The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

by Isabel Wilkerson

As often happens with immigrant groups, some of the old-timers would have preferred to shut the door after they got there to protect their own uncertain standing.

Olivet Baptist Church got five thousand new members in the first three years of the Migration, making it one of the largest Baptist churches and one of the first megachurches in the country.

it was “too large—it don’t see the small people.”

Maybe they don’t know how to dress or comb their hair or anything, but their children will and their children will.”

they functioned as the midwives of the Great Migration, helping the migrants gather themselves and disembark at the station and thus delivering to the world a new wave of newcomers with each arriving train.

north or south, wherever colored labor was introduced, a rivalrous sense of unease and insecurity washed over the working-class people who were already there, an unease that was economically not without merit but rose to near hysteria when race and xenophobia were added to preexisting fears.

Those on the lowest rung resorted to “slave markets” where colored women gathered on street corners from as early as six in the morning and waited for white housewives from the Bronx and Brooklyn in New York or from Hyde Park or Pill Hill in Chicago to bid on them for as little as fifteen cents an hour.

The randomness of this kind of work, hiring oneself out to total strangers with no standards in duties or wages, opened domestics to all kinds of exploitation for very little pay. They could never know for sure what they would be asked to do, how long they would be expected to do it, or if they would be paid what was promised.

Aside from these sources of friction, colored domestics could not know what perils they might face from opportunistic sons or husbands assuming that younger domestics would do more than just clean. As it was, the very act of walking the streets for work came awfully close in appearance to how prostitutes plied their trade—except that the domestics were working at the whim of Janes instead of Johns.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the decline in property values and neighborhood prestige was a by-product of the fear and tension itself, sociologists found.

Yet the very thing that made black life hard in the North, the very nature of northern hostility—unwritten, mercurial, opaque, and eminently deniable—made it hard for King to nail down an obvious right-versus-wrong cause to protest.

The unequal living conditions produced the expected unequal results: blacks working long hours for overpriced flats, their children left unsupervised and open to gangs, the resulting rise in crime and drugs, with few people able to get out and the problems so complex as to make it impossible to identify a single cause or solution.

sociologist Gunnar Myrdal called the Northern Paradox. In the North, Myrdal wrote, “almost everybody is against discrimination in general, but, at the same time, almost everybody practices discrimination in his own personal affairs”—that is, by not allowing blacks into unions or clubhouses, certain jobs, and white neighborhoods, indeed, avoiding social interaction overall.

King would be fighting the ill-defined fear and antipathy that made northern whites flee at the sight of a black neighbor, turn away blacks at realty offices, or not hire them if they chose. The “enemy” was a feeling,

No laws could make frightened white northerners care about blacks enough to permit them full access to the system they dominated.

hypersegregation, a kind of separation of the races that was so total and complete that blacks and whites rarely intersected outside of work.

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

The hierarchy in the North “called for blacks to remain in their station,” Lieberson wrote, while immigrants were rewarded for “their ability to leave their old world traits” and become American as quickly as possible.

Blacks, though native born, were arriving as the poorest people from the poorest section of the country with the least access to the worst education.

“There is just no avoiding the fact that blacks were more severely discriminated against in the labor market and elsewhere,” Lieberson wrote. They “had to work more hours to earn less money than anyone else,” the historian Gilbert Osofsky wrote.

he had lived his life with the perpetual sense of watching a reception through a keyhole,

The only thing we are proud of in connection with the South is that we left it. —Jefferson L. Edmonds, the publisher of The Liberator, one of the first colored newspapers in Los Angeles

One county in Virginia—Prince Edward County—closed its entire school system for five years, from 1959 to 1964, rather than integrate.

A 1968 survey found that eighty-three percent of whites said they preferred a system with no integration.

According to a growing body of research, the migrants were, it turns out, better educated than those they left behind in the South and, on the whole, had nearly as many years of schooling as those they encountered in the North. Compared to the northern blacks already there, the migrants were more likely to be married and remain married, more likely to raise their children in two-parent households, and more likely to be employed. The migrants, as a group, managed to earn higher incomes than northern-born blacks even though they were relegated to the lowest-paying positions. They were less likely to be on welfare than the blacks they encountered in the North, partly because they had come so far, had experienced such hard times, and were willing to work longer hours or second jobs in positions that few northern blacks, or hardly anyone else for that matter, wanted,

the turmoil in the South could be felt in the North. “Black school principals in Philadelphia,” wrote the scholar Allen B. Ballard, could tell that “something had happened in a particular section of the South by the concentration of refugees from a certain place.”