I recently read “The Warmth of Other Suns,” Isabel Wilkerson’s remarkable study of the “Great Migration” in which about six million Black Americans left the Deep South and moved North and West in the early and mid-20C. They moved to escape the horrific oppression of the “Jim Crow” era and build new lives for themselves and their progeny. It’s an impressive and moving historical study, combining rich personal stories with some overall sociological context.
Virtually every major US city was deeply affected by this demographic shift and the ubiquitous presence of Black culture (and White reactions) makes it all too easy to think that this has always been the case. Nonetheless, across the 20C and continuing today, US music, labor relations, housing patterns, and political issues and participants are all products of this relatively recent change.
The US has always been a society with considerable racism. However, up through the Civil War, the peculiar institution of chattel slavery was its deepest expression and the principal focus of a modernity which claimed some moral foundation based on the dignity of the individual. It was (relatively) easy to oppose slavery and many who did and likely more of those who merely went along with abolition remained profoundly racist. There’s no small mythologizing of the Civil War as a moral struggle, but few in the North fought for treating Blacks as full citizens and social equals.
Of course, abolition was hardly the end of the story. While the formalities of slavery were prohibited, the flourishing of Black freedom in the South (“Reconstruction”) was all too brief and both in terms of culture and economics, the status of almost all Blacks in the South returned to an appalling state. Whether in terms of lynchings, the economics of farm labor, or daily social relations, the lives of most Blacks were hardly better by 1900 than they had been in 1850.
Reading about the treatment of Blacks in the South at this time brought to mind the stories with which I had been more familiar as a historian of European imperialism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The conquest and exploitation of indigenous peoples across the 15-20C took place far away from the centers of power (the “metropoles”) in the “home” countries of those empires. While the US was an empire in this sense as well, we can also look at the treatment of Blacks in the South as an imperial project. Rather than leaving the exploited labor ‘in situ,’ we (via the Spanish, Portugues, British etc.) moved them to the work locations in Alabama, Georgia, etc. As a variant in the modes of the projection of power over another people (my definition of imperialism), this seems to fit. Certainly the treatment of the people involved and the motivations were well within the normal frames of imperialism.
All this was quite interesting to me at the “macro” level, and Wilkerson’s writing ensured my deeper understanding of some of the individual stories, but what drew me to the book was a personal, if indirect connection.
I grew up in an upper-middle class household in suburban Detroit in the 1960s. We had a series of household servants—maids and laundresses—throughout that time. They were all Black women. Anniebell Shepherd joined us in the mid-1960s and stayed working for my folks well into the 1990s. I have only fond memories of her warmth, attention, and cooking. At the time (as a child) her presence seemed unremarkable (most of my friends and family had Black household servants). I knew she had been born in the South and had come to Detroit well before I was born.
I never asked her about her motivations and experiences. But later, I came to wonder how her story was part of this broader historical process in the US. I learned she was born in Mississippi in 1912 and moved to Detroit in the mid-1940s. Wilkerson’s book gave me context within which I could place Anniebell.
As the author describes it, the race-based discrimination of America in the North and West was widespread and endemic. It lacked, however, in most cases, the full extent of the physical abuse and legal structures characteristic of the South. Both WWI and WWII brought a sharp increase in the demand for labor and thus created opportunities for Blacks seeking to escape the awfulness of the South. But we should make no mistake: while Blacks were better off and this improvement in conditions was sufficient motivation for the challenges of leaving their homes and families, this attractiveness was only relative to what was left behind. It took the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s to launch another round of legal changes on the road to equality. And, in terms of culture, practice, and attitudes, a lot of work remains to be done (even before the current retrenchment).
I was unaware of all this of course as a child, with little understanding of the history and social practices manifest in our house or, more broadly, that gave rise to the Detroit (and other) race riots of the late 1960s. I didn’t think of myself as racist, nor my parents, nor their friends and families. This book has given me a powerful lesson about the limited scope of my awareness. Just as a fish doesn’t know that its water that they’re swimming in, neither did I appreciate much of blithe assumptions and comforts of upper middle class White life at that time; nor the implicit (even if not malevolent) racism of our situation.
Decades later, I remain a work in progress in this regard. I have to tolerate the discomfort of pushing myself to see how I still act in ways which I find improper/wrong just because of my own history/socialization/laziness—and then change.
(btw, Juneteenth is next week; it’s a federal holiday and a commemoration of the Great Emancipation of the 1860s and a reminder that the legal formalities are often some distance from people’s daily lives.)
Virtually every major US city was deeply affected by this demographic shift and the ubiquitous presence of Black culture (and White reactions) makes it all too easy to think that this has always been the case. Nonetheless, across the 20C and continuing today, US music, labor relations, housing patterns, and political issues and participants are all products of this relatively recent change.
The US has always been a society with considerable racism. However, up through the Civil War, the peculiar institution of chattel slavery was its deepest expression and the principal focus of a modernity which claimed some moral foundation based on the dignity of the individual. It was (relatively) easy to oppose slavery and many who did and likely more of those who merely went along with abolition remained profoundly racist. There’s no small mythologizing of the Civil War as a moral struggle, but few in the North fought for treating Blacks as full citizens and social equals.
Of course, abolition was hardly the end of the story. While the formalities of slavery were prohibited, the flourishing of Black freedom in the South (“Reconstruction”) was all too brief and both in terms of culture and economics, the status of almost all Blacks in the South returned to an appalling state. Whether in terms of lynchings, the economics of farm labor, or daily social relations, the lives of most Blacks were hardly better by 1900 than they had been in 1850.
Reading about the treatment of Blacks in the South at this time brought to mind the stories with which I had been more familiar as a historian of European imperialism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The conquest and exploitation of indigenous peoples across the 15-20C took place far away from the centers of power (the “metropoles”) in the “home” countries of those empires. While the US was an empire in this sense as well, we can also look at the treatment of Blacks in the South as an imperial project. Rather than leaving the exploited labor ‘in situ,’ we (via the Spanish, Portugues, British etc.) moved them to the work locations in Alabama, Georgia, etc. As a variant in the modes of the projection of power over another people (my definition of imperialism), this seems to fit. Certainly the treatment of the people involved and the motivations were well within the normal frames of imperialism.
All this was quite interesting to me at the “macro” level, and Wilkerson’s writing ensured my deeper understanding of some of the individual stories, but what drew me to the book was a personal, if indirect connection.
I grew up in an upper-middle class household in suburban Detroit in the 1960s. We had a series of household servants—maids and laundresses—throughout that time. They were all Black women. Anniebell Shepherd joined us in the mid-1960s and stayed working for my folks well into the 1990s. I have only fond memories of her warmth, attention, and cooking. At the time (as a child) her presence seemed unremarkable (most of my friends and family had Black household servants). I knew she had been born in the South and had come to Detroit well before I was born.
I never asked her about her motivations and experiences. But later, I came to wonder how her story was part of this broader historical process in the US. I learned she was born in Mississippi in 1912 and moved to Detroit in the mid-1940s. Wilkerson’s book gave me context within which I could place Anniebell.
As the author describes it, the race-based discrimination of America in the North and West was widespread and endemic. It lacked, however, in most cases, the full extent of the physical abuse and legal structures characteristic of the South. Both WWI and WWII brought a sharp increase in the demand for labor and thus created opportunities for Blacks seeking to escape the awfulness of the South. But we should make no mistake: while Blacks were better off and this improvement in conditions was sufficient motivation for the challenges of leaving their homes and families, this attractiveness was only relative to what was left behind. It took the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s to launch another round of legal changes on the road to equality. And, in terms of culture, practice, and attitudes, a lot of work remains to be done (even before the current retrenchment).
I was unaware of all this of course as a child, with little understanding of the history and social practices manifest in our house or, more broadly, that gave rise to the Detroit (and other) race riots of the late 1960s. I didn’t think of myself as racist, nor my parents, nor their friends and families. This book has given me a powerful lesson about the limited scope of my awareness. Just as a fish doesn’t know that its water that they’re swimming in, neither did I appreciate much of blithe assumptions and comforts of upper middle class White life at that time; nor the implicit (even if not malevolent) racism of our situation.
Decades later, I remain a work in progress in this regard. I have to tolerate the discomfort of pushing myself to see how I still act in ways which I find improper/wrong just because of my own history/socialization/laziness—and then change.
(btw, Juneteenth is next week; it’s a federal holiday and a commemoration of the Great Emancipation of the 1860s and a reminder that the legal formalities are often some distance from people’s daily lives.)
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