Jandos Rothstein
The American dream has propelled countless numbers of people to leave their current conditions in search of a better life. Through persistence and hard work, the story goes, anyone can improve their life and achieve success, especially if they are willing to move to a new place offering better opportunity. This idea assumes that everyone has equal opportunity and their success or failure depends solely on their own merits—their ability to work hard, their skills and talents, and their intelligence. Yet this idea of the American dream does not take into account the variety of barriers that various groups face. It assumes that everyone starts from a level playing field. One of the most important factors in shaping one’s success in life is your parents’ economic status. Yet Blacks begin several steps behind whites in nearly every measure of economic success and opportunity.
Isabel Wilkerson’s book The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Struggle of America’s Great Migration shows how Blacks migrating north and west from the South sought to improve their status and sense of personal freedom. Yet while they landed jobs and had opportunities they could not have experienced in the South, the conditions they faced often fell short of their expectations. The persistence of racism, and the different forms it took in the North and West, meant that no matter where they migrated, the characters in the book could not escape economic, social, and personal discrimination.
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, by Isabel Wilkerson
All of Wilkerson’s characters—Ida Mae Gladney, Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, and George Starling—faced significant barriers to success and economic mobility in the South. For Ida Mae, growing up in the cotton fields of Mississippi, she could not see any life for herself beyond the life of a sharecropper. She talks about how white landowners shortened the school year for Black children so they could spend more time picking cotton in the fields. There was no opportunity to improve one’s life there. Robert Pershing Foster thought the same thing about life in Monroe, Louisiana. Even though his father was educated and was the principal of the local Black school, he was paid a fraction of what the principal at the white school was paid. The students had to get their books from the ones the white school was throwing away. The constant reminders of inequality in the Jim Crow South meant that many young Blacks did not see a future for themselves there.
That was true for George Starling in Eustis, Florida, as well. Like picking cotton, picking citrus was hard work, and the white owners of the groves often did not pay the pickers what they deserved. The market did not improve conditions for Blacks in the South because the entire system was dominated by a racial caste system that made it impossible for Blacks to achieve success or even earn the wages they deserved because there was widespread fraud and abuse. Wilkerson writes, “An invisible hand ruled their lives and the lives of all the colored people in … the entire South.” This was not the invisible hand of the free market, though. It was the invisible hand of Jim Crow that made Blacks completely dependent on whites for everything. There would never be opportunities for economic advancement or personal dignity as long as this system was in place.
Even worse than the economic dependence of Blacks was the constant threat of violence in the South. All the characters in Wilkerson’s book discuss horrific examples of brutality that they witnessed or experienced directly. George Starling talks about how Blacks in the citrus groves lived in constant fear of breaking the rules, knowing that the consequence could be death. When George tried to organize Blacks citrus workers to fight for their wages, there were threats of lynching. Ida Mae’s husband George’s cousin Joe Lee was savagely beaten because white landowners thought he had stolen turkeys, which he had not. In Ida Mae’s words, “They beat him until his coveralls turned red with blood and stuck to the surface of his skin as if with adhesive.” It did not matter that he said he did not do it. It also did not matter when the turkeys wandered back to the farm the next day, proving that he had not stolen them. Blacks lived in constant fear of violence and even death, with no recourse because they could not challenge the system of racial oppression.
The decision to leave the South was one that each of the characters made because they thought they had no other choice. Like migrants from other countries, they thought that the only way to achieve economic success and independence was to travel somewhere new. Unlike immigrants from other countries, though, Black migrants from the South were trying to achieve what was promised to them as Americans. For them, the American dream could only be achieved by seeking out new opportunities in the North and the West. Ida Mae and her husband George followed other family members and neighbors to Chicago. When Ida Mae arrived in Chicago, she found new freedoms she could not have imagined in the South, but also continued patterns of racism. She was excited to be able to vote for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and feel that her vote mattered, when in the South she would not even think about voting because of Jim Crow laws. She even became a precinct volunteer so she could help get more Blacks involved in the political system.
Yet she also found it difficult to find a good job. She started out working as a domestic worker and found that there was little sense of freedom or dignity in that work. There was a lot of room for exploitation, just like in the South. Even after she held more steady jobs, at Campbell’s Soup and as a hospital aide, she found it difficult to really get ahead. She and her husband were able to buy a home in South Shore in Chicago. Yet they experienced larger patterns of Northern discrimination where segregation meant that Blacks paid much more for worse housing, and where whites immediately left neighborhoods when Blacks started moving in.
In order for Ida Mae to have lived a more dignified life, there would have had to be a greater recognition of the hard work and sacrifices she and her family had made. There would have had to be more intervention from the government so that Blacks could enjoy the fruits of their labor and be able to accrue wealth in the same way that whites could. Yet with racial discrimination and the lack of investment in Black communities, it was difficult for people like Ida Mae to fully reach their potential.
Robert Joseph Pershing Foster also felt that the only way to achieve success and freedom was to leave the South. He had the benefit of receiving a college education and then graduating from medical school. He could have stayed in Monroe, Louisiana, and practiced medicine like his brother. Yet he had always dreamed of going to California and saw it as a path to greater success, where he would not be held back by the system of Jim Crow. Even on his way to California, though, he was repeatedly confronted with racism, when trying to rent motel rooms in Texas and Arizona. When he is refused a hotel room in Phoenix, he says, “I came all this way running from Jim Crow, and it slaps me straight in the face.” He even had a Black woman in South Central Los Angeles tell him that she did not want a Black doctor working on her.
Despite these setbacks, he was able to become a successful doctor in Los Angeles, and even became the doctor of Ray Charles. It appears on the outside that he did achieve the American dream, improving conditions for his family and overcoming the obstacles that held him back in the South. Yet, he also always felt like he did not quite belong. He always felt that he had to prove himself. He said that he thought Blacks like him always had to be better than anyone else just to prove they were capable and worthy.
The characters in Wilkerson’s book show how hard work and determination allowed them to improve conditions for themselves and their families. Yet they also faced persistent racism and discrimination that they had not anticipated as they left the South. Their hard work and persistence were not enough to allow them to achieve full participation in the promise of America. They faced segregated conditions in the North, and saw limits in their abilities to take full advantage of economic mobility. They also experienced more subtle forms of racism among whites in the North and West, like protests against Blacks moving to white neighborhoods and white businesses not hiring Black workers or paying them less.
In the end, though, they all believed they achieved greater levels of freedom than they ever could have in the South. For them, the American dream was less about an idealized version of unlimited success and more about achieving independence and freedom. As Wilkerson explains, “By their actions, they did not dream the American Dream, they willed it into being by a definition of their own choosing.” To me, that means that the American dream requires both individual determination and social and economic policies that allow all people to achieve greater opportunity.
