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November 6 - November 16, 2024
Freedom allowed in every way. Freedom of speech, right to live and work as others. Higher pay for labor. Freedom; privileges; treatment of whites; ability to live in peace; not held down. Freedom of speech and action. Can live without fear, no Jim Crow. The schools for the children, the better wages, and the privileges for colored people. The people, the freedom and liberty colored people enjoy
Growing accustomed to being treated like people. Getting used to the
There’s prejudice here, too, but the colour line isn’t drawn in their faces at every turn as it is in the South.
The Great Migration was now into its fourth decade. People who were children when it began were well into middle age. And back in Mississippi, people were still trying to escape. Ida Mae would hear about these people and pray for them.
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 sentence that would shut him off, at age forty-seven, from the rest of the world and his wife and four children for the remainder of his life.
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.
He lay still and quiet, unable to turn over or adjust himself for the fifteen-hour ride to the North.
He prayed over it, and it came to him that he should pack himself into a box and get himself “conveyed as dry goods to a free state.”
down, which left Brown sitting on his head, even though the box explicitly said, this side up with care.
He arrived in Philadelphia at three in the morning. He had been doubled up in the box for twenty-six hours.
“Is all right within?” the voice asked, trembling. “All right,” Brown replied. The people were joyful. And Brown was free. He would go on to Boston, which was judged to be safer, and for the rest of his life he would go by the name of Henry Box Brown, in light of how he had gained his freedom.
How many people fled the South this way during the Great Migration is impossible to know, due to the very nature of the mission. For the operation to work, it required the highest level of secrecy, coordination and planning worthy of the Secret Service, the active and willing participation of sympathetic white southerners, the cooperation of funeral homes in both the departure and receiving states, the complete trust of the person being ferried out by friends and loved ones willing to put themselves in danger to save a single soul,
George loved Inez. But Inez was not an easy woman to love. There was a storm inside her that nobody seemed able to calm.
George knew firsthand how the folks in Eustis could be. He told Pat she needed to make the most of the mind God had given her and warned her that there would be people pitying her and expecting her to fail. “You must not fail,” George told Pat, “because they’re expecting you to.”
died, that she didn’t have a job yet, she didn’t know the city well enough. Inez didn’t need to be told how rough life could be. She had never had the chance even to know her mother. She had little sympathy and didn’t want her around.
Gerard would go on to steal televisions and radios and cash from his parents, anything of value that they hadn’t locked up or hidden away or could be easily carried out the door. He would bring sadness and heartbreak to Inez and especially to George, who could rarely even bring himself to talk about his son. He had come all this way from Florida, and here was something that had turned out worse in ways he couldn’t have thought possible.
Inez, who had adored and indulged Gerard, retreated into herself and seemed to take the sorrows out on those around
Inez never joined a church in New York. It reminded her too much of the hard life she’d had in Eustis and of a little girl’s imaginings of how different life might have been if her mother had lived, the mother who
Dr. Foster has got her, then I know I’m through, Because he’s got medicine and money, too. I ain’t seen hide nor hair of my baby, since that day.
Robert knew Ray was working on a song about him, or about a doctor at least. Ray asked Robert’s permission to use his name before recording it. Coming as it did just months after Robert had put his hand back together and delivered his son, it was Ray’s way of thanking a man he had come to depend on. Robert, always craving approval and enamored of show business, gave him the go-ahead. Robert wasn’t looking to be the subject of a song and really didn’t need it. Years later, he didn’t talk about it much and, the times he did, it was rather like a footnote. But when it first hit the airwaves back
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He had more business than he ever could have imagined back when he was dreaming of getting out of Louisiana, trying to convince himself as much as everybody else that he really could make it in California.
Gambling and medicine were basically his life. He could lose himself in both and had a hard time walling off his professional and personal lives. He doted on his patients and sometimes went gambling with them.
the ancestral home no longer the distant Africa of unknown forebears but the more immediate South of uncles and grandparents, where the culture they carried inside them was pure and familiar.
The migrants warned their children to be on their best behavior, especially when it came to the white people they might encounter. But the children did not have the internalized deference of their southern cousins. They got into scrapes with the other children and couldn’t remember all the rules. 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. —
George, went back only once—for the funeral of the brother who had raised him, Willie. And even then he did not stay the night; he left for Chicago right away.
memorialized black northerner ever to go south, if only because he never made it back alive and because of the brutal reasons that he didn’t. His mother had sent her only child south for the summer in 1955 to spend time with his great-uncle in Mississippi. She never saw him alive again. He was bludgeoned and shot to death a month after his fourteenth birthday.
his mother, Mamie Till, decided to hold the funeral with an open casket, so people could see what Mississippi had done to him.
How many of them had sent their children south to be with their cousins and grandparents, giving them the same warnings Mamie Till had given her son—that they mind themselves around white people?
There was not enough housing to contain them, and the white neighborhoods bordering the black belt were barricading themselves further, not flinching at the use of violence to keep the walls in place.
Chicago was trying to discourage the migration of any more colored people from the South.
The Clarks did not let that deter them but sued and won the right to occupy the apartment. They tried to move in again on July 11, 1951. This time, a hundred Cicero housewives and grandmothers in swing coats and Mamie Eisenhower hats showed up to heckle them. The couple managed to get their furniture in, but as the day wore on, the crowds grew larger and more agitated. A man from a white supremacy group called the White Circle League handed out flyers that said, keep cicero white. The Clarks fled.
They smashed the piano Clark had worked overtime to buy for his daughter. And when they were done, they set the whole pile of the family’s belongings, now strewn on the ground below, on fire.
in protest of the Clarks’ arrival. They chanted, “Go, go, go, go.” They hurled rocks and bricks. They looted. Then they firebombed the whole building. The bombing gutted the twenty-unit building and forced even the white tenants out. The rioters overturned police cars and threw stones at the firefighters who were trying to put out the blaze. Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson had to call in the National Guard, the first time the Guard had been summoned for a racial incident since the 1919 riots in the early years of the Migration.
A total of 118 men were arrested in the riot. A Cook County grand jury failed to indict any of the rioters.
That fall, Governor Stevenson, who would go on to become the Democratic nominee for president the following year, told a newly convened state commission on human rights that housing segregation was putting pressure on the whole system.
Well into the twentieth century, Cicero would remain synonymous with intolerance and corruption. It would come to be seen in the same light as other symbolic places, like Ocoee, Florida, or Forsyth County, Georgia, where many blacks dared not think of living and thought twice before even driving through, well into the 1990s.
Even white immigrant families were leaving Cicero, ceding it to Mexican immigrants. In 2000, the U.S. Census found that, of Cicero’s population of 85,616, just one percent of the residents were black, nearly half a century after the riots that kept the Clarks from moving in.
It was a chilling parallel to the war playing out at the very same time in the South, from the arrest of Rosa Parks in 1955 for refusing to give up a bus seat in Alabama to white troops blocking nine colored students in 1957 on their first day of school in Little Rock, Arkansas, after the Supreme Court said they had the right to enroll.
After World War II, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and other northern and western cities would witness a fitful migration of whites out of their urban strongholds. The far-out precincts and the inner-ring suburbs became sanctuaries for battle-weary whites seeking, with government incentives, to replicate the havens they once had in the cities.
Decades later, the message would still hang in the air, the calculus pretty much the same. By the end of the twentieth century, blacks would make up more than eighty percent of the population of Detroit. Just across the Ford Expressway, the black population of the suburb of Dearborn, the 2000 census found, was one percent.
Something welled up in George. Everything raced before him: the cheating foremen in the groves, his running for his life, the hangings and burnings, the little southern dog that would rather die than be black, the bomb going off on Christmas Day under the bed of a good man trying to bring justice to Florida. And then there was New York. Wide open and stifling at the same time. Yes, he was alive, but it was a slow death in a hard city. He was a baggage handler for all intents and purposes and would be no more than that no matter how much potential he had.
It never failed to remind him that he was seen as alien, the Yankee bartender taking the trouble to break the glass George had drunk from rather than use it again.
I’m looking right in a white man’s face just sitting across from me. I had never seen the man before, didn’t know him from Adam, but he was white. And the hatred just surged up in me after looking at this thing in the paper. I just wanted to hurt somebody white. And I had to just really restrain myself to keep from just getting up. And that was the thing that went on during the whole campaign,” as he called the civil rights movement.
the bombing deaths of four little girls just before a Sunday church service in Birmingham, the assassinations of civil rights workers, black and white, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner and Medgar Evers, the confrontation on a bridge in Selma, Alabama. Those would not come until Jim Crow’s fitful last hours.
He had been in Harlem and working for the railroad for eighteen years now and knew he and his co-workers could raise more than a few dollars to help fight bigotry in the region they left.
Instead of saving his brother in California, Robert would end up sending Madison back home in a casket, the people in Monroe clucking over Robert’s so-called Promised Land and what a shame it all was. Harriet would hold it against him for years. Madison had died of a blood clot; that had been the source of his discomfort, and nothing, it seemed, could have prevented
Robert would blame himself for as long as he lived, torture himself with “What would have happened if…,” and would never truly get over it.
Ida Mae was taken in by the sheer presence of the man, who by then had already won the Nobel Peace Prize, led the March on Washington, witnessed the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and overseen his epic battles against Jim Crow in places like Selma and Montgomery. But Chicago was a turning point for King. His movement was aging, its actions drawing greater skepticism and its successes leaving him with fewer obvious dragons to slay.
