by Isabel Wilkerson (Random House, 2010)
Writing to address the need for “a comprehensive treatment of the century-long story of black migration,” Isabel Wilkerson tells the story of the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the North and West by telling the stories of three people who were part of it:
- Ida Mae Brandon Gladney of Chickasaw County, Mississipppi, who migrated with her husband and children in 1937, first to Milwaukee and then to Chicago;
- George Swanson Starling of Wildwood, Florida, who migrated to New York City in 1945; and
- Robert Joseph Pershing Foster of Monroe, Louisiana, who migrated to Los Angeles in 1953.
Thus, Wilkerson includes three decades and three typical migration routes (because people from certain Southern locations tended to end up in certain Northern/Western “receiving cities”). She begins in each case with where the migrant was born and grew up, his/her family, education, work, and the kinds of discrimination and outright terror suffered in the home town or county. For example, George Starling worked picking citrus fruit after his father refused to pay his college tuition, and he tried to organize the other pickers to demand their rights (modest rights: a very slightly higher price per box of fruit), which resulted in his being hunted by the grower’s goons. He was lucky to escape with his life.
Having set the stage by explaining what the migrants were fleeing, Wilkerson tells the story of the journey itself and then describes the migrants’ reception in the receiving cities. Ida Mae Gladney was traveling with her husband (also George, which was a bit confusing for me) and two small children. They took the train north, riding in the “Jim Crow car” until they crossed the border into the Midwest, eating food packed in shoeboxes, having to change trains in Chicago, reaching their final destination of her sister’s home in Milwaukee. Robert Foster, a surgeon, traveled in his private car, but the trip was excruciating because finding places to sleep, for a person of color, was next to impossible in Texas and unpredictably difficult once he reached the Southwest. He nearly didn’t make it across the desert. He arrived in Los Angeles knowing only one person, a fellow doctor named Beck, who offered to refer patients to him, but he felt compelled to try Oakland first; Oakland proved unwelcoming, and he returned to LA, where he struggled for several years to build a practice. Californians were just as racist as Louisianans, but the rules were harder to figure out, and even Black people preferred White doctors.
Then Wilkerson describes how the migrants settled down in what she calls the “New World”: Ida Mae Gladney becomes a nurse’s aide; George Starling goes to work as a porter on the trains running up and down the East Coast; Robert Foster builds a successful practice treating the black underclass in Los Angeles and becomes a wealthy man. She ends with their final years and the deaths of Starling and Foster; Ida Mae Gladney, the eldest of the three and the first to migrate north, was still alive at the end of the book (though she died in 2004, as stated in a brief Afterword between Notes on Methodology and Acknowledgments).
In between the stories of the three migrants, Wilkerson weaves the bigger story of the Great Migration, with facts and statistics and findings from studies and censuses. But it is the biographies of these three ordinary/extraordinary people that keep the reader engaged throughout the book.
In the Epilogue, a mini-treatise by itself, Wilkerson observes that the Great Migration touched everyone: those that were part of it and their descendants, those who were left behind and their descendants, those who already lived in the Northern and Western cities where the migrants settled and their descendants, later immigrants of color, and American culture as a whole. Popular imagination blamed the migrants for bringing the problems of crime, welfare dependency, unemployment, broken families, illegitimate children with them and inflicting them on the populations that were already there, but Wilkerson points out that research does not support these conclusions; the migrants tended to be hard-working family people who stayed out of trouble and who were, on the whole, better educated than those already living in the cities they settled in (black but sometimes also white). She speculates that the same character traits that enabled the migrants to pull up roots and venture into the unknown enabled them to make the best of the very difficult situations they found themselves in.
Migrants or children of migrants are among the most accomplished, successful, and famous black Americans. They were the first black mayors in the receiving cities of Cleveland, Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, and San Francisco. Music made by those who migrated, usually as children, or their descendants, changed the world: Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Aretha Franklin, the Jacksons, John Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix, Nat King Cole, Diana Ross, Whitney Houston, Queen Latifah. The genres of jazz, rock, R&B, the blues and hip-hip were all created by migrants or their descendants (would they have done so had they remained in the South?). Other high-achieving African Americans who were migrants or descendants of migrants include James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Michelle Obama, Jesse Owens, Serena and Venus Williams, Bill Cosby, Condoleezza Rice, Berry Gordy, Mae Jemison, August Wilson, Spike Lee, and Isabel Wilkerson herself. Indeed it might have been easier to list famous black Americans whose history did not begin in the South; the list might have been shorter!
Wilkerson muses how her three protagonists represent a different “aspect of the emigrant psyche” and “patterns of adjustment” seen among the migrants. Robert Foster, the most financially successful of the three, rejected the South entirely and suffered all his life from insecurities. George Starling mourned his lost educational opportunities but gained psychological freedom from the South. Ida Mae Gladney “had the humblest trappings but was perhaps the richest of them all. She had lived the hardest life, been given the least education, seen the worst the South could hurl at her people, and did not let it break her. She . . . never forsook her origins, never changed the person she was deep inside, never changed her accent. . . . ” She lived surrounded by Northerners, white flight, street crime, and drug deals, “but it was as if she were immune to it all. She took the best of what she saw in the North and the South and interwove them in the way she saw fit. . . .”
The reasons for the Great Migration include racist persecution in the South (Jim Crow and sharecropping), changes in cotton production, but Wilkerson considers the possibility that it was the Migration that impacted the persecution (the number of lynchings decreased over the period of the Great Migration) and cotton industry (mechanization was due to the loss of human labor availability). Wilkerson writes, “in the end, it could be said that the common denominator for leaving was the desire to be free. . . . They left to pursue some version of happiness, whether they achieved it or not.”
Finally, Wilkerson points out the similarities between the people of the Great Migration and other immigrants to the United States, although the migrants themselves vehemently reject this label, since they were born U.S. citizens and their roots were much deeper than those of the immigrants that came after them: “The black people who left were citizens, and many of their forebears had been in this land before the country was founded.” She ends with this: “Perhaps it is not a question of whether the migrants brought good or ill to the cities they fled to or were pushed or pulled to their destinations, but a question of how they summoned the courage to leave in the first place or how they found the will to press beyond the forces against them and the faith in a country that had rejected them for so long. By their actions, they did not dream the American Dream, they willed it into being by a definition of their own choosing. They did not ask to be accepted but declared themselves the Americans that perhaps few others recognized but that they had always been deep within their hearts.”
Every American should read this book.
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