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She learned to give them the benefit of the doubt but not be surprised at anything involving them. This alone probably added decades to her life.
Railroads in Pennsylvania had begun undercover scouting of cheap black labor as early as 1915. But few people noticed when, in the deep of winter, with a war raging in Europe and talk of America joining in, several hundred black families began quietly departing Selma, Alabama, in February 1916, declaring, according to the Chicago Defender’s brief citation, that the “treatment doesn’t warrant staying.”
Teenagers sneaking into coffee shops and swiveling on the soda fountain stools forbidden to colored people in Florida and then running out as fast as they’d come in before anybody could catch them. Each one fought in isolation and unbeknownst to the others, long before the marches and boycotts that were decades away.
it made you want to swallow your tongue, as they used to say in their highest compliment to a cook.
They returned home to a Jim Crow South that expected them to go back to the servile position they left. Most resented it and wanted to be honored for risking their lives for their country rather than attacked for being uppity. Some survived the war only to lose their lives to Jim Crow.
It was an illegal form of contemporary slavery called debt peonage, which persisted in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and other parts of the Deep South well into the 1940s.
Later, in 1879, Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, a former slave who made coffins for colored lynching victims and was disheartened by the steadiness of his work, led a pilgrimage of six thousand ex-slaves, known as Exodusters, from the banks of the Mississippi River onto the free soil of Kansas.
At first the South was proud and ambivalent, pretended that it did not care. “As the North grows blacker, the South grows whiter,” the New Orleans Times-Picayune happily noted. Then, as planters awoke to empty fields, the South began to panic. “Where shall we get labor to take their places?” asked the Montgomery Advertiser, as southerners began to confront the reality observed by the Columbia State of South Carolina: “Black labor is the best labor the South can get. No other would work long under the same conditions.”
“Newark.” It sounded so tantalizingly close to “New York,” and maybe, some assumed, was the way northerners, clipping their words as they did, pronounced New York. It was confusing to have their intended destination preceded directly by a city with such a similar name and with an identically named station. And as they had been riding for as many as twenty-four hours and were nervous about missing their stop, some got off prematurely, and, it is said, that is how Newark gained a good portion of its black population, those arriving in Newark by accident and deciding to stay.
The general laws of migration hold that the greater the obstacles and the farther the distance traveled, the more ambitious the migrants. “It is the higher status segments of a population which are most residentially mobile,” the sociologists Karl and Alma Taeuber wrote in a 1965 analysis of census data on the migrants, published the same year as the Moynihan Report. “As the distance of migration increases,” wrote the migration scholar Everett Lee, “the migrants become an increasingly superior group.”
“I wasn’t invited to shake hands with Hitler,” he wrote in his autobiography. “But I wasn’t invited to the White House to shake hands with the President either.
“My son’s victories in Germany,” Henry Owens said, “force me to realize that I made the best move of my life by moving out of the South.”
He seems on a mission to sort through the paperwork of his life, find some meaning in all the railroad pamphlets and official letters he wrote on behalf of workers’ rights that were politely dismissed or not acted upon.
Then Robert joins in. “I had taken my bath in the tin tub,” he begins. “I was clean.” “Was that the Saturday-night bath?” Beckwith’s wife, Isabel, asks. Everyone laughs in recognition. Like most black people in the South, none of them had had indoor plumbing back then, and Saturday was the one night in the week when they could manage the time-consuming ritual of boiling water from the well and filling a tin tub so everyone in a given family could take a bath.
And she’s feeling a little sick, as people do when they drink the water they are warned about when they visit developing countries. Later in the day she will put some nutmeg in the palm of her hand and lick it to settle her stomach, and not draw the least attention to herself among the people in Mississippi, which is, after all, where she learned it.
One of the headstones appears to be testimony to the hard times the people faced under Jim Crow. It reads simply: thy trial’s ended.
A heavy snow fell outside. In a symbolic kind of way, snow was to Chicago what cotton was to Mississippi. It blanketed the land. It was inevitable. Both were so much a part of the landscape of either place that where you saw snow you by definition would not see cotton and vice versa. Coming to Chicago was a guarantee that you would not be picking cotton. The people sitting at the dining room table this late winter night had chosen snow over cotton.
“The Southerners had their eye out for something,” an old settler, Arthur Fauset, was quoted as saying in a book on the migration to Philadelphia. “These shrewd South Carolinians came here as if they knew there was something they could get and they went after it.”
Such may be the sheer force of determination of any emigrant leaving one repressive place for something he or she hopes will be better. But for many of the migrants from the South, the stakes were especially high—there was no place left to go, no other refuge or other suns to search for, in their own country if they failed. Things had to work out, whatever it took, and that determination showed up in the statistics.
The Migration exposed white Americans outside the South to black culture and created an opportunity—much of it missed—to bridge the races in the New World.
George Starling succeeded merely by not being lynched.
“If all of their dream does not come true,” the Chicago Defender wrote at the start of the Great Migration, “enough will come to pass to justify their actions.”
They tried to instill in their children the values of the Old Country while pressing them to succeed by the standards of the New World they were in.
