The title of this year's National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction comes, of course from the lines in Richard Wright's book, that is really a prayer.
I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown. . .
I was taking a part of the South
to transplant in alien soil,
to see if it could grow differently,
if it could drink of new and cool rains,
bend in strange winds,
respond to the warmth of other suns
and, perhaps, to bloom.”
Isabel Wilkerson took 15 years to write her book about one of the largest internal migrations in the history of the world that took place in the United States between 1915-1970. The book tells the story of hope when the railroad to economic freedom moved above ground. In order to make it more manageable and to emphasize that a mass migration is really made up of individual stories, Wilkerson focuses on the histories of three people who reflect the three geographical legs of the flow of millions from the Old South as she traces the epic journey of a people fleeing "lynching, voter suppression, intimidation, systematic disenfranchisement, oppressive labor conditions and terrorism."
Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Joseph Perching Foster, were from Mississippi, Florida, and Louisiana respectively. Ida Mae was a cotton picker, mother, sharecropper’s wife and later matriarch. Dr. Robert Joseph Perching Foster a graduate of Morehouse and Meharry escaped the boondocks and bayous to live out the high life he dreamed of but not without his own tales of woe discrimination and humiliation. George Swanson Starling a fruit picker whose labor organizing activities on behalf of blacks forced him to flee Florida with white vigilantes on his heels. Norwood Holland
Wilkerson said, "The film The Joy Luck Club influenced my desire to write this book. Also Avalon, because in the first case it was a story about how immigrants attempt to integrate the best of the old with the best of the new worlds and in the second case, the movie underscores the clash between the parent and what he desires for his children and their desires for themselves after he uproots them and moves to Baltimore to give the family a better chance.
"Almost everyone in this room descends from recent immigrations (2-3 generations or less). My mom came from Rome, Georgia and my father from Virginia and they migrated to Washington, D.C.
"There were three main streams of migration. One originated in Florida and moved up the East coast; the second moved people from the middle Gulf Coast states up north; the third originated in Louisiana and pushed west.
"This is the first time American citizens felt they had to uproot themselves in order to find a place where they could feel like they were equal to other American citizens. They were fleeing a caste system. In this book, I was searching for symbols of that caste system beyond the iconic water fountains and bathrooms for "Coloreds Only."
"There existed a law in Birmingham, AL that said it was illegal for a black and white person to play checkers with one another. Somebody must have seen two people playing in the park and viewed it as a threat to the caste system. Also, a Black copy and White copy of the Bible were in use in Southern courtrooms so that white hands would not have to touch the same sacred object that black hands had touched. We're talking about an era when a white person probably never shook hands with a person of another race in their entire lives.
"For 15 years I researched, doing lots of reading, traveling all over the country, interviewing people who had participated in the migration whose oral histories needed to be captured before they all disappear.
In Raleigh, I read a recent newspaper story about a local courtroom having to suspend proceedings because the Jim Crow Bible couldn't be found.
Laws existed in the South that made it illegal for a black motorist to pass a white motorist, if driving. I used this when talking to high school students, and when they heard, they raised a commotion.
'What is that?' I inquired.
'I would have honked.'
'Can't.' I still heard talking. 'What's the trouble?'
'I would have tail-gated to get them to move faster.'
'Can't.' Finally, another student said, 'I would have left.'
'My point, exactly.'
"The South relied on an oversupply of cheap field labor. There was a lot invested in keeping people on the farm by suppressing education, general intimidation, and restricting their employment opportunities in order to keep them poor and unable to find better work in the neighboring town.
"This all changed with WWI when European migration came to a standstill and much of the northern workforce left to fight the war. The North began to recruit Blacks in the South. Those who responded were arrested on the train platforms while they waited for the trains to carry them to cities like Boston, Detroit, and Chicago. If there were too many people waiting, the station managers waved the trains on through and the people had no way of making the journey.
"It was the first time in America that the lowest caste people in our country chose to go toward opportunity. Until that time 90% of the Blacks lived in the South. After it, they had distributed themselves across the country. Migration gave them their first chance to become more than a field hand, a domestic, or a teacher in a black school.
"Think of some of the famous people whose futures were made possible by their parent's choice. Jesse Owens, whose father moved to Cleveland said, 'Leaving Alabama is the best thing I ever did. Otherwise, he never would have been an Olympian.' Toni Morrison's parents also left Alabama where blacks couldn't check out library books. Barry Gordy left Georgia for Detroit where he heard the children of those migrants make music that represented a transfer of and integration into culture of their music. People met who otherwise never would have. Diana Ross' mother was from Alabama, her father from West Virginia; Michael Jackson's parents met in Gary, Indiana. Jazz started in Chicago when Miles Davis' parents move to Illinois and gave him the luxury needed for him to practice. The same with Thelonius Monk whose parents' past in tobacco country would never allowed it.
"But things began to change in the South when northern cameras came down and showed the rest of the country the violence. All the time before, an African American was lynched in the South every four days for violating some suppressive law or custom.
"The people who participated in this migration did something that the Emancipation Proclamation and federal legislators could or would not do. They freed themselves."
Q & A
Q. What parallels do you see now with today's immigrants?
A. I think every migration happens for a reason. I hope we can learn from our past. Often don't. One of the reasons for resistance to immigrants is perceived economic threat. We'll all pay a price if we don't learn the lessons from our past.
Q. Do you understand the right wing's idea of 'taking back America'?
A. I can't. . .I don't know what it really means. I don't know where America went, so I can't answer.
Q. The migration you write about is now going in reverse under pressure from red-lining and loss of low-rent affordable housing in northern cities.
A. You may know that Frederick Douglass encouraged them not to go North, to stay in the South. He said, "Leaving would be a disheartening surrender." But he was already in the North. I view this "reverse migration" as "return migration." The region they left has become more welcoming because of change. The ultimate gift is that the change took place and made this possible. That migration was over issues of life and death. This migration represents total free choice to go anywhere one wants.
Q. How do you explain the failure of blacks to obtain civil rights during Reconstruction?
A. In the short run, immediately after the Civil War, life got better, but then the reconstructionists left. The Jim Crow laws were instituted that prevented and proscribed blacks from doing what they had done before when the reconstructionists were present. As people drifted North, their numbers grew and it made it easier for the waves of migration to follow because they had a friend or relative to ease their way.
Q. I grew up in apartheid South Africa. How were the migrants received in the North?
A. First of all, the North wanted the labor but not the people. Blacks were not allowed to join labor unions; they were used as strike breakers. Other immigrant (European) groups were permitted into unions, and they led the conflict. That is one of the tragedies. Basically, the people were the same -- except for their color -- both the Southern immigrants and the European immigrants were originally agricultural laborers. But African Americans were ghettoized; they often paid more for their rent. And they were brutally denied opportunities to buy and dwell in properties that were in white neighborhoods.
Q. What happened to those who were swallowed by the North -- didn't succeed in making the transition?
A. Not every story is one of triumph. It takes a strong person to prevail. Those who fared best were those who maintained a sense of the good values from what they left behind, but adopted the best values of where they were. They withstood a tremendous sense of disillusionment.
Q. 100,000 Haitians have permission to come to this country but are still denied entry by our government.
A. I'm not an expert -- I can only say that this is a big country. New people have always added value to America. I am pro immigration overall. As a child of immigrants, how could I argue otherwise?
The next installment in the continuing series of reports from last weekends Miami Book Fair will take a literary turn. We'll hear from the authors of The Tiger's Wife, When She Woke, and the 2010 National Book Award winner for fiction, The Lord of Misrule, as well as some interesting insights from Robert Massie about Catherine the Great. Hope you'll join me!