere else.
Colored children are mighty profitable to us.”
The sharecroppers owed the planters, the planters owed the merchants, the merchants owed the banks, and the banks were often beholden to some business concern in the North, where most of the real money was in the first place.
Federal investigations into neoslavery in Florida uncovered numerous abuses of kidnapping and enslavement and led to a 1942 indictment and trial of a sugar plantation company in the Everglades.
In Florida and in the rest of the Deep South, “the killing of a Negro by a white man ceased in practice even to call for legal inquiry,” a white southerner observed in the early 1940s.
Still it made no sense to Pershing that one set of people could be in a cage, and the people outside couldn’t see the bars.
Thus the Great Migration had more in common with the vast movements of refugees from famine, war, and genocide in other parts of the world, where oppressed people, whether fleeing twenty-first-century Darfur or nineteenth-century Ireland, go great distances, journey across rivers, deserts, and oceans or as far as it takes to reach safety with the hope that life will be better wherever they land.
Huey Newton would become perhaps the most militant of the disillusioned offspring of the Great Migration. He founded the Black Panther Party in 1966
The man didn’t use the term, and nobody had bothered to tell Robert ahead of time, but some colored people who had made the journey called it James Crow in California.
But in the early 1960s, secluded regions of the rural South—Alabama and Mississippi in particular—had become war zones in the final confrontation between segregationists and the civil rights movement.
He had learned that fear when he was little and once passed the white people’s church. The kids came out of the church when they saw him. They threw rocks and bricks and called him the vilest names that could spring from a southern tongue. And he asked his grandparents, “What kind of god they got up inside that church?”
She didn’t quite trust whatever it was they did to people in hospitals. She had never been inside one but had heard that they strapped women down during delivery, and so she decided to surrender herself to a Mississippi midwife as she and everybody she knew had always done.
By the 1940s, when George Starling arrived, Harlem was a mature and well-established capital of black cultural life, having peaked with the Harlem Renaissance, plunged into Depression after the 1929 stock market crash, climbed back to life during World War II,
slow syrup accents
A young colored boy sent a Christmas card to a white girl, who showed the card to her father. A posse of white men captured the boy, hogtied him, and forced the boy’s father to watch as they tortured the boy and drowned him in the river. The posse would later say the boy jumped into the water on his own.
Fucking Florida
“Even in the North, refugees were not always safe,” wrote Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy in the 1945 book Anyplace but Here. “One hard-working migrant was astonished when a detective from Atlanta approached him and informed him that he was wanted back home for ‘spitting on the sidewalk.’ ”
Upon his arrival, they cursed King with epithets from a knoll overlooking the march. Many people in the crowd waved Confederate flags. Some wore Nazi-like helmets. One placard read king would look good with a knife in his back.
George Starling,
“About 74 percent of the rioters were brought up in the North,” wrote the authors of what would become known as the Kerner Report.
And so the root Becomes a trunk And then a tree And seeds of trees And springtime sap And summer shade And autumn leaves And shape of poems And dreams And more than a tree. —Langston Hughes
Ultimately, according to the Harvard immigration scholar Stanley Lieberson, a major difference between the acceptance and thus life outcomes of black migrants from the South and their white immigrant counterparts was this: white immigrants and their descendants could escape the disadvantages of their station if they chose to, while that option did not hold for the vast majority of black migrants and their children.
Society urged them to leave Poland and Latvia behind and enter the mainstream white world. Not so with their black counterparts like Ida Mae, Robert, and George.
He had built an entire practice on understanding his patients’ personal troubles so that he could get to the bottom of their medical ailments, as he saw one as being connected to the other.
Hippocrates
Robert took the Hippocratic oath so literally that he rarely spoke of the specifics of any one patient.
When I was a boy down here, when you went through the white neighborhood you had to be practically running. Now black people are living in there. They all mixed up with the whites right there in Eustis.”
What MLK helped accomp
