The Warmth Of Other Suns

“A railing divided the stairs onto the train, one side of the railing for white passengers, the other for colored, so the soles of their shoes would not touch the same stair. [George Swanson Starling] boarded on the colored side of the railing, a final reminder from the place of his birth of the absurdity of the world he was leaving.” 

George Starling’s trip out of the South highlights the absurd practices of segregation: The fact that Starling could not even walk on the same ground as whites proves the insanity that marked the codes and rules of Southern life.

“From the early years of the twentieth century to well past its middle age, nearly every black family in the American South, which meant nearly every black family in America, had a decision to make. There were sharecroppers losing at settlement. Typists wanting to work in an office. Yard boys scared that a single gesture near the planter’s wife could leave them hanging from an oak tree. They were all stuck in a caste system as hard and unyielding as the red Georgia clay, and they each had a decision before them. In this, they were not unlike anyone who has ever longed to cross the Atlantic or the Rio Grande.” 

Now that African-Americans had the ability to move out of the South, would they take that chance, or would they remain? This question was central to the debate between many black Southerners of whether it was better to move North to escape the South and its ways entirely, or to stay in the South and try to change the mechanisms of its government and social life from within. 

“Ida Mae soon discovered that, when it came to white people, there were good ones and bad ones like anything else and that she had to watch them close to figure out the differences.” 

Gladney points out the degree of nuanced people-reading required of African-Americans in the South. Black people had to minutely analyze, understand, and acclimate to the white people around them, since even the most progressively-minded whites could suddenly turn on a dime, intimidated by other white people around them for breaking racist decorum. 

“No one knows who was the first to leave. It was sometime in the middle of World War I. The North faced a labor shortage and, after centuries of indifference, cast its gaze at last on the servant class of the South. The North needed workers, and the workers needed an escape. No one knows exactly when or how it commenced or who took the first actual step of what would become the Great Migration.” 

Unlike many historical migrations that can often be traced to a specific catalyst, no one moment kicked off the Great Migration. Because of this, it has been often overlooked or seen as a so-called quiet migration, whose effects were only noted after it ended. 

“By the time Lil George was old enough to notice, it seemed as if the whole world was crazy, not because of any single event but because of the slow discovery of just how circumscribed his life was turning out to be. All this stepping off the sidewalk, not looking even in the direction of a white woman, the sirring and ma’aming and waiting until all the white people had been served before buying your ice cream cone, with violence and even death awaiting any misstep. Each generation had to learn the rules without understanding why, because there was no understanding why, and each one either accepted or rebelled in that moment of realization and paid a price for whichever they chose.” 

African-Americans in the South had to be aware of the written rules governing their daily lives, and just as aware of the unwritten codes of conduct that dominated Southern culture—something learned through years of experience. Both conforming and rebelling meant losing a part of oneself. Black people who protested the system ran the risk of being killed; those who quietly submitted were battered by the rage of injustices visited upon them. Many strove to find a middle path that would keep them safe and not arouse the ire of whites. 

“You sleep over a volcano, which may erupt at any moment.” 

A Southern woman on the verge of leaving the South said this to demonstrate how unpredictable life was for African-Americans during Jim Crow. One day their lives could be relatively normal, the next they could be dead. They lived at the mercy of the whims of the whites around them and had no security or peace of mind. 

“He [George Swanson Starling] told his father what his father already knew. Men had been hanged for far less than what George was orchestrating. And there would be no protecting him if he stayed. In Florida and the rest of the Deep South, ‘the killing of a Negro by a white man ceased in practice even to call for legal inquiry,’ a white southerner observed in the early 1940s.”

Having attempted to organize the growers in his citrus grove to get more money, George ran the risk of being seen as a rabble-rouser. Retribution against African-Americans happened with impunity—very few, if any, white men were ever prosecuted for their actions. 

“[Robert Pershing Foster] was starting over now. His mother was gone. What he would be called was up to him. In California, he would be Robert or, better yet, Bob. Bob with a martini and stingy-brim hat. It was modern and hip, it suited the new version of himself as the leading man in his own motion picture. He had tested it out in Atlanta, and it had caught on. The people in California who knew him back home would get used to it in time. Bob. Simple and direct and easy to remember. He rolled the word around in his mind, and he liked it.” 

Names were very important to the African-American community because it was one decision they had complete agency over. Thus, naming was about more than identity—a name carried the weight of geography and history. Many African-Americans either simplified or flat out changed their names once out of the South in an effort to both leave the South behind and start over.

“Robert was feeling sick now. It was too late to turn back, and who knew what he was heading into? The man told him to gear himself up. The man didn’t use the term, and nobody had bothered to tell Robert ahead of time, but some colored people who had made the journey called it James Crow in California.” 

Although African-Americans escaped the South, they didn’t find full equality or escape racism. In the North, racism persisted in subtler forms. Calling it “James Crow” underscores the sense that the North teemed with more sophisticated, but no less demeaning, racism.

“[Robert Pershing Foster] realized he had entered a more complicated universe than he had imagined. Colored people in California didn’t have to go to colored doctors if they didn’t want to. They had choices colored people in the South couldn’t dream of. To make matters worse for a colored doctor new in town, the very system that instilled privilege and superiority in southern whites also instilled a sense of inferiority in their southern workers, and when the latter got the chance to get all that had been denied them, some sought out whatever they were convinced was superior—and thus white.”

Expecting other black migrants in California to flock to him, Foster was shocked that African-Americans did not want to go to black-owned service providers because they viewed the white options as better. 

“Just by being able to keep his job, which he would for many years, George [Gladney] would be spared the contentious relations at so many plants in the North, where the migrants were scorned if they were hired at all, or outright turned away. Most migrants like George were hired into either menial labor—janitors or window cleaners or assembly-line workers—or hard labor—longshoremen, coal miners, stokers of foundries and diggers of ditches, which is what he had done before landing the assembly-line job at Campbell Soup.”

This passage highlights how, although the North appeared better than the South, the options that many African-Americas had in the North were severely limited. They could earn more and be treated better in Northern cities, but they were still on the bottom of the social ladder. 

“It was only a matter of time before just about every colored family in the North, unsettled though they might have been, got visitors as George and Ida Mae did. There was a back-and-forth of people, anxious, giddy, wanting to come north and see what all the fuss was about. And when even a colored guest paid a visit while the Migration was on, and even decades later, he or she could be assured of finding the same southern peasant food, the same turnip greens, ham hocks, corn bread in Chicago as in Mississippi.” 

Those who had come North had a duty to help those coming after them. When guests came to the North, they brought Southern culture with them. Their hosts, conversely, showcased the opportunities available after leaving the Though migrants had left the South physically, it still dominated much of who they were culturally. 

“Let’s not fool ourselves, we are far from the Promised Land, both north and south.” 

Martin Luther King, Jr. points out that although the North and the West were much better for African-Americans than the South was, they were still far from being utopias for black people, who still had to deal with racism and injustice.

“Decades later, the message would still hang in the air, the calculus pretty much the same. By the end of the twentieth century, blacks would make up more than eighty percent of the population in Detroit. Just across the Ford Expressway, the black population of the suburb of Dearborn, the 2000 census found, was one percent.” 

The North developed segregated parallel societies due to exclusionary housing laws. Off-the-books predeterminations would create entirely white or Black housing areas in a process called self-segregation. The practice belied the North’s view of itself as a bastion of freedom, equality, and opportunity.

“[Martin Luther] King was running headlong into what the sociologist Gunnar Myrdal called the Northern Paradox. In the North, Myrdal wrote, ‘almost everybody is against discrimination in general, but, at the same time, almost everybody practices discrimination in his own personal affairs’—that is, by not allowing blacks into unions or clubhouses, certain jobs, and white neighborhoods, indeed, avoiding social interaction overall.” 

Northern racism was hard to fight because it could recede. It wasn’t on the books; instead, it was often passive and thus less obvious. White flight is an excellent example of this—as whites and industry moved out of Black and Black-adjacent neighborhoods, those neighborhoods eroded due to lack of jobs and shrinking corporate and property tax revenue.

“What did they know of the frustration of the young people who had grown up in the mirage of equality but a whole different reality, in a densely packed world of drugs and gangs and disorder, with promises that seemed to have turned to dust?” 

One of the central themes of The Warmth of Other Suns is the generational divide between the original migrants and their children. For those who had left the South, the North was an imperfect but opportunity-filled place. Later generations born in the North didn’t have the same urgency to fulfill their potential as their parents; instead, they succumbed to the darker aspects of city life. 

“The hierarchy in the North ‘called for blacks to remain in their station,’ [Stanley] Lieberson wrote, while immigrants were rewarded for ‘their ability to leave their old world traits’ and become American as quickly as possible. Society urged them to leave Poland and Latvia behind and enter the mainstream white world. Not so with their black counterparts like Ida Mae, Robert, and George.”

The idea of immigrants becoming American is central to the American foundational myth. This notion seemed to only extend to whites who could shed their ancestry and blend in. Because African-Americans could never be able to shed their skin color, they would never be able to fully escape their past. Even though they were already citizens, whites could never see them as fully American as white immigrants.

“The presence of so many black migrants elevated the status of other immigrants in the North and West. Black southerners stepped into a hierarchy that assigned them a station beneath everyone else, no matter that their families had been in the country for centuries. Their arrival unwittingly diverted anti-immigrant antagonisms their way, as they were an even less favored outsider group than the immigrants they encountered in the North and helped make formerly ridiculed groups more acceptable by comparison.” 

Wilkerson tries to dispel the idea that Black migration caused the drop in the living standard in Northern Cities. On the contrary, the facts show that, if anything, Southern Blacks were more ambitious than their Northern counterparts—they actually raised the standard of living in their communities. However, because they faced greater prejudice than immigrant communities around them, they suffered more at the hands of politicians and government regulations. 

“As long as the two had known each other, Robert’s fixations never made sense to Jimmy. ‘He [Robert] always sought approval,’ Jimmy said. ‘And I never understood it because he had it all.’” 

Despite everything, Foster remained insecure about his achievements. He had to constantly prove he had made it, flaunting his wealth and competing with white people. The need to display wealth through conspicuous consumption became a part of migrant African-American life. 

“From his front stoop George Starling watches a most desperate parade. On these streets, there were once people gliding down the boulevard as if on a Paris runway, the men in overcoats and fedoras, the women in mink-collared swing coats and butterfly hats, all rushing to work for the rich white people or the manufacturers of paint or hats or lampshades. Now there are the hooded and disheveled descendants of the least able of the migrants living out their lives on the streets.” 

The generations stemming from the Black migrants of the Great Migration failed to live up to the promise of their forebears. Once-affluent and culturally rich neighborhoods faced a downturn. African-Americans no longer tried to create their own paradises in Northern cities, as the succeeding generations brought down much of what the first generation attempted to build. 

“All told, perhaps the most significant measure of the Great Migration was the act of leaving itself, regardless of the individual outcome. Despite the private disappointments and triumphs of any individual migrant, the Migration, in some ways, was its own point. The achievement was in making the decision to be free and acting on that decision, wherever the journey led them.” 

Because they had for so long been denied agency in the South, making life decisions like choosing to leave, were huge victories for many Southern Blacks. For the first time, they were taking their fate into their own hands and could make their own choices. 

“They left to pursue some version of happiness, whether they achieved it or not. It was a seemingly simple thing that the majority of Americans could take for granted but that the migrants and their forebears never had a right to in the world they had fled.” 

Regardless of success or failure in the US North or West, just the fact of individual choice and ability should count as success for migrants compared to African-Americans who remained in the South. The race-based caste system of Jim Crow-era policies in the South disallowed individualism, choice, and happiness. 

“As with immigrant parents, a generational divide arose between the migrants and their children. The migrants couldn’t understand their impatient, northern-bred sons and daughters—why the children who had been spared the heartache of a racial caste system were not more grateful to have been delivered from the South. The children couldn’t relate to the stories of southern persecution when they were facing gangs and drive-by shootings, or, in the more elite circles, the embarrassment of southern parents with accents and peasant food when the children were trying to fit into the middle-class enclaves of the North.” 

Second-generation migrants could not fully understand what their parents had fled, and thus didn’t fully appreciate all that the North offered. Their parents lacked patience and understanding towards the issues and frustrations of their children, because they could not grasp how anyone could be unhappy away from all of the evils of the South.