D.G. Martin

CHAPEL HILL — “He had to walk a thin line between being a man and acting a slave. Step too far on one side, and he couldn’t live with himself. Step too far on the other, and he might not live at all.”

Isabel Wilkerson is describing the all too common dilemma of blacks in the South during the early and middle part of the last century. Her book “The Warmth of Other Suns” is a compelling chronicle of the exodus of Southern blacks to Northern cities between 1915 and 1970.

During this “Great Migration,” six million African Americans moved away from the South. In 1915, 90 percent of American blacks lived in the South. By 1970, 47 percent lived outside the region.

The impact on American life, culture, and politics, Wilkerson asserts, was and is monumental. She gives the facts and figures to show the importance of the Migration.

But the power and appeal of her book are its stories — like the “thin line” that the Mississippi sharecropper husband of Ida Mae Gladney had to walk when he quietly and respectfully “registered his discontent” to “Mr. Edd,” his landlord and boss.  Mr. Edd and a group of men had barged into the Gladney shack one night.

One of the men had threatened and terrified Ida Mae. Then the group severely beat a man they had mistakenly accused of stealing turkeys.  

Ida Mae and her husband were convinced that they could be the next to suffer a beating, if they stepped the least bit out of line. “This is the last crop we making,” he told Ida Mae.

Getting out of Mississippi — or any Southern state — in 1937 was not as easy as I would have thought. Sharecroppers were usually in debt to the landlord. That debt effectively attached them to the land as if they were serfs.

The out migration of blacks created a labor shortage for farm owners in the South. When their workers tried to leave, they did everything they could to persuade them or intimidate them to stay.

Ida Mae and her family successfully slipped out of Mississippi and made their way to Chicago, where they faced another set of racially based discrimination in housing and workplace opportunities. But it was nothing like what they had had to fear back home.

In Mississippi, Ida Mae had not thought of voting. In Chicago, she quickly became a voter and a political worker. Late in her life, a young state senator visited her local organization. She paid him little attention, not knowing that he would someday be President of the United States.

Wilkerson shares the stories of two other migrants.

George Starling grew up working in the Florida orange groves. When his plans for continuing his college education were disrupted, he went back to picking fruit. When he stirred up trouble by demanding more pay, he became a target of the local sheriff, an unapologetic. Fearing a lynching, he hid and snuck away to New York City. George became a railroad porter and took care of passengers who, like him, were fleeing the South.

Professional people, like Dr. Robert Foster, a surgeon, left because the doors to the operating rooms in Southern hospitals were not open for use by black doctors. In Los Angeles, Foster found another set of closed professional doors. Over time he knocked down most of them. When he saved the injured hand of musician Ray Charles, he became famous and wealthy.

Ida Mae, George, Robert, and six million others left the South. But when they left, they took the South with them. They brought their food, their music, their religion, and their ways of speaking to the North.

And the North would never be the same.
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D.G. Martin hosts UNC-TV’s North Carolina Bookwatch, which airs at 9:30 p.m. Fridays and 5 p.m. Sundays. For more information or to view prior programs visit the webpage at www.unctv.org/ncbookwatch/