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Good Morning POU!
We continue our look at the events and history surrounding over 6 million African Americans moving from the deep south to the north and western parts of the United States. An event known as The Great Migration.
Documenting “The Great Migration”
When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson told a group of high school students that for most of the 20th century in the U.S., it was illegal for a black motorist to pass a white one on the road, they were flabbergasted.
One student said he would’ve honked. Another said he would tailgate.
Finally, one student came up with the answer she was looking for: He would’ve left.
“I said ‘My sentiments exactly,” said Wilkerson, a journalism professor at Boston University. “That is what 6 million African Americans did starting with World War I and continuing on until the 1970s,” she said.
Wilkerson was referring to the Great Migration, the subject of the book she spent 15 years working on: “The Warmth of Other Suns.” She talked about her research, for which she interviewed 1,200 people, while giving the University of Iowa Martin Luther King Jr. Distinguished Lecture on Wednesday before a packed atrium on the University of Iowa campus.
The Great Migration was the movement of millions of blacks from the rural and small-town South to the North and West between 1915 and 1970. The people, many of them sharecroppers who worked to live on their employer’s land, moved to escape the caste system in the South designed to keep blacks in a lower societal position than others.
The caste system was so strong that between 1889 and 1929, a black person was lynched every four days for a perceived breach of the code, Wilkerson said. The most common reason: They acted like a white person, she said.
It wasn’t until after the book was published and Wilkerson was touring the country talking about it that she said she realized what it’s truly about: freedom.
“It’s actually what all of them wanted, and it’s of course what Martin Luther King, who we’re all gathered here to honor this special week, what he wanted as well,” she said. “I discovered that in fact, that’s what the book is actually about and that’s the story that I ultimately was telling.”
The migrations weren’t spontaneous, in fact, there were predictable streams, whose effects still can be observed in U.S. cities today, Wilkerson said. Many blacks living in Chicago trace their roots to Arkansas and Mississippi, Wilkerson said. In New York or Washington, D.C., where Wilkerson is from, many people are from the Carolinas or Georgia.
Growing up, Wilkerson said people didn’t talk about the Great Migration, but many of her neighbors were from the Carolinas.
Jean Robillard, UI’s vice president for medical affairs, told the group that the Great Migration is the “biggest underreported story of the 20th century.”
“Before reading the book, I was unfamiliar with much of this important history,” he said, “and was moved by her magnificent telling of this giant shift in the United States population.”
Anthony Berger, a first-year medical student at the university, said his interest in health disparities initially drew him to the book. While reading it, he said he found Wilkerson’s description of the treatment of blacks as a “caste system” very interesting.
“You think of caste system and you think of India, not the black population of the U.S.,” he said. “I thought she just had a really interesting approach.”
Iowa City resident Royceann Porter, a member of the local Coalition for Racial Justice Steering Committee, also attended Wednesday’s lecture. She said a lot of people are afraid to talk about racism.
“But it needs to be talked about,” she said. “It needs to be expressed. It happens.”
In 1963, the American mathematician Edward Lorenz, taking a measure of the earth’s atmosphere in a laboratory that would seem far removed from the social upheavals of the time, set forth the theory that a single “flap of a sea gull’s wings” could redirect the path of a tornado on another continent, that it could, in fact, be “enough to alter the course of the weather forever,” and that, though the theory was then new and untested, “the most recent evidence would seem to favor the sea gulls.”
At that moment in American history, the country had reached a turning point in a fight for racial justice that had been building for decades. This was the year of the killing of Medgar Evers in Mississippi, of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, of Gov. George Wallace blocking black students at the schoolhouse door of the University of Alabama, the year of the March on Washington, of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and his “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.” By then, millions of African-Americans had already testified with their bodies to the repression they had endured in the Jim Crow South by defecting to the North and West in what came to be known as the Great Migration. They were fleeing a world where they were restricted to the most menial of jobs, underpaid if paid at all, and frequently barred from voting. Between 1880 and 1950, an African-American was lynched more than once a week for some perceived breach of the racial hierarchy.
“They left as though they were fleeing some curse,” wrote the scholar Emmett J. Scott, an observer of the early years of the migration. “They were willing to make almost any sacrifice to obtain a railroad ticket and they left with the intention of staying.”
The migration began, like the flap of a sea gull’s wings, as a rivulet of black families escaping Selma, Alabama, in the winter of 1916. Their quiet departure was scarcely noticed except for a single paragraph in the Chicago Defender, to whom they confided that “the treatment doesn’t warrant staying.” The rivulet would become rapids, which grew into a flood of six million people journeying out of the South over the course of six decades. They were seeking political asylum within the borders of their own country, not unlike refugees in other parts of the world fleeing famine, war and pestilence.
Until that moment and from the time of their arrival on these shores, the vast majority of African-Americans had been confined to the South, at the bottom of a feudal social order, at the mercy of slaveholders and their descendants and often-violent vigilantes. The Great Migration was the first big step that the nation’s servant class ever took without asking.
“Oftentimes, just to go away is one of the most aggressive things that another person can do,” wrote John Dollard, an anthropologist studying the racial caste system of the South in the 1930s, “and if the means of expressing discontent are limited, as in this case, it is one of the few ways in which pressure can be put on.”
The refugees could not know what was in store for them and for their descendants at their destinations or what effect their exodus would have on the country. But by their actions, they would reshape the social and political geography of every city they fled to. When the migration began, 90 percent of all African-Americans were living in the South. By the time it was over, in the 1970s, 47 percent of all African-Americans were living in the North and West. A rural people had become urban, and a Southern people had spread themselves all over the nation.
Journeys of Promise, produced by Online Journalism students at La Salle University in Philadelphia, tells the stories of six African Americans who migrated to Philadelphia from the South as part of the Great Migration, the largest internal migration in U.S. history. The six sojourners who tell their stories here were interviewed in Spring 2011 at Center in the Park, a senior center in Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood.