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December 5 - December 16, 2024
From the early years of the twentieth century to well past its middle age, nearly every black family in the American South, which meant nearly every black family in America, had a decision to make. There were sharecroppers losing at settlement. Typists wanting to work in an office. Yard boys scared that a single gesture near the planter’s wife could leave them hanging from an oak tree. They were all stuck in a caste system as hard and unyielding as the red Georgia clay, and they each had a decision before them.
Over time, this mass relocation would come to dwarf the California Gold Rush of the 1850s with its one hundred thousand participants and the Dust Bowl migration of some three hundred thousand people from Oklahoma and Arkansas to California in the 1930s.
The Great Migration would not end until the 1970s, when the South began finally to change—the whites-only signs came down, the all-white schools opened up, and everyone could vote. By then nearly half of all black Americans—some forty-seven percent—would be living outside the South, compared to ten percent when the Migration began.
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.
Fifteen thousand men, women, and children gathered to watch eighteen-year-old Jesse Washington as he was burned alive in Waco, Texas, in May 1916. The crowd chanted, “Burn, burn, burn!” as Washington was lowered into the flames. One father holding his son on his shoulders wanted to make sure his toddler saw it. “My son can’t learn too young,” the father said.
When two little girls in 1930s Florida wanted to know why they couldn’t play on a swing like the white children or had to sit in a dirty waiting room instead of the clean one, their father, the theologian Howard Thurman, had to think about how best to make them understand. “The measure of a man’s estimate of your strength,” he finally told them, “is the kind of weapons he feels that he must use in order to hold you fast in a prescribed place.”
The layers of accumulated assets built up by the better-paid dominant caste, generation after generation, would factor into a wealth disparity of white Americans having an average net worth ten times that of black Americans by the turn of the twenty-first century, dampening the economic prospects of the children and grandchildren of both Jim Crow and the Great Migration before they were even born.
He was found beaten to death on the outskirts of town. He was wearing his uniform. He had survived the war only to be killed at home.
If there was a single precipitating event that set off the Great Migration, it was World War I.
The leaves were the color of sweet potatoes and of the summer sun when it sets.
He went screeching and lurching with the distracted urgency of a man meeting a blind date, picturing the first glance and dreading the faint chance of disappointment.
Against nearly every assumption about the Migration, the 1965 census study found that the migrants of the 1950s—particularly those who came from towns and cities, as had George Starling and Robert Foster—had more education than even the northern white population they joined. The percentage of postwar black migrants who had graduated from high school was as high as or higher than that of native whites in New York, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and St. Louis and close to the percentage of whites in Chicago.
The northern-born colored people and the long-standing migrants, who were still trying to keep their footing in the New World, often resented the arrival of the unwashed masses pouring in from the very places some of the old-timers had left. 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.
“To hell with what people think of me. Go on and do what you wanna do. They gonna do what they wanna do anyhow, say what they wanna say anyway.”
What got Arrington High in trouble was a weekly newsletter he published that argued for integration. He had been editor of a two-page mimeographed broadside, the Eagle Eye, for some fourteen years and had made a name for himself protesting the treatment of colored people in central Mississippi.
What got him declared insane, however, was exposing the segregationists who were consorting with prostitutes at a colored brothel that catered only to white politicians. It was a death wish of a crusade that actually may have fit the legal definition of insanity for a colored man in Mississippi at the time.
He was in Alabama but still not safe. He was still in the South and within siren call of any Mississippi sheriff. The cars took him to a predetermined location. There waiting for him was a pine coffin. He was told to get inside. The coffin had breathing holes in it for him to get air. The men sealed him in the coffin and loaded it onto a hearse. On top of the coffin, the men placed a load of flowers so that it would appear that the coffin had just been driven from a funeral. The hearse drove to a railroad station, where the coffin was loaded on a train bound for Chicago. He lay still and
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“You must not fail,” George told Pat, “because they’re expecting you to.”
One migrant’s son, Emmett Till, on a visit from Chicago to Mississippi in 1955, was killed for breaking protocol in some way that will probably never be known for sure, except that everyone agreed it involved something he had said to a white woman, which only served to remind those who left of the rightness of their decision and those who stayed how foolhardy it could be to forget for a moment where you were when you crossed into the very different country of the South.
McCall was the lawman who had shot two handcuffed prisoners, killing one, as he transported them from one jail to another for an upcoming trial in the Groveland rape case back in 1949.
Over the years, McCall would be accused, implicated, or indicted in dozens of cases of prisoners dying under suspicious circumstances while in his custody. He patrolled the colored section in his ten-gallon hat, interrogating and pistol-whipping colored men for any suspicion and putting colored fruit pickers in jail if he caught them not working on a Saturday. The colored people of Eustis and the rest of Lake County lived in fear of his patrol car crawling through their gravel streets. “Here come the Big Hat Man,” the people would say when they saw him approaching.
President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act on July 2, 1964, 101 years after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation granting rights that would have to be spelled out again long after Lincoln was gone. Now blacks were entitled to the same privileges as any other citizens. They were not to be segregated in any sphere in life. But it would take time, up to a decade or more, for the message to sink in to those who chose not to recognize the new law.
The discontent of the young people unsettled the migrant parents who had fled the violence of the South. They could do little to dissuade their children from whatever role they might play in the outburst. It was too late to try to get them jobs at now-closed factories or the education they missed if they gave up on school, or, maybe most of all, the grounding and strength they themselves had acquired after having endured so much. The parents had come from the Old Country, had been happy to have made it out alive and make a few dollars an hour. What did they know of the frustration of the young
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It was in 1954 that the Supreme Court ruled on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, declaring segregated schools inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional.
Since the 1940s, Willis McCall had cast a long shadow over Lake County. His handling of the Groveland case, in which a white woman accused four black men of raping her back in 1949, had made national headlines and put Lake County on the map as a symbol of racial injustice. McCall had shot two shackled defendants while transporting them the night before their second trial. One of the men, Walter Irvin, actually survived the shooting and lived to tell how McCall had taken the backwoods, stopped in a remote location, told them to get out, and shot them.
Into the early 1970s, Willis McCall was still the sheriff of Lake County. He was still wearing his ten-gallon hats. The Groveland case had made him something of a celebrity among Florida segregationists. He would become the center of case after case of alleged abuse and misconduct against black people in the county. He would be investigated forty-nine times and survive every one of them.
When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, “the only public building in the United States that refused to lower its flag to half-staff was McCall’s jail in Tavares,” the Lake County seat, according to the author Ben Green.
colored only and white only signs were coming down all over the South during the 1960s. But Sheriff McCall did not take down the colored waiting room sign in his office until September 1971, and then only under threat of a federal court order. He may have been the last elected official in the country to remove his Jim Crow sign, Green said.
McCall was reelected seven times, that is, until 1972, when Florida Governor Reubin Askew stepped in and suspended him after yet another violent assault on someone in his custody. This time, McCall was indicted for second-degree murder for allegedly kicking a black prisoner to death. The pris...
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The times might have changed, but he never would or sought to. Displayed in his home was the colored waiting room sign that once hung in his office and that he was forced to take down under threat of a court order. Nobody in the world was going to tell him what he could do or what he could hang in his own home on Willis V. McCall Road.
