Report from Santa Fe; Isabel Wilkerson

The National Education Association of New Mexico, an organization of professionals who believe that investing in public education is an investment in our state's economic future. And by a grant from the Healey Foundation, Tau's New Mexico. Hello, I'm Lorraine Mills, and welcome to report from Santa Fe. Today our guest is Isabel Wilkerson. Thank you for joining us. Thanks so much for having me. Well, you were on leave as professor of journalism and narrative nonfiction from Boston University. You were the first African American woman in journalism to win the Pulitzer Prize. And you were the first black American to win for individual reporting. Congratulations.

Thanks so much. But you're here because I love, love your book. It's called The Warmth of Other Sons, the epic story of America's Great Migration. And thank you for writing this. Tell us, tell us what compelled you to dig into this the most under-reported story in 20th century American history. Well, in some ways, it's my own family story. It's a story really of the majority of African Americans that you might meet, North, Midwest, and West. And when you go beyond that, it's really the story of many, many, many Americans whose origins meant that they have ancestors who cross the Atlantic, cross the Pacific Ocean, cross the Rio Grande to get to these shores. And so in some ways, it's so many people's stories. And yet, it hadn't been told in this way. My parents were part of this Great Migration. They came from two different parts of the South, two Washington DC from Georgia and Virginia

to Washington DC. And had they not migrated, I wouldn't even be here, which is really the American story. So that's one of the things that propelled me to want to do it. Actually haven't been raised by them. This story about the Great Migration was never talked about. People who lived it did not talk about this experience, did not share it with their children. In some ways, it was something they had endured that had been so painful that they didn't want to burden their children with all that they had gone through. And so no one talked about the Great Migration in the terms that we now do. No one said, remember when we came up in the Great Migration, or remember when the Great Migration was on, it was an unspoken reality that affected everything and yet no one spoke of it. I actually, through all of my history, never heard of anything called the Great Migration. And I think it was because it was happening while I was still alive. So let's talk about when it was, who first looked back and said, hey, what we were doing

other things is huge things been happening. So tell me when, who, why? Well the Great Migration was the outpouring of six million black southerners from the South to the North and Midwest that began in World War I and did not end until the 1970s. So it went on for so long and went on for close to 60 years, three generations, so many people leaving that it was really hard for any one person to capture while it was going on or even to recognize in terms of its magnitude because it was really reshaping our country even as it was going on. But look how much she's been written about tiny migrations, the gold rush, what a hundred thousand, the dust bowl, maybe three hundred thousand, this is six million. I think part of it is because it went on for so long and was up in because the people who were part of this migration in some ways they were, when they arrived in these big cities, the cities began to respond to the effect of their being there.

So the reasons why they were coming, the motivations, the dreams and the aspirations that they had often got lost. It took you 15 years to write this book. Yes. And you interviewed over 1200 people. Yes. You have gotten more accolades than the wars. I think then anyone, any author I have interviewed, you got to cover the New York Times book review. You are on the New York Times bestseller list, every nonfiction word, I can't even name them all, the New York Times every best book of the year thing. And then finally, in 2012, the New York Times decided we are going to make a list of the all-time best books of nonfiction. And there you are. All-time. Yes. Congratulations. Thank you. Talk to me about how you chose it and how you chose to do it this way. I wanted to tell the story because it was everywhere in our culture. This had had an effect on music, on theater, on literature, on the politics north and south.

And some ways one of the reasons why there are blue states and red states is that the places that they went, those cities, those places often became blue by their arrival. These people who had not been permitted to vote where they were from and the Democrats were the first to get them when they arrived. And so it changed so much of our country's history and yet no one was really talking about in these terms. And so I wanted to understand why did these people go? How did they make the decision to leave? What were the circumstances and the conditions that they were living in and the places that they were coming from and what happened to them when they arrived? Part of the desire that I had was because my parents weren't talking about it and I wanted to know why. How did I get here? It's an existential question that all of us might have. And so I said about trying to get to them before it was too late. Remember, if the migration began during World War I and it began because the north had a labor shortage during World War I and they began to recruit in the south and they had to go in secret because the south didn't take kindly to the poaching of its cheap labor so it made it very difficult for the north and it's to come in and recruit African-American

workers. And that's how it began. And so the people who were the earliest people to be part of this migration were getting up in years by the time I started to look into it, which is the late 1990s. So I began to set about trying to find them as quickly as I could. It was a race against the clock to get to them before it was too late. Well, I wanted to try to explain to our audience what you've done here because you take the entire historical epic, it is truly an epic of what was going on with the Jim Crow laws and what was going on in the south and then you take three stories, three emblematic stories and I'll let you tell us who they were and how you chose them. And you trace their whole life, how they found the courage to go off leap into the unknown the way they did. And they were their example of three of the streams of migration that went to different parts of America. And then you wrap it all up, you incorporate all the history, all the contemporary news accounts, and then at the beating heart, it's just personal, intimate and compelling stories

of the complete lives of these three individuals who were they and why did you choose them. Well, the three of them represent, as you mentioned, the three streams of this migration and any migration people are beautifully predictable. I mean, the same way people came across the Atlantic to the United States and from particular parts of Europe. Many people of Irish descent ended up in parts of Boston or in Chicago or in parts of New York. And so they were beautifully predictable. And these three people represented the three streams. There was one person who represents the East Coast stream from Florida up to New York. Another one represents the Midwest stream from Mississippi up to the Midwest. And then there was a third stream from Louisiana and Texas out here to the West. And so they each represent the stream. They also represent three different circumstances and conditions under which they were living where they were. One was a chaircropper's wife who was terrible at picking cotton. I love the fact that she was because it shows you that there was, you know, all kinds

of people who were forced to do that. There was a man who had been working in the citrus groves and he could see he had a little bit of education in school, but the money had run out. And so he could see when he returned to the work of citrus picking that they were being cheated and what they were making. And so he said about trying to get more, better working conditions and a little bit more pay, five cents more box for a box of fruit. And for doing that, he essentially confronted and challenged the caste system which did not permit that kind of standing up for oneself. And he had to flee to New York, essentially for his life. And then the third person was a physician who was not permitted to practice surgery in his own hometown, even though he'd done so in the army in Europe. And so he decided that he was going to come out west. He was from Louisiana and he decided he was going to go to California. And those are the three people that I focus on. And in that little one sentence, you cannot give the emotionality, the drama, the, I mean, when I read these stories, I really could not put them down.

One of the big prizes you got was from Harvard and Columbia University gave you something called the Linton History Prize. This is what they said about you. She has created a brilliant and innovative paradox, an intimate epic. These stories are so intimate and yet it's set against his vast panoply of history. Has anyone ever done that before? I am not aware of the depth of time that it's of spending on something like this. And it really is a combination of ethnography and anthropology and understanding history and just spending time at the knee of these people who've been through so much. And you could just what you couldn't get enough of their stories. They had a tremendous sense of courage and a sense of humor that a lot of people might not expect in a book of this kind. And they were beautifully flawed like any of us. And yet history and circumstances and their lives converged to force them to have to make a decision and the decision they made was whether to stay or whether to go and they decided

to go. Well, one of the other points you make is that this was a leaderless migration, one by one, courageously individuals decided that they were going to go and try to find a better life. That's one reason why it kind of was under the radar screen because there was no leader. There was nobody who set the time or the hour that the people should go. Each one of them in their own lives looked at the circumstances around and they looked in a very dangerous and terrifying world in which it was actually, you know, we didn't get to this, but it was actually against the law for a black person and a white person who merely played checkers together in Birmingham. The Bible itself was segregated in court rooms. They couldn't touch the witnesses, could not touch the same Bible. Did the truth or something on a black Bible? Yes, for a holy black people, and they couldn't touch the same Bible. So there were such arcane rules that were enforced with such a sense of violence that they were living in a world that was a hard for us to imagine today.

And so when they decided to leave, they were leaving one by one, by one. In fact, many of them could not declare that they were leaving. They had to leave in secret in the middle of the night. Many of them were running for their lives, essentially, if they got on the wrong side of someone in the caste system that they were under. It didn't take much to, you know, it was a matter of not tipping one's hat when they ran across someone of the upper caste or if they didn't step off the sidewalk quickly enough. Any infraction could literally mean your life. And so those are the circumstances that they were leaving when they were part of this. History has just kind of not exactly prettified it because we know about lynchings and we know about the randomness and the arbitraryness of when you could be beaten to death for just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The real horror of that was kind of the floor of their life. I mean, there was always this random, you just like you said, you didn't tip your hat

pass on that. But at the time, this is basically a story about life in the 20th century, the first two thirds of the 20th century, within the lifespan of many, many, many millions upon millions of people alive today. And so what this is really saying is that in some ways some of the more terrifying aspects, the things that made life so much, so much more difficult than it needed to be and essentially said in motion a lot of the conflict that we even have in this country today, occurred because of the smallness of it. In fact, the smaller, presumably insignificant things are the kinds of things you could lose your life for. For example, one of the things that the more common reason for lynching, we're not for the larger things such as some untoward remark, toward a white woman, which of course happened with Emmett Till, but for the smaller things, the biggest, the most common reason for losing one's life would be for the accusation of acting like a white person. For that, you could lose your life, and many, many, many people did.

And so that meant any, any number of things of not getting off the road, not stopping for a white motorist quickly enough. It was a mercurial nerve-jangling world in which to live. And I think it's those everyday terrors and fears that actually made it more oppressive than we might imagine otherwise. We're speaking today with Isabel Wilkesson, who is the author of this wonderful book, The Warmth of Other Sons, The Epic Story of America's Great Migration. One of the things about immigrants and migration was pointed out in the 20s. Was that the Negroes alone of all our immigrants came to America against their will. You know, here are these people, you know, captured, brought in bondage to be slaves. And then through what do you think was, what was trickling down for them to realize, besides the terror that, that, wait a minute, shouldn't I be able to vote, shouldn't I be able to educate my children?

Shouldn't I be able to get an education? That's what happened with George Starling. Yes. If he'd had an education, if he'd been able to finish his whole life, it would have been different. Totally different. But the, you know, the thing is that as long as there was slavery, there were people who wanted to leave. There were always slaves who were attempting to escape, and many of them were trying to get to Canada. There was underground railroad that, that, that helped to ferry out many, many people. So there had always been a desire to leave, but it wasn't until the North began to actively recruit that the true connection, North and South, the true possibilities of freedom are beckoned for them. And when that call came, they began to answer. To such a degree, and with such forcefulness, that actually got to the point where the North didn't have to recruit anymore. Once the first few people arrived, then they sent for their relatives or cousins, their nephews, their younger brothers and sisters, as was also the case among immigrants to this country, and thus there was an entire day-luge of people arriving. You'll ask you what are the lessons for African-Americans today, and one of the things you

say is, sit down with your grandparents, really ask them about their story. Well, I see lessons for all Americans. I mean, this, the book is, you know, the subtitle is the epic story of America's Great Migration. But in some ways, it's about the search for freedom, and how far people are willing to go to get it. And that's how, you know, this country got the large population it has, is because people were looking for freedom. And these are people who within their own country had to find freedom in other parts of their own country. This is the only group of people in our country's history that has ever had to act as immigrants in order to be recognized as citizens within their own country. And that, that's a singular distinction that, that shows you how badly these people wanted to be free, like any other American. But we still see infringements on freedom now that I'm thinking of this stop and frisk laws in New York, and driving while black or brown.

I mean, there's no other, there's no north to go to. How can we make those changes? And, and at the core of that question, is what's the relationship between the Great Migration and the Civil Rights Movement? That's such a great question. That's a big question. Yeah. Wow. First of all, the, you know, what can we learn from it and what do we do? I mean, part of the, part of the reality is, as a country, we've not dealt with these really painful, deep-seated, very long-running divisions and problems. This is as if we have, you know, we have tragedy in the family and we've never dealt with it. Never, ever dealt with it. There's been no truth in reconciliation commission, and yet all Americans bear the scars of what happened, because this happened on our soil. Didn't happen in another country. It happened right here, and there are descendants of really harsh, terrifying realities that are, you know, that are here in our own country, and we've not dealt with it.

Secondly, you can change the laws, but that doesn't mean that you change the hearts. And the connection between this Great Migration and the Civil Rights Movement is that the Civil Rights Movement would have happened eventually. But this mass defection of six million people who had been the bedrock of the working class, the bedrock of the economy of the South, when they defected in the ways that they did, sought political asylum, you might say, within the borders of their own country, that had a tremendous effect on what was going to happen north and south. The north was then dealing with the arrival of so many people they really were not prepared for. The South was dealing with what did it mean to have so many people in some ways voting with their feet. It was a referendum on how the people were being treated. And so together, that in some ways propelled what we now view as a Civil Rights Movement. It was a precursor to the Civil Rights Movement. There were so many people who made their political will known through their migration that had

put a lot of pressure on both the north and south. I want to flesh it out with some numbers because before the Great Migration, 90% of the blacks in America were in the South. After 50% of the blacks in America were not in the South. Spread out all over the country. That's huge. It's a total redistribution of an entire people. And so when those people made that decision and remember, it was a leap of faith, many of them had never been outside the county into which they had been born. There was no Google. They couldn't Google up what a Cincinnati looked like. I mean, they had no way of knowing. And so they were just making this great leap of faith. And to me, I think that's indicative of just how badly they wanted to be free. Some of the effects. Let's look at how is our country different now? I'm thinking about music, language, culture, cities. It changed the nature of cities. It's changed the nature of the politics of almost every northern and western city because

the arrival of so many people who had never been allowed to vote before now suddenly could vote. And it was a question of, it was a toss up as to which party would get to them first. The Democrats got to them first. They would have likely have been Republican because it was a party of Lincoln, but the Democrats got to them first. And that's one of the reasons that we have blue states and red states, if you think about it. Secondly, when it comes to culture, really 20th century American culture, as we know it, absolutely that emanated from the cities is really the culture of the Great Migration. So much of what we take for granted as just the way things are actually came as a result of the Great Migration. Music, as we know it, would be something completely different. Had these people not migrated, brought with them the music that had sustained them, the blues, the spirituals, and the gospel music that had sustained them all that time. And then changed it to something different and new that the kids did, some of them. We have Motown, which never would have existed, had there been no Great Migration.

Barry Gordy, his parents were from Georgia, they migrated to Detroit. And that's where he recruited people who also are household names, Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, the temptations, all of the Marvin Gaye, all of those people were children of the Great Migration. Every single one of them were children of the Great Migration. When it comes to jazz, jazz, as we know, it simply would not have existed. Miles Davis, his parents, were from Arkansas, migrated to Illinois. He got the luxury of being able to spend time honing the genius that was within him, but which might have gone foul when the cotton country of Arkansas. The loniest monk, his parents, were from North Carolina, migrated to New York when he was four years old. That's where his mother saved up to get him a used piano and that's, you know, and then the rest of his history. And John Coltrane, John Coltrane himself migrated at age 16 from North Carolina to Philadelphia where believe it not, it was not until he got to North Philadelphia that he got his first alto sax.

And these are to some of the names from Tony Morrison to August Wilson. These are all children of the migration who change who not only existed and got opportunities because of this migration, but actually changed 20th century culture as we know it because of what they were now free to do that they would not have been able to do had there been no great migration. He musicians, one of the main stories you do Robert Prushing Foster was the physician two Ray Charles and who was also part of the great migration. Yes. And they both had parallel life stories, they both ended up in LA and he once sent, you know, had a terrible injury to his piano hand and Dr. Foster could have endangered his life actually was a very serious situation that he was in. You're gentlemen, one of the three stories here helped him and then he wrote a song about him called Heidner Hair. I mean, it's just wonderful the way it keeps expanding, keeps expanding, keeps expanding. I was wondering if you would take a moment to read us just that bit of the poem from which

you took the title of this book, The Warmth of Other Sons. Yes. It comes from the words of Richard Wright who was also part of the great migration, a wrote native son and he left Mississippi for Chicago in 1927 and so he wrote these words as he was contemplating his moment of departure from this place he had known for a place he had never seen and he wrote 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 sons and perhaps just perhaps to bloom. Oh, that is so beautiful and it makes me think what other sons are there.

Here is this huge piece of my history, of American history that I kind of just didn't get how big it was and so what other worlds are there? What other sons, for us to bloom under, what other huge unreported stories are out there and are you working? Are you looking? You spent 15 years, you get some time off. But are there other stories that called you the way this epic story called you? Well I do plan to continue writing but for now the book is just taken over my life. I've literally been from Anchorage, Alaska and Amsterdam and the Netherlands talking about this book is sort of taken over my life and I think one of the things that stays with me gets to your other question and that is what are the other sons? And I think that as I contemplate that passage that I read to you from Richard Wright and

I've gone all over the country and even outside the country talking about it, I'm convinced that actually the real lesson of all of this for those who succeeded in this migration or any migration is that the sun was within them all along. There are no other places to go. It's a finite planet and we have to find the sun within us. Well, so your advice to young people is, you know, I think we need a new definition of hero is to recognize that we all have strengths within all of our families otherwise we wouldn't be here. We're all descendants from people who have survived so much more than we can even imagine. And to me, the lesson would be that we go back and hear those stories within our own families without looking, not always looking to the outside and remember this was a leader was revolution. They didn't look to leaders to solve their problems. They took it upon themselves. They had absolutely nothing and they took it upon themselves to say in this world that we're in our work is devalued and our very lives are devalued perhaps we'll fare better

elsewhere and they set out for something better and I think that they're telling us something. There's something some message that they're telling us and that is that the answers and the strengths are within us and within our own families and our stories. We have a higher self esteem in children when they know their own family story, their own family stories, how did we survive, how did we get there, get where we are. And to respect who are we, our ancestors, our grandparents and the choices and the courage that it took. The courage that they all had. Yes. And to remind the warmth of other sons, I'm so happy that you've been with us today. Our guest today is Isabelle Wilkerson. Thank you for joining us. Thanks so much for having me. And I cannot recommend this highly enough, the warmth of other sons. It's the epic story of the Great Migration. Once you start the spooky, we'll not be able to put it down. It's really compelling and a tremendous gift to us. Thank you.

Thank you. And I'd like to thank you our audience for being with us today on report from Santa Fe. We'll see you next week. Past archival programs of report from Santa Fe are available at the website report from Santa Fe dot com. If you have questions or comments, please email info at report from Santa Fe dot com. Report from Santa Fe is made possible in part by grants from the members of the National Education Association of New Mexico, an organization of professionals who believe that investing in public education is an investment in our state's economic future. And by a grant from the Healey Foundation, Taos, New Mexico.