Jandos Rothstein
In The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, author Isabel Wilkerson profiles three African Americans who sought better lives in the North. Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, the wife of a sharecropper, left an abusive plantation in Mississippi so her children could thrive in Chicago; Robert Foster fled a Louisiana hamlet to practice medicine in California; and George Starling organized a strike in Florida’s citrus orchards, a venture so dangerous he had to escape to New York. By any fair interpretation of the American dream, Wilkerson’s subjects should have thrived in the North through their hard work and leadership. But their success was circumscribed by their race. Both in North and South, the market restricted Black Americans’ opportunities to obtain secure housing, health care, and employment, an injustice that forced them to leave their Southern towns while consigning them to poverty and indignity in Northern cities.
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, by Isabel Wilkerson
Gladney’s problems stemmed from the deregulation of sharecropping in the late 1800s. Shortly after the Civil War, Reconstruction allowed Black Americans to acquire the privileges of citizenship, with organizations such as the Freedmen’s Bureau teaching them to read, helping them negotiate labor contracts, and establishing schools of higher education. Soon, 16 African Americans were fighting inequality from Congress and over 600 served in state legislatures. Backlash arrived in the form of Black Codes, Southern laws that abolished Black suffrage and permitted freedmen to be forced into unpaid labor, and soon supply and demand became an untenable basis for the economy. Millions of African Americans were denied employment in the South as teachers, doctors, lawyers, and mechanics, so the price of their labor lay in the capricious hands of Southern plantation owners. No invisible hand reached down to help them, and no federal laws regulated how many hours they could work. Instead, women like Gladney worked from dawn to dusk cultivating cash crops whose profits they would never see.
The North did not salve Gladney’s wounds. In Chicago, where she made her home, the dual scourges of redlining and racism made dignity nearly unattainable for Black women. Consider when Gladney moved to a safe South Shore neighborhood. Worried that black homeowners would decrease property values, every white family in the area dashed to the suburbs. “It happened slowly, and then all of a sudden, boom,” remembers one member of the exodus. Once light skin disappeared from the South Side, the government did nothing to prevent banks from overcharging Black families for loans, an insidious practice known as “redlining” that ensured constant turnover in rented apartments. And so Gladney raised her children in a rapidly deteriorating environment. Unable to find secretarial work—for of course, no federal laws gave Black women equal access to employment—she cleaned white people’s houses, which was backbreaking at best and degrading when men asked her for sex. Her job paid less than a secretary’s and rendered health care an unaffordable luxury. Gladney returned home to the background noise of drug deals and shootings, a victim and a survivor of the unfree housing market.
Two thousand miles west of Chicago, conditions were similar for Robert Pershing Foster III. After serving as an Army doctor in Austria, Foster discovered Los Angeles to be a Russian nesting doll of racism. Its outer shell was glamorous; as he “rode at God’s knee” and “saw the clouds search out folds in the [California] mountains,” Foster believed he was entering a land of newfound opportunity for Black folk. The young surgeon already had tremendous cachet thanks to his wife, Alice Clement, whose father was the first Black man on Atlanta’s Board of Education, and he looked forward to matching their prestige with financial security.
Foster soon encountered the inner shells of racism in Los Angeles. For although he could find hotel rooms in California, unlike in the Jim Crow South, Foster was barred from living in nice neighborhoods by racially restrictive covenants. Although in Louisiana he could only have become a country doctor, catering to poor Black families and being paid in goats and grain, now his surgical career faced obstacles from Los Angeles residents. At first, Foster collected urine for an insurance company, a task insultingly below his station. Then hospitals denied him admitting privileges because of his skin color, making it difficult to retain patients. And when at last his surgical skills were respected throughout the city, with dozens of women queuing outside his door, his white colleagues planned excursions to casinos that barred Black people. It seems that no matter how tirelessly Foster advanced his career, society never let him forget his Blackness.
Nevertheless, Foster triumphed over white expectations, earning enough money to support his family, throw glittering birthday bashes, and serve as the inspiration for the hit song “Hide Nor Hair.” George Starling was not as fortunate. His story of hard work and wasted talent confirms my bleak perception of the American dream.
In the words of James Baldwin, the American dream was created by the white man at the expense of the Black man. As long as Black families like Foster’s are barred from affordable neighborhoods, there are more homes for middle-class white families; as long as Gladney is limited to cleaning houses, there are more secretarial jobs with pensions for white women. I’m not surprised, then, that the American dream was useless for George Starling, a dark-skinned teenager in Eustis, Florida, yearning to leave the rigid caste system. He was a sharp young man, having graduated valedictorian of Curtwright High School and enrolling at a mechanical college. One summer, he even led a strike in the Eustis citrus orchards, forcing a wage increase for the poor Black pickers on his team. This talent and initiative would predict a bright future for a white boy. Starling had to quit college, though: too expensive. When he moved to New York, finding a job on the railroad and excelling there, he couldn’t get promoted: too Black. You could say that Starling was too Black for the American Dream. He died a “black death,” as Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah has written, “a slow death, the accumulation of insults, injury, neglect, second-rate health care … [and] no time to sigh.”
Starling’s story shares a common thread with millions of other Black migrants. All of them “[defied] the gravitational pull of their own solar systems,” leaving behind generations of family members and friends in the South. All of them sought the warmth of a faraway sun, one that would nurture them with freedom and opportunity. And once they arrived in the North, clutching tickets they had purchased in the dead of night, clasping the hands of young children and peering through the windows at the bustling train station, all of them found the sun colder than expected. It turned out in these “free” markets that people with white skin systematically denied clean neighborhoods, low-interest loans, health care, and high-paying jobs to people with Black skin. The federal government failed to outlaw restrictive covenants; it failed to enforce the Civil Rights Act. It failed and failed and failed until millions of Black people lived in poverty. Therefore, Wilkerson teaches us that our government must actively regulate the economy to ensure dignity for the descendants of the Great Migration.
