This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Feb. 9. 2011 - Six million African-Americans left the South from 1915-1970. They left to escape the indignities and the threats of Jim Crow. They left to get clerical jobs. They left to perform surgeries in hospitals, not in the kitchens of their patients. They left to find better lives.
Isabel Wilkerson chronicles the Great Migration in her book, "The Warmth of Other Suns." She tells the story through the lives of three characters, from three different backgrounds, each of whom took a different route to a new life in the Midwest, the West and the Northeast.
Wilkerson is the first black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism. She received the award in 1994 while working as the Chicago bureau chief of the New York Times. She is currently a professor of journalism and director of Narrative Nonfiction at Boston University. Her parents were part of the Great Migration, leaving Georgia and southern Virginia for Washington, D.C.
Wilkerson talked with the Beacon in advance of a book discussion on Wed., Feb. 9, at 7 p.m. at the Schlafly Branch of the St. Louis Public Library, 225 North Euclid Avenue.
You say you wrote this book because it's the history of your own family, and because of the silence of the migrants. Is there a reluctance among those who left the South to describe their experiences, and if so, why?
Wilkerson: There is a general reluctance, and perhaps discomfort, in talking about some of the things that they suffered and endured living under Jim Crow. I think there was an internalization of some of the treatment they endured. When they left, they left for good and didn't look back. They were starting all over again, turning a new page, taking on a new life. Many took on a new identity. They changed their names, took on Northern airs and assumed a Northern accent. They shed the things that reminded them of what they were trying to leave. There were 6 million people, so there are 6 million ways they responded to this experience. But they were all leaving a caste system that devalued and demeaned them. Those experiences were so painful that they often did not share them with their children and grandchildren.
I didn't grow up hearing about these things. In fact every reference to my own family in the book came as a result of my doing research for the book itself. My mother was the most challenging interview of all. She really did not want to talk about these things. Over time, she finally relented. I read every single page of the book to her and she began to open up. It would spark some memory. That was how I was able to find out a lot of things about my own family.
There is even a bit of shame about what happened in the past. They had no responsibility -- they were bound in a caste system that wasn't of their own making. But they don't want to be seen that way. They want to be seen as whole and vigorous individuals who made this courageous decision, raised their children well and worked hard. They don't want to be seen as victims.
I was taken with the story of Robert Joseph Pershing Foster. Dr. Foster's first trip away from home in 1935 was to St. Louis. He later graduated from Meharry Medical College and then trained at Homer G. Phillips Hospital here. What did you learn about his time in St. Louis?
Wilkerson: There's a great photograph of him on the Amazon website with his awards and citations. If you look very closely, one of the citations is from Homer G. Phillips.
His brother (Madison) sends him a ticket to St. Louis because he's about to graduate from high school. This is his very first time out of the South and away from Monroe (Louisiana), so it had great meaning to him. I described him getting on the bus, in his brand new tweed suit, straight backed and proud and he's walking on the bus as if he's walking on the Queen Mary and heading to France.
St. Louis was his first taste of the North.
He describes his days as a resident at Homer G. Phillips as being so long and the work so rigorous that he had very little time to enjoy the city. It was his experience at Homer G. Phillips, combined with his experience in the army that helped convince him that he did not want to stay in his hometown of Monroe. He did not want to work out of the trunk of his car treating patients (as his brother did because he was denied practice privileges at the local hospital). He'd gotten the opportunity to see what a great hospital could be. He got accustomed to the technology and accoutrements of a big city hospital, and that was what he wanted for himself.
You mention Chicago, Cleveland and Detroit as major destinations for Southern blacks heading to the Midwest. What about St. Louis?
Wilkerson: There wasn't a city in the North or the Midwest that wasn't affected by the Great Migration. St. Louis drew much of its black population from Arkansas and Tennessee in particular, and Mississippi and Alabama as well. The people went wherever they could, wherever the railroads and the bus routes would take them. Once you had a colony already established, they could build on that colony. That's why you had people coming to particular states and particular cities. St. Louis would have been the first stop for many people just trying to get out. For some people, St. Louis would be far enough North for them. They had no desire to go any farther. I have run into people from Memphis whose parents did not leave and one of the women said to me, "I just couldn't understand why didn't they go to St. Louis. We knew so many people who went to St. Louis. Why didn't they go?" Each place in the South had a different place that represented freedom for them.
There's this iconic image from that era in the paintings of Jacob Lawrence. It's one of his best known paintings from the migration series. There's a mass of humanity, so many people, you can't see the ground. There are three places they're all heading to: one is Chicago, one is New York and one is St. Louis. St. Louis was considered among one of the top cities people would want to go to in the Great Migration.
I was struck by your comparison of this group of migrants to immigrant groups who came to the U.S. before and after the Great Migration. What did you find that defied the stereotypes of the people who were part of the Great Migration?
Wilkerson: In the course of interviewing all these people, I found these general themes. The vast, vast majority of people had married and had remained married, many of them had graduated from high school or gone as far as they could wherever they came from. Not only did they manage to find a job, most of them worked very long hours and often multiple jobs. When I had completed much of the interviewing and began writing the narrative, I did a deep look into the archives. I knew the archives would always be there. But the entire process of working on this book was a race against time. I was trying to reach as many of these people as I could before it was too late because they were getting up in years.
By the time I looked at the data, much of it didn't surprise me because it affirmed what I had found in the interviews. It would be more difficult to find the stereotypes.
What surprised me the most was the birthrates were lower for African-American women than other (immigrant) groups. That defied so many assumptions that we've grown to accept as conventional wisdom. It really floored me. The African-American women who came into these big cities from the South, according to the 1940 census data, had birthrates that were lower by far than the Czechs, Poles, Russians and Italians. The African-Americans who arrived in the cities at that time were being paid less than all these other groups. In the South in an agrarian society where you have a lot of people working on the farm, it was to your benefit to have as many children as you could possibly have. Once they got to the North where the cost of living was so much higher, where they were already crammed together in tenements, they couldn't afford (more children).
What were your criteria for selecting the three subjects of your book?
Wilkerson: I spent a year and a half to two years going to senior center after senior center, meetings of retired transit workers, Baptist churches in New York where everyone is from South Carolina and Catholic churches in Los Angeles where everyone is from Louisiana. It took a very long time to find the individuals. I did a lot of auditioning of people. I needed one person for each of the major migration streams. I was looking for people to represent different decades. Then I needed to have people who were leaving for different reasons and coming from different backgrounds so each of the stories would give the reader a different window into the precipitating factors that would lead them to make the decisions they did. They each needed to have different outcomes. I wanted them to be representative of all the people I met and interviewed. Finally, the variable that is hardest to define, and maybe the most influential of all, that they would interesting, fascinating, amazing people. I was drawn to them personally -- and they were drawn to me -- so it made the whole process of spending time with them fulfilling and rewarding. I loved spending time with them.
I narrowed it to 30, and then down to three. Once I began spending time with the three, immersing myself in their lives, I rotated the time I spent with them. I spent years with them. There was a lot of fieldwork in it, going back to the places they were from, interviewing the people in their lives from where they came and from the destination cities.
Are there any cities in the U.S. that you consider well integrated, and if so, how did that happen? How have they been able to achieve greater integration of housing and schools?
Wilkerson: Oakland and Seattle strike me as two of the most integrated of American cities.
This is an educated guess, trying to say what makes these cities different from others. One is, there is greater diversity in general. There isn't the polarity as in other cities where it's traditionally just black and white. Originally when immigrants from Europe arrived in the United States, they arrived as separate nationalities and ethnicities. When they got to the U.S., they Anglicized their names and in the second generation, they could more easily blend in to the general population. That option wasn't there for African-Americans.
When the migrants arrived on the West Coast, there was great diversity there already. There's a long history of a large and diverse Asian population, an old and large Hispanic or Latino population and of course, the Anglo or white population. The black population was a later arrival to this pre-existing mix. There are so many people from so many different backgrounds that it would be difficult to have the same level of demarcation that you have in so many other cities. That's not to say those cities don't have challenges. It just looks and feels very different than most of the older cities in the Midwest and the East that were the receiving stations in the Great Migration.