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November 6 - November 16, 2024
Blacks in the North could already vote and sit at a lunch counter or anywhere they wanted on an elevated train. Yet they were hemmed in and isolated into two overcrowded sections of the city—the South Side and the West Side—restricted in the jobs they could hold and the mortgages they could get, their children attending segregated and inferior schools, not by edict as in the South but by circumstance in the North, with the results pretty much the same.
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
About this social process, the ordinary white Northerner keeps sublimely ignorant and unconcerned.”
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, a general unease that led to the flight of white people and businesses and sucked the resources out of the ghettos the migrants were quarantined into. No laws could make frightened white northerners care about blacks enough to permit them full access to the system they dominated.
Daley’s police force didn’t let any white mob get near them, which kept the protests off the news and kept the movement from gaining traction, just as Daley had hoped.
This was a working-class neighborhood of Poles, Lithuanians, Germans, and Italians who had not long since gotten their starter bungalows and were standing their ground against the very thought of colored people moving in. It was August 5, 1966. A fist-shaking crowd of some four thousand residents had gathered in advance. 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.
have to do this,” he said as he tried to steady himself after the stoning, “to expose myself—to bring this hate into the open.”
this was the mid-1960s. The trains in the North had always been integrated, but blacks had to move to separate cars before being permitted into the South. During the run between New York and Alabama, it had been George’s job to move the colored passengers from their seats in the white section and into the Jim Crow car before crossing from Washington into the segregated state of Virginia.
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 whites left so fast Ida Mae didn’t get a chance to know any of them or their kids or what they did for a living or if they liked watching The Ed Sullivan Show like she did Sunday nights. They didn’t stick around long enough to explain.
To the colored people left behind, none of it made any sense. “It was like having a tooth pulled for no reason,” said a black resident who moved his family in, only to watch the white neighbors empty out.
It was as if the city lost interest when the white people left.
The Walgreens on the corner became a liquor store. Karen and Kevin enrolled in Bradwell Elementary School and remember being, along with two other kids, the only black children in the entire school in 1968. By the time they graduated four years later, the racial composition had completely reversed: only four white children were left.
They would call it hypersegregation, a kind of separation of the races that was so total and complete that blacks and whites rarely intersected outside of work.
in order of severity of racial isolation from most segregated to least: (1) Chicago, (2) Detroit, (3) Cleveland, (4) Milwaukee, (5) Newark, (6) Gary, Indiana, (7) Philadelphia, (8) Los Angeles, (9) Baltimore, and (10) St. Louis—all of them receiving stations of the Great Migration.
George had made a winless bargain. He had taken a job that kept him away from the very people he was working so hard to take care of, and he could not undo the damage already done.
His absence only created a bigger gulf between him and Inez and left the children without a father most of the time and a mother with demons of her own to raise them practically by herself.
The wounds they both carried had hardened and calcified,
Both had worked long and hard and had all the material comforts most any American could dream of. Yet both men wanted to prove to the other and to everyone else that his was the wiser choice, his life the more meaningful one.
President Clement was the tight-buttoned scion of the southern black bourgeoisie. Robert was a brilliant but tortured free spirit who had run from the very strictures Clement stood for. Clement was a distinguished accommodationist in the Jim Crow South—a beneficiary of it, in fact.
While he was out betting heavy and looking for something that did not exist and that nobody could give him, Alice set about establishing herself as a proper surgeon’s wife.
They were living parallel lives, and Alice and the girls tried not to notice that Robert, whose long hours helped finance their ball gowns and socials, was trying to fill some hole that could not be filled and was hardly ever around.
They had both come into their own and seemed less suited in some ways than before. Perhaps they had always been ill suited for each other but were just beginning to realize it, now that they had a life and a family and reputations to protect.
They were picketing for higher wages for the orderlies and nurse’s aides who did the kinds of things nobody notices until they go undone.
She had faith that whatever she needed would eventually come to her. The concept of not working a job one had agreed to do was alien to Ida Mae.
was shortly before six o’clock, and Martin Luther King, Jr., was heading to dinner before attending a rally for striking sanitation workers. He was standing on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel on Mulberry Street just outside his room, room 306. A half dozen of his aides were with him, gathering themselves to leave. Someone reminded King of how chilly it was getting. He agreed and went to get his topcoat. At the precise moment that he turned back to his room, a minute past six on April 4, 1968, a single .30-caliber bullet was fired into the balcony. The rifle shot, thought to have
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The receiving stations of the Great Migration would burn all through the night after Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. And when it was over, some neighborhoods, the old places the migrants had packed into when the Migration began, would look like Berlin after an air strike during the Second World War.
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.
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 people who had grown up in the mirage of equality but a whole different reality, in a densely packed world of drugs and gangs and disorder, with promises that seemed to have turned to dust?
To him, spite never settled anything. It only gave your detractors more ammunition and, as it had back when the colored people in Monroe had urinated in the colored section of the Paramount Theater, only ended up hurting the people themselves.
He was trying to escape the disappointments of an underutilized mind and a sand trap of a marriage he was too loyal and upright to leave.
President Lyndon Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act of 1968, banning discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin in the renting or selling of property.
the gangbangers and their little lookouts were God’s children too, to her way of thinking.
Ida Mae and her husband were never going to go to college or rise much beyond where they were, but they had come a long way from where they had started, and that was an accomplishment in itself.
America would overlook people like her in its fixation with the underclass, just as a teacher can get distracted by the two or three problem children at the expense of the quiet, obedient ones.
Few experts trained their sights on the unseen masses of migrants like her, who worked from the moment they arrived, didn’t end up on welfare, stayed married because that’s what God-fearing people of their generation did whether they were happy or not, and managed not to get strung out on drugs or whiskey or a cast of nameless, no-count men.
A name change would have had no effect in masking the ethnicity of black migrants like Ida Mae, George, and Robert. It would have been superfluous,
They did not have the option of choosing for themselves a more favored identity. They could not easily assimilate whether they sought to or not.
She would still be seen as black and be subject to the scrutiny of the outside world, no matter whom she married or whose name she took.
He had made it up north, alright, as he had dreamed so long ago. But he had an unhappy wife who could not be made happy and two teenage children who were good at heart but had been swallowed up by the worst aspects of the North and South while he and his wife were out working long hours to give the kids a life they themselves had never had.
He did not begrudge the younger generation their opportunities. He only wished that more of them, his own children, in particular, recognized their good fortune, the price that had been paid for it, and made the most of it. He was proud to have lived to see the change take place.
Maybe you had to live through the worst of times to recognize the best of times when they came to you.
He would not have been working in the citrus groves or had the standoff with the grove owners that had forced him to flee to the North if he had stayed in school. That moment would gnaw at him for as long as he lived.
he had only to look at Inez to be reminded of what could have been.
Ray Charles’s song about him, “Hide Nor Hair,” spent seven weeks on the Billboard charts back in 1962.
All the good and extraordinary things that had happened to him seemed never to make up for the rejection he had endured, and he set out to prove that he was better than what they took him for, even though the people who haunted him would never see it, no matter what he did.
Because of the fifty-one previous years of his life, he had a number of complexes. He had a Napoleon complex, a southern complex, a baby-of-the-family complex. He had both a superiority complex and an inferiority complex, and, because he was born on Christmas Day, a Christmas baby complex.
The people who had not gone north now worked in factories, textile mills, and hardware plants, factories that made poly foam and felt for the manufacture of furniture, and factories that made trailers, sewer pipes, corrugated boxes, shipping crates.
