ECON 3248 Fall 2020 Isabel Wilkerson on the Great Migration from the Warmth of Other Suns p 1 Notes on Great Migration and the Return Migration that post 1990

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Isabel Wilkerson, Journalist and Author of the Warmth Fof Other Suns 15,325 views •Jan 21, 2011

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Note to cite one of these paragraphs or quotes please search for it and add a timestamp, for example Rio Grande is mentioned 2:46 minutes into this talk, so cite this comment a Wilkerson, Isabel (2011) Invited Speaker at Yale University Jan 21st YouTube video Yale University, New Haven. ECON 3248 Fall 2020 Isabel Wilkerson on the Great Migration from the Warmth of Other Suns p 2

Additional Materials on the Great Migration: CUNY American Social History Project Toppo and Overberg (2015) USA Today, Feb 2nd After nearly 100 years, Great Migration begins reversal “College Grads And Retirees Are Leading The Return Of Blacks To The South A Note on return Migration: Returning migrants tend to start new businesses, on this we have evidence from Albania* (see the Harvard CID Albania project including Ricardo Hausmann’s 2017 talk) and China (see Lin and Revindo (2021) Return home and start a new business: return Migration in China, APEL, Australian National University. *Note the Albanian Diaspora is large, we have many Albania immigrants in the Bronx, many Arthur Ave shops and restaurants are owned by Albanians Isabel Wilkerson, journalist and author of "The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration," speaks at Yale as a Poynter Fellow in Journalism. The event was co-sponsored by the Department of African American Studies. Inspired by her own parents' migration, Wilkerson devoted 15 years researching and writing her first book, "The Warmth of Other Suns." The book chronicles the stories of a sharecropper's wife, a laborer and a surgeon who were among the six million black Americans that fled the American South during the Great Migration between World War I and the 1970s. It is the story of how the northern cities evolve as a result of the migration, of the music and culture that might not have existed had these individuals not left the South in search of new beginnings.

Named one of The New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year, "The Warmth of Other Suns" (September 2010) has received critical acclaim for telling one of the greatest underreported stories in American history. Wilkerson interviewed more than 1,200 individuals, unearthed archival works and gathered the voices of the famous and the unknown to tell the epic story.

Transcript created byYouTube (not perfect, my changes in italics and yellow highlights added) Thank you so much professor Alexander it's such an to be here and to even see you after all these years to even be on the same stage the poet still means a lot to a journalist it's still an out-of-body experience to be standing here before you today after having completed this book I have been on a journey of my own just to report and to write this book this book is 15 years of love and obsession and passion and dedication and absorption into another era it's 15 years so that if this were human being it would be in high school and dating which gives you a sense of what it took to write this book I come to you as a journalist who has made the transition of the journey herself from daily journalism newspaper journalism at the I would argue and say always the best newspaper in the country if not the world and devoted myself to understanding what I believe to be the biggest underreported story of the 20th century I'm glad that I didn't know it was going to take 15 years because I don't think I would have finished it I don't think I would have embarked upon it had I known but I'm glad that I didn't know because it allowed me to to start this and to complete it now I decided to devote myself for my first book to something gargantuan something that lasted throughout most of the 20th century involved six million people changed altered forever the demographics the culture the politics of our country so I just thought I'd start with something small you know go from small with smaller stories or run a newspaper in a day to something it would take 15 years this story is a universal story of longing and determination which I was convinced from the very beginning could have meaning for people far beyond the reach of the stories itself themselves The people who left had the immigrant heart they had the same longing and determination for something better as anyone who ever crossed the Atlantic in steerage or crossed the Pacific Ocean and hopes for something better or crossed the Rio Grande to get to this country. ECON 3248 Fall 2020 Isabel Wilkerson on the Great Migration from the Warmth of Other Suns p 3 In fact it's the story if you think of it of almost every American because who among us would even be here had there not been someone in our backgrounds from someplace far away who had the courage the will the determination and the grit to leave the only place that they'd ever known for a place that they'd never seen. In hopes that life might be better no guarantees whatsoever and we all in some ways though our existence to that how many of us have… I've known so many people who have say an Irish great-grandmother who met an Italian great-grandfather on the Lower East Side of Manhattan or on the southwest side of Chicago or perhaps in Boston and they never would have met they came here and created whole new lineages. We in fact owe a debt our very existence in fact to someone who did that otherwise we wouldn't be here that is truly the American story and that's what happened within the own borders of our of our own country now these six million people who left this great migration began during World War one and did not end until 1970 when the essential conditions that had led to this migration were finally resolved in the South I call this overground railroad because in some ways they were responding to and acting upon the unmet promises of the Emancipation Proclamation in other words the Emancipation Proclamation did not live up to its name and it took these people to actually make it become real to free themselves these were in my view defections from a caste these people were seeking political asylum as any group of people might think political asylum in this country except they were citizens already and that makes it all the more poignant to me all the more tragic in some ways and all the more daring in its own way and that is in fact the reason why it went underreported for so long because people didn't take notice of people who were migrating within their own borders there was there was no Ellis Island to through which the people had to be processed they if they could manage to get out they were they were free to leave the question was how they were going get out now I focus on trying to understand the world that they were leaving what would propel six million people to leave the land of their forefathers for a place that they'd never seen in search of what Richard Wright calls the warmth of other Suns they in fact we're not leaving for a warmer Thunder they were leaving for Suns as we know so well just looking outside today is clearly not any warmer than those that they were leaving but symbolically they were my mother actually was always a believer in this title so the book was a nameless orphan child for a very long time and I while I was working on it and settled on this title for reasons I could talk about a little bit later and she said to me she was a part of this great migration she said to me yes we had to leave because our sun was cold our sun was cold now they were living under an artificial hierarchy a caste system which as with the it's related word caste (or cast) as one would put on a broken bone is in some ways a stricter it holds one fast in a certain place and that's exactly what this caste system did people were assigned to a certain caste upon birth based upon lineage and what they look like such that there was no opportunity at a point for there to be almost any interaction between the races save for the actual mechanics of work that was the only way that they could be that there could be any interaction between the two so that In Birmingham it was actually against the law for a black person and a white person to play checkers together one has to imagine how someone came up with that as a law someone must have seen a black person and a white person playing checkers in some courthouse square in Birmingham and perhaps the two were having too good a time maybe they were laughing joking I'm between the two of them and someone must have seen it and said that the entire foundation of the American South is imperiled and we must end this now so someone had to go and write this out as a law so that this would not happen anymore this would have heard everyone would have heard the black person who wanted to play and the white person who might have really quite enjoyed playing checkers with their friend but this was an indication of just how far the southern caste system was going to go to maintain this system which was required to ensure that there would be an oversupply of ready and willing cheap labor to work the cotton to work the cotton fields to work the tobacco fields to raise the rice and sugar cane and all the other things that the southern caste system had relied upon in order to make the economy ECON 3248 Fall 2020 Isabel Wilkerson on the Great Migration from the Warmth of Other Suns p 4 work throughout the south in courtrooms there was a black Bible and a white Bible to swear to tell the truth on I could asked about that when I mention it they say well was it a different kind of Bible like the King James Version for one an American Standard for another it turns out that it was the exact same Bible that wasn't the point the point was that they could not touch the same sacred text and I found out about this law almost by accident I was looking for something else and I came a client across an article in a North Carolina newspaper commenting on the fact that this was a law but not out of alarm or shame or embarrassment or even really announcing that there was a law they the story came about because the need for a second Bible had created a disruption in the courthouse in the courtroom that day they had to suspend the trial in order to find a Bible because they could not find the black Bible so they had to look for the black Bible and that meant that the bailiff and all the court officers had to go from courtroom to courtroom search that courtroom in order to find the Bible for the black witness that had just taken the stand and so this is an indication of just how normal it was viewed it was considered just an ordinary thing and the judge upon ordering the bailiff to find the black Bible said well this is the court this is a court of law and this is the law of the state and therefore we must abide by that so we must find this black Bible and they did now when I talk about the Jim Crow which is what is the term that we often use to describe what I call a caste system I spent a lot of time looking for all of the possible ways that were devised to keep these races these different levels of the caste separate there are no references in the book to water fountains or restrooms because we know that already so there are no references to that I was looking for any other possible example to make real for the reader what it was like to be in that circumstance so that a person might have to would be forced I would hope to think what would I do if I were in that situation what would I do what I stay or what I leave so one of the examples that I find in talking about this book I find that one example seems to get to people quite a bit and I'd like to see if people would be willing to raise their hand if they have ever passed someone on the road he was driving too slowly anyone ever passed someone why would you do that this is laughter because it's so obvious well it turns out that under the caste system an African American motorist was not permitted to pass a white motorist on the road no matter how slowly that person was driving no matter how many times and we all have been through this the person stopped because they thought that was the turn but no it was not the turn maybe it's the next to turn and then the next turn and there was nothing that that person could do and as I have talked with younger people about it with the high school students even about the reality of this caste system and I tell them about this they will often say well I would have hopped someone even said I would bump them and I said no you would not because one of the one of the realities of this caste system is that because it was so artificial was an artificial hierarchy that had been created in order to maintain an economic system that really truly was in peril to begin with and unsustainable to begin with that it had to be brutally enforced it was enforced with such sent a level of terror and violence that every four days somewhere in the South an African American was lynched over all kinds of things and not always the things that traditionally have been viewed as the precipitating events that would lead to lynching such as the accusation of the rape of a white woman that was one of the many reasons that a person could be lynched but I came across so many other examples one man was lynched for having stolen been accused of having stolen 75 cents for 75 cents he was dope he was lynched others were lynched because they had been accused of stealing a hog others were lynched for a very common cause of lynching was the accusation of having been have having acted like a white person whatever that means that means for whatever reason they had done something they had not stepped off the sidewalk they had not stopped for the white mode of motorists they had looked straight into the eyes of a white person and called them by their first name they had made some breach of southern protocol that warranted action that would then be put all the other people in that same caste on notice that this was not acceptable behavior so for many reasons these people many purported reasons these people were living under extreme terror that is almost hard to believe it doesn't even sound like the United States of America it sounds like the Soviet Union but during the Cold War and yet this was within our own country so that meant that for much of the 20th century and particularly in the ECON 3248 Fall 2020 Isabel Wilkerson on the Great Migration from the Warmth of Other Suns p 5 of the 20th century until the 1960s every African American family in the South had a decision to make they had to think about whether they were one of today or whether they want to go and I wanted to read you a passage a very short one it was an anonymous quote anonymous because it was too dangerous for this woman to let her name be known as she was expressing the sense of fear and agitation among the people to try to figure out what to do she wrote in our homes in our churches wherever two or three are gathered there is a discussion of what is best to do must we remain in the south or go elsewhere where can we go to find that security which other people feel is it best to go in great numbers or only in several families these and many other things are discussed over and over this is a Alabama woman in 1902 in the on the cusp of the great migration so it turned out that the people had wanted to go all along but because there had been no opening for them to leave that actually from the time from emancipation until the beginning of the great migration there actually were very few people who actually made it out we know about the Underground Railroad that occurred during slavery but afterward you would think that things were open and they were putatively free they would have left but it turns out that they needed to they needed a signal that there were options someplace else and that signal came during World War one during World War one the North had a problem the North had a great need for labor because the emigration from Europe came to a virtual halt because Europe was at war and with Europe at war that the immigrants the European immigrants who were already here we often call back home to help with the war effort and that meant that the northern factories the foundries the steel mills the slaughterhouses the railroads all needed labor at a time when there was a great urgency because the world was at war and yet they didn't have war to fill those slots and so they began to look around and to figure out where can we go to find the labor that we need and they went to the cheapest labor in the country the cheapest labor in the land and that would have been African Americans in the South because many African Americans in the South many of them were sharecroppers or farmers and they were working merely for the right to live on the land they were farming and that meant that they were readily and quite anxious to leave if there were a signal that there were options recruiters from the north came to the south to begin looking for labor and found it found it there and that is how the great migration began however once that began the South went into a deep panic they could see that there were going to be they were this was a great threat to the economic system and the social and cultural system and life of those in the South would come to depend upon an oversupply of cheap labor to do whatever was needed to serve the needs of the highest caste and so this is what the make and Telegraph had to say at this moment everybody seems to be asleep about what is going on right under our noses that is everybody but those farmers who have wakened up on mornings recently to find every Negro over 21 on his place gone to Cleveland to Pittsburgh to Chicago to Indianapolis and while our very solvency are very solvency not people not human beings but our very solvency is being sucked out beneath us we go about our affairs as usual this is September 1916 when it began to hit the south when it became clear that these people were leaving they were leaving because they now have the option to do so which they had not had before and so what this meant was the South had to go to great lengths to see what it could do or what it thought it could do to keep the people from leaving so what did they do they began to arrest people from the railroad platforms when there were large numbers of black people with tickets leading heading north they would board the trains and arrest them from this and accused them of or charge them with vagrancy or not of not working which of course they were not working at the moment cuz they were leaving they would when there were too many people for them to arrest they would wave the train on through so for the train would not stop and so with the people the people who had saved up all those months or perhaps even over a year for that train ticket to go had could see the train that the train that they had hoped would lead them to freedom passing right by them and there was nothing they could do about it at that time they began to find other ways to get out instead they would go to nearby towns they would go south in order to go north they would leave in the middle of the night and pack their things and not tell anyone they became to be aware that if they ECON 3248 Fall 2020 Isabel Wilkerson on the Great Migration from the Warmth of Other Suns p 6 were seen in large numbers attempting to lead that that could imperil their efforts to get out and so they found other ways to get around it and in fact the but the preeminent sociologists of the day who did much of the work on covering the great migration Dr. Charles Johnson I became President of Fisk University he wrote that actually these efforts by the south to keep the people from leaving only fed the urge to leave because it was a reminder that this place was not a place that was going to get better for them or that would make life tenable for them now there was a great urgency in quest that they had in the South some people wondered whether they should treat the people better and there was an example of one planter who made the ultimate sacrifice he decided that what I'm doing is not working so what I shall do is I think I will put away my whip and gun and maybe they will Stay now and he made that clear to the people but the people had decided at that point that they were going to go and so then we had this migration on I want to say a little bit about how I and why I decided to spend so much of my time working on this I myself am a product of this great migration and it has touched me so many times as I've worked on this book that I would not even have existed and perhaps the majority of African Americans would not even have existed had there been no great migration simply wouldn't have existed which is also the case for most Americans if you're descended from two streams of migration one from say China and another from Ireland and you simply wouldn't have existed they would never have met had had these two streams not come together in this continent and it's the same is the case for most African Americans my mother migrated from Rome Georgia to Washington DC my father from Petersburg Virginia to Washington DC after he had been a Tuskegee Airmen and they would never have met had they not been part of great migration but growing up no one talked about it as a great migration no one very rarely would you even hear the term used no one said things like well remember when the great migration began or remember when all those people came up in the great migration or remember how during the great migration people did this or did that people don't talk about it people in fact did not talk about what they had experienced people in fact did not talk about the south it's almost as if we had just landed from another planet and just were there was no backstory there was nothing that preceded that in fact many of them when they left because they were leaving such heartache and terror in fact for some of them that they often changed their names they changed their accents they became northern they turned their backs on all that they had known and became as northern and or American as they could imagine themselves to be and so I grew up in a world in which I was surrounded by people from North Carolina and South Carolina which I understand and know is the one of the great tributaries to Newhaven example that in some ways much of Connecticut is sort of North Carolina South Carolina north and I grew up in that same that same environment but you know he hearing the language the music partaking of the food and the folkways the spiritual values the folk wisdom that comes from that rural southern culture a small-town culture that is what I grew up with but no one ever described it as anything beyond just I left and so I wanted to understand that better and that's the reason why I set out to tell this story with great urgency when I began it because the people this migration began in 1916 and that means that these people were leaving us rapidly I went about it with great urgency knowing that the stories were this in order to get the story I had to act fast because the stories were not going to be there forever these people were not going to be with us forever and I needed to get to them very quickly before was too late so I set out on a course in which I went out and interviewed people in all these different senior centers and AARP meetings and meetings of retired postal workers and quilting clubs and churches in in Brooklyn where everybody was from South Carolina and Catholic churches in Louisiana I'm sorry in Los Angeles where everyone is from Louisiana and so all of these all of these in all of these places I went looking for people who might be able to share their stories and when I would go in it turned out that everywhere you went you were running into these beautiful streams that showed the the predictability and the kind of comforting movements of people that could be predicted so precisely that if you go to Los Angeles you could be pretty much assured that many of the people you run into her from Texas or Louisiana that is just the way this migration unfolded the migration unfolded in three separate streams three major streams with tributaries ECON 3248 Fall 2020 Isabel Wilkerson on the Great Migration from the Warmth of Other Suns p 7 along the way one was the East Coast stream where we're pretty much at the end of that stream people really wanted to get a when they came up to Connecticut I think this stream is the one that took people from Florida the Carolinas Georgia and Virginia to Washington DC the first stop some people said this is far enough for me and then up to Philadelphia New York Connecticut Boston and that was this East Coast dream that was a stream

that my family was a part of and to give you an example of how beautifully predictable it is when I went to these other places to do the reporting and this reporting took off. It ook almost two years just to settle on these three people when I would go to California I would run into people from a different stream and I almost had to prove myself because the question was where are your people from the expectation was if I'm in California then clearly you from Texas of Louisiana which I was not and the food was different they were eating ox tails and red beans and rice my mother wasn't didn't make that when I was growing up when I was in Chicago talking to doing the research on this they ate different food suddenly I was exposed to something called hog head cheese how many of you heard of that and I was I didn't know what it was and it was a delicacy which was offered on on a bus trip to one of the floating casinos in Iowa and the seniors there were so excited because someone had the good stuff direct from the source in Mississippi and they were passing it around and I had to find a way to let them know that I was just going to pass on that and I would get it the next time I didn't know what it was I literally don't know what it was my mother had made that and it's true that many people force took everything and actually did not make anything from the old country my mother actually did but ours was a different thing was more scrapple and grits and collard greens a turnip greens which she preferred but in any case I found that there were cultural differences it actually created some challenges and they've been just doing the work so when I was in California I had to prove myself many times over had to learn the names the pronunciations of the small towns in Louisiana which weren't not just rolling off the tongue for me given what I was exposed to and where I was from same goes for for Mississippi where had to learn the language and the and the pronunciations almost as if you're talking about different country but when I got to New York which was my focus for this for the for this migration stream for the protagonist for my book I actually ran into people who knew my father from Petersburg Virginia that is how beautifully predictable this migration is in the same way that if you go to Minnesota you went to a lot of people from Scandinavia and it's the same thing with this migration I just find that to be one of the comforting things about human behavior is that we're actually quite predictable and we like to do things in an orderly fashion and this was a fairly this is not a haphazard unfurling of lost souls this was a very orderly transfer of a good portion of the black population of an entire population along the bus routes and the railroad lines that took them out the most direct routes out of wherever they happen to be and that is the reason why when I went to these different places I was running in to certain people from certain places and very few people very little cross-pollination when it came to this which is quite comforting in and of itself now that means then that the majority of African Americans that you meet in the north and west are descended from this great migration the majority this migration began 90% of all African Americans 90% we're living in the south all concentrated in this one region of the country by the end of this great migration nearly half of living all in all parts North Midwest and west from Washington to this great arc north to Connecticut in Boston New England over to Cleveland and Detroit in Chicago and all the way over to the west coast they were everywhere but the south and that caused a total redistribution of an entire people which had the effect of putting pressure on the south in ways that it had not anticipated pressure on the north that could not have been anticipated and this unfolding of this migration which at every point along the way every key point the end of World War one at the end of World War two people were saying it's over the people are not going to come any more clearly there's no reason for them to come but no one told the people that make kept coming because you know human behavior is not always so controllable as that no one told them that it was over so they kept coming this migration has ECON 3248 Fall 2020 Isabel Wilkerson on the Great Migration from the Warmth of Other Suns p 8 changed American culture in ways that we are still trying to understand to give you a few examples of the ways that it affected our culture one example is the effect on the politics of our country and I mean the laws and politics and the ultimate end of the caste system is as it had been known in the south this end of the caste system would have ended eventually it would have ended eventually but this great migration helped to accelerate it the people at the time of the great migration began we're not in a position to have exerted their will as even though they might have wanted to they were not in a position even to honk at someone who was driving slowly in front of them much less tell them you will let us vote you will let us walk into the front door of the courthouse they were not in a position to do that the time was not right for it and the demographics of the south meant that economically speaking there were too many African Americans too much too many of the low of the cheap labor all concentrated an oversupply which meant that they had there that the value of that labor had been quite low and to increase the value of that labor meant there needed to be less of that labor in the south and these people without a leader this is a leaderless revolution which is perhaps to me the most inspiring part of this entire migration nd the most inspiring thing about any immigrant experience is that no one sounds the hour or the day as to when it shall begin no one said on this day we shall all go no leader said that it is best for us to leave because economically we will have will have more power if we and more influence and greater value if we are someplace the people within their hearts took an accounting of their circumstance and said it would be better for us to leave these were individual decisions when you talk with them they don't speak of themselves as being a part of the great migration when I would go to these senior centers and talk with them if I were to say to them how many of you were a part of the great migration not a single hand would go up if I asked them how many of you left Louisiana or Texas for California between the years of 1960 to 1970 every hand would go up because they didn't view themselves as part of this great migration they were making decisions that were particular to them and their circumstances at that time at that place and they decided that they could not take this caste system one day longer and they made this decision so this is a leaderless revolution and that revolution slowly person by person one by one put extreme pressure on the South to change and it did it had effect on the people who stayed there were people who stayed and they needed to stay because it needed to be someone to be there to fight the ultimate battle which we call the civil rights movement of the 1960s there needed to be people there to brave those sheriffs hoses and those dogs and to March those marches but there also needed to people be people outside of it the effect of the people on the outside was tremendous in the same way that from our perch here in the United States we can have tremendous influence on other parts of the world where there are atrocities or human rights abuses because we have the means to do that we can be more watchful we can make contributions financially we can provide a political lever for those people in other places and the exact same thing happened north and south with this great migration having so many people in the North that the people in the south could now point to and say if things get difficult I can go to a cousin in Cleveland that makes a big difference as you're going out and braving those sheriff's hoses they also were they were exposed to the options and to what life could be like when you were free. Martin Luther King himself had gone to Boston University and gotten his doctorate there and it was in Boston that he met his wife Coretta Scott King that had a tremendous impact on his ability to then go return to the south and fight the fact the final battle for freedom ultimately for his people for African Americans but it was a exposure to the north being able to get on a train and I have to sit in the back being able to actually shake the hand of a person of a different race which was not permitted in the in the South believed in I was another one of the strictures one of the protocols it was not permitted such that a historian said that in the South very few people of one race or the other had ever shaken the hand of someone of another race because I was not permitted so the existence of large numbers of African Americans in the north and west did several things it provided an a political psychological emotional and political lever that could be used by those in the south it exposed those in the south to the freedoms that could be experienced by people who look just like them in a different place that was always looming there it also meant that there were people in the North who had means ECON 3248 Fall 2020 Isabel Wilkerson on the Great Migration from the Warmth of Other Suns p 9 just by going to the North while that might not have been their initial their primary concern at the time they were leaving some people leaving just merely to save - in order to avoid being killed but by being in the north they were automatically going to be making more money than the people in the south and they were sending money back home just like every immigrant group does they were sending money back much more often that they could eat then they could even afford and they were sending money back to the mothers and the fathers that needed their help and to support this this nascent civil rights movement that ultimately was

going to need a lot of support in order to succeed so all of these things were working north and south to help change the south helped to affect change in the north even and ultimately to open the way for all other kinds of freedom movements now can take for granted freedom from women freedom for other immigrant groups freedom for even the disabled all of these things that grew out of the initial efforts that occurred during the early there in the mid-1960s that were the catalyst for other kind of types of change and which started because the people the lowest caste people in the south sent a signal to the north and the south that they had options and they were willing to take them now that's one part of the effect but the effect that I think I like to talk about the most is the effect that is really the perhaps the major way of gauging the effect of any immigration and that is the children who are in some ways the great legacy of any great movement of people what is it that what is it that the people were leaving when they left the sovereign what was on their hearts and on their minds when they were leaving for almost any immigrant it is almost too late for them truly to benefit from the migration that they're about to embark on whatever limits on education they had there was not much it was going to change that once they were 30 years old and packing up their Pontiac and heading north or boarding the train with their young children and heading north or leaving the leaving Ireland or Poland or what war or Italy for this for the new world their lives had already been fairly well established whatever lacking and nutrition made experience they had already experienced but that wasn't the case for the children the children might have it better and any emigration involves hope that life will be better for the children and that was what that is where you can see the true impact of this great migration these children of the great migration had the opportunity to do things that their parents could only have dreamt of some of the people who are part of this great migration include Toni Morrison for example: her parents migrated from Alabama to Ohio where she got the opportunity which her parents never would have had never had and what she would not have had they stayed which is merely to walk into a library and to borrow to take out a library book she would not have been able to do that in Alabama during the time that she would have been growing up and that's kind of an important thing to be able to do if you're going to be a Nobel laureate you know you need to be able to read a book to get access to a book and she would not have been able to do that so many other writers in fact much of the African American literature of the 20th century is essentially about the great migration which is one of the things that I found someone's firing about this I mean much of the poetry were speaking of Gwendolyn Brooks for example when we speak of Toni Morrison's work herself a Richard writer almost everything he wrote was about the great migration it was about reconciling his experience in the south and his search for freedom somewhere outside of the south and feeling bound by that somehow invisible man even is about the great migration on some level and about the ship from the Southern College to life in New York and feeling invisible as a result of that migration in theatre Lorraine Hansberry and August Wilson there were all the schools of entire cycle is essentially about the great migration the uprooting of people from the south to Pittsburgh and he used that as at the centerpiece to understand what had this done to an entire people to be uprooted from a place that they had not really wanted to leave and had been forced to leave and that's just in literature in art Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence devoted all most of their energy to cataloging into - to describing and to somehow trying to interpret and make real and there are the pain and the heartache and the joys even that came from this great migration they are symbols of the very thing that we're talking about this means that much of twentieth-century art as and create creativity as we know it was ECON 3248 Fall 2020 Isabel Wilkerson on the Great Migration from the Warmth of Other Suns p 10 all born out of this great migration when it comes to music simply would not be is where there nope no great migration in fact I would argue that the American ear has been reshaped by the transfer of southern folk music to the north through this great migration and the marriage of both southern music to the to the north and the mouth metabolize differently here and got exposure in ways that it would not have been exposed otherwise for example we all know about the blues.

Muddy Waters and BB King all were migrants themselves coming to the north from the Mississippi Delta with their 12 string guitars and the music's and that music in their head but I like to think about other things too which simply would not have existed Motown for example simply wouldn't have existed without the great migration it absolutely would not have existed and that's because Berry Gordy the founder of Motown his parents migrated from Georgia to Detroit where he grew up he decided and want to go into music he did not have necessarily great singing voice nor was he necessarily a musician but he wanted to go into music he wanted to create music company but he didn't have the money to go all over the country scouting out the best talent so what did he do he looked around him and there were teenagers all around him who were the children of the great migration children of people who had made this great leap of faith into a northern city forbidding northern city and one of them was a 14 year old girl who had two friends the 14 year old girl the main one her parents her mother had migrated from Alabama my father from West Virginia they never would have met had there been no great migration she wouldn't even have existed had there been no great migration she had two friends who Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard who both were also children of the great migration their parents had come from the south the Maine when I'm mentioning is Diana Ross we simply would not even know her name had there been a great migration because first she wouldn't have existed and Barry Gordy wouldn't have been able to meet someone it didn't so we wouldn't even know her name and of course that he found them against her parents’ wishes they did not want her to go into music but she did anyway and there were born The Supremes he also heard about it of course that the temptations and all those other groups all had roots in the south a tall we're all part of this ascent the same wave of people so an entire you know an entire art form you might say or subset of music was created as a result of this great migration but Berry Gordy also heard about this very large family in Gary Indiana very large but there were nine or ten kids nine or ten kids and there were five boys in this large family who were known for going around to the different talent shows and apparently winning all these talent shows talent contests and the of the five boys it was the youngest who seemed to be the most talented some even the father would have admitted and he was a Frontman at eight four for this group and Barry Gordy discovered them of course I'm talking about the Jackson five who we would not even know the names of because they wouldn't they too would not have existed their mother migrated from Alabama father from Arkansas they meet outside of Chicago moved to Gary Indiana have a lot of kids who have amazing talent and therefore an entire legendary family comes into being that we would never even have known about those are just a few of the examples of popular music that just simply wouldn't have existed had there been no great migration there's so many other people who are part of that as well but when it comes to jazz for example and we'll give you two more examples of things that would not have existed had there been no great migration when it comes to jazz the three pillars of jazz again simply would we would not even know their names Miles Davis for example we wouldn't know his name Miles Davis has his parents migrated from Arkansas Illinois where he had the opportunity to the luxury really of being able to practice to learn music to practice music but she would never have had in the cotton country of Arkansas now he'd come from a fairly well situated family but even then he would not have had the opportunity to go to better schools would have allowed him the option of being able to take music in the way that he ultimately was Thelonious Monk because parents migrated from from North Carolina to Harlem when he was five years old where he too got the luxury of being able to practice the ECON 3248 Fall 2020 Isabel Wilkerson on the Great Migration from the Warmth of Other Suns p 11 piano to learn music in a way that he never would have had the opportunity to do had his parents stayed in the tobacco country of North Carolina and John Coltrane John Coltrane migrated at the ripe old age of seventeen which is kind of old beginning a musical career in today's world he left at age 17 from North Carolina to Philadelphia and it was in Philadelphia that he got his first alto sax he did not touch an alto sax until he got to Philadelphia his mother gave him one it was a used one and then he went to the Ornstein School of Music in Philadelphia and he apparently played and played and played on his off hours he was working in a factory and I would submit to this day that the people in his apartment building would would deny this to this day that they did what they did but they actually complained to the landlord and said there's this man in 12 C was playing at all hours of the night and you must make him stop because we can't sleep little they know they were saying that there's you know John Coltrane is playing it we don't want to hear him they would deny that I'm sure but where where would where would jazz be where would usik be where would culture be not just American culture but culture in this in the world because John Coltrane is as popular in Tokyo in Paris as he is here in the United States where we're culture be had John Coltrane not gotten on a train and got into Philadelphia and gotten ahold of an alto sax it's unfathomable what that would have meant to music and to our culture the culture as we know it and that's just one example but I want to leave you with one of the most to me stunning examples and I've so grateful to have been able to actually meet him Bill Russell Bill Russell the NBA great it's frightening to think that we might even might not even know his name bill Russell's parents were living in Monroe Louisiana which is a place that I had to go back to for the book which is the reason why is even in the book because Monroe Louisiana figures prominently in the book one of my three protagonists was from Monroe and his parents were having a very hard time of it in the late 1930s and early 1940s at one point his father went to a gas station to get gas and he was having a difficult time getting served and the reason was because the southern protocol required that all white patrons had to be served before any black person could be served no matter when the white person showed up so if white patrons kept coming up that meant he was going to have to wait and wait and wait until plate basically the place was empty or the only person left to be served was another black person in which case he would then move to the front of the line because he'd been there first well he waited and he waited and white patrons kept coming and he decided he was running out of time and it needed to go and he would just get gas another time as he was backing out of the gas station the proprietor set down the hose from which he was using which he was using to to service one of the white patrons and he went over to bill Russell's father he put a gun to his head and he said you'll leave when I say you can leave and don't ever do that again bill Russell's mother at around the same time was walking down in downtown Monroe when a police officer stopped her she was wearing her church clothes she had saved up a long time to get this outfit the police officer did not appreciate what she had on because he thought that it was not in her not fit for someone of her caste and he said he said go home right now take that off don't ever let me see that see that on you again what you have on is not fit for a colored woman only a white woman should be in what you have on if I see that in you on you again I will arrest you this is your last warning Bill Russell was about eight or nine years old at the time and he went came home from school and he saw his mother at the kitchen table and tears over the streets that they were in because this was a world but there was closing in on them and there were no options there were reminders from the moment they woke up to the time they went to sleep that they were in a different caste and that there was no way out and that that it in fact danger attended any potential breach of that caste system so they set out on a course for California they decided that they would go to California they caught the train first to st. Louis in the state and the segregated train and then when they got the st. Louis which was a border city as is Washington DC and El Paso and Texas they in the border city they could switch over to an integrated train and it was called the American Eagle and he remembered it to this day Bill Russell with a little boy and they set out on a course for Oakland where he was able to go to integrate at schools he said that we were like immigrants we had to learn the language that people spoke differently they ate different kind of food which is exactly what I experienced ECON 3248 Fall 2020 Isabel Wilkerson on the Great Migration from the Warmth of Other Suns p 12 growing up too in a way that the that we had to learn the ways of this new place that we were in and I felt like an immigrant he had the opportunity to go to college in an integrated school which he would never been able to do in Louisiana because the state schools even though African Americans were contributing to the funds because they were paying taxes they could not go to the integrated state schools actually they weren't integrated they were white the white schools in there and there are respective states and so he would not have had the opportunity to go to the state school in Louisiana or any white school in Louisiana but in California in this new world he was able to go to the University of San Francisco and the University of San Francisco happen to be an

NCAA school he was very tall as we all know and it turned out that he was not just tall but he was quite skilled and he led his team the Dons to two n-c-double-a championships which of course he never would even have been able to go to an NC double-a school had he been had his family stayed in Louisiana it was because he was at that school and had led that school to two NCAA championships that he came to thee to the attention of the Boston Celtics he was hired onto the baltic boston celtics and it was there that he led boston to 11 of 13 championships NBA championships and is considered even to this day one of the greatest men ever to played the game one of the greatest defensive players ever and people who follow the game for people who follow the game it's almost unimaginable what professional basketball would be had there been no Bill Russell and yet we might not even know his name had his parents not migrated because he would not have had the opportunity to even get to the NBA to come to the attention of the NBA he would very likely be working in a sawmill and no one would know his name that is the impact that this migration had multiplied times six million people and all of their children and their children's children to the point that I am even standing before you today I wouldn't even be here where they're not a great migration I want to end this my discussion with I haven't had a chance to talk much about the three people the three people are item an item a Gladney who migrated from Luisi from Mississippi to Chicago in 1937 she had been a sharecroppers wife who was terrible at picking cotton and they ended up having to leave because a cousin was beaten to women within an inch of his life over a theft that he did not commit afterward there were no apologies it just was one of those things that would happen in 1937 in Mississippi and after that her her husband decided he said to her after he saw what had happened to his cousin this is the last crop were making and they set out on a course for the north the second person was a man who had been a college student but the money ran out and there was no opportunity for him to go to this to the school near his family which would have made it possible for him to go to school he couldn't go he could no longer afford board really and so he and he couldn't go to the white school and in his region so he had to return to the work of the region of Florida where he was which was citrus picking and ultimately he had to flee for his life to Harlem because he had been agitating for better wages and work conditions for the people were picking fruit the work was very dangerous and a crime and a 40-foot trees the pay was reflected the what little value the growers ascribed to the work which was meaning that they paid them ten or twelve cents for a box of fruit which might take them over several most of the day to pick and so under great peril and so he was trying to agitate for better wages and as a result of that he had he had to flee for his life because unions were not welcome at that time and particularly not from African Americans who would have the gall to stand up to the growers in the way that George Starling was doing that so he fled from Florida to Harlem in 1945 and then the last person was Robert Joseph Pershing Foster who was a physician a surgeon in the US Army and he had performed Abele in the army and had been permitted to practice medicine but when he got out of the army after the Korean conflict it turned out that he could not practice surgery in his/her own home of Monroe Louisiana the same town that bill Russell's family had come from and so he decided that he was going to set out for for California and that meant a perilous journey of driving through the night multiple nights without sleep because he could not find a place to rest no place would allow him to would give him a went would rent him a room and he had to go through the hairpin curves and the mountains in the desert of Arizona New Mexico and into California he had not anticipated that he after he would have to drive that far without rest and it was it was not ECON 3248 Fall 2020 Isabel Wilkerson on the Great Migration from the Warmth of Other Suns p 13 only perilous but it was dispiriting to him because he realized that perhaps they made him wonder what was this place he was going to and would it in fact be any better not something that probably weighs on the mind of anyone who ever leaves one place for another because there are no guarantees what is it that you're doing and you often think about what you this person had to go through just to make the decision and once you made the decision you'd like to believe you made the right decision and he was not certain as it did that but I want to read to you this passage about him about where when I first met him this was the this was the day that I first met Robert Joseph Pershing Foster a character unto himself Los Angeles 1996 the panel door rises a story high and would be fit a museum or government office but is actually the front door of a Spanish Revival south of Wilshire the door opens and there stands a one-time bourbon swilling army captain and deft handed surgeon who now in his later years as a regular at the blackjack tables and the trifectas at Santa Anita but he is at the heart of it all and perhaps most important a long-standing still bitter and somewhat obsessive expatriate from the 20th century south the heartbreak Jim Crowe Landy chose to reject the for could reject him again he's a Californian now this Robert Joseph Pershing Foster he is the color of strong coffee and has ways in his hair which he lets grow as untamed design Stein's but then brushes back like the boys in the band he's wearing a white cotton Island shirt loose slacks and sandals the uniform of the well-to-do LA pensioner he has the build and bearing Sammy Davis jr. and not a little of the showmanship and delightful delightful superficiality that seemed to grow on people in certain circles of LA whenever I read that in LA I think to myself I needed to edit that out I meant to edit out the superficiality part but then you know when I've read it they just say yep that's us we're superficial they loved it he walked straight back and flutes we footed into the 4ea past the curve fo Gone with the Wind staircase in the East

Asian pottery he just restored the living room an imposing space that dwarfs him in its volume fairly frozen in the seafoam carpet and hot pink tulip chairs out of a sure buddy Doris Day movie from the 50s the whole effect is a starched and formal as a tuxedos II used to wear to the parties he threw for himself back when Alice his wife was alive and the money was raining down like confetti he seems accustomed to people fawning over the place and with the prim air of leading men of his favorite movies from back in the 40s insists on serving his guests a slice of lemon pound cake and vanilla ice cream on Rosenthal China whether they would like to have it or not he is a physician or was for most of his adult life and by most accounts a very good one and is prone to pontificate like a man of his years and accomplishments but he's just as likely to interrupt himself and check the time to see if he can still make the one o'clock at the Hollywood Park Racetrack his photo albums are filled with an unlikely assortment of bookies and blues singers and dentists and fraternity men and surgeons and society people whose approval he craved even though he knew they were too pretentious to matter really he doesn't say it because it would be gauche and hardly worth mentioning from his point of view but there happened to be a lot of little Roberts around town due to the fact that over the years he delivered a number of baby boys his mother's were so grateful for his firm hand and calming reassurances at the precise moment of truth that they named their sons not after their husbands but after the doctor who delivered their babies before he begins the story he tells you it's a long one and you can't get it all he's lived too many lives done too much known too many people written so high and so low that there's no point in fooling us into thinking you can capture the whole of it you could try of course and he agrees to give as much as he can I love to talk he says a smile forming on his still chiseled face as he sits upright in his tulip chair and I am my favorite subject thank you so much I'm so happy to take your question

ECON 3248 Fall 2020 Isabel Wilkerson on the Great Migration from the Warmth of Other Suns p 14 Transcript created by YouTube for timestamps see above for see pages 2-13 above to find a time stamp find a phrase above and search for in the version below Thank you so much professor Alexander :11 it's such an :13 to be here and to even see you after all :18 these years to even be on the same stage :21 the poet still means a lot to a :23 journalist it's still an out-of-body :25 experience to be standing here before :26 you today after having completed this :28 book I have been on a journey of my own :32 just to report and to write this book :35 this book is 15 years of of love and :42 obsession and passion and dedication and :47 absorption into another era it's 15 :51 years so that if this were human being :54 it would be in high school and dating :58 which gives you a sense of what it took :01 to write this book I come to you as a :07 journalist who has made the transition :09 of the journey herself from daily :12 journalism newspaper journalism at the I :16 would argue and say always the best :19 newspaper in the country if not the :21 world and devoted myself to :24 understanding what I believe to be the :26 biggest underreported story of the 20th :29 century I'm glad that I didn't know it :33 was going to take 15 years because I :34 don't think I would have finished it I :35 don't think I would have embarked upon :37 it had I known but I'm glad that I :40 didn't know because it allowed me to to :42 start this and to complete it now I :46 decided to devote myself for my first :49 book to something gargantuan :53 something that lasted throughout most of :55 the 20th century involved six million :58 people changed altered forever the 2:02 demographics the culture the politics of :06 our country so I just thought I'd start :08 with something small you know go from 2:10 small with smaller stories or run a 2:12 newspaper in a day to something it would :15 take 15 years this story is a universal :20 story of longing and determination which :23 I was can :24 Vince from the very beginning could have :27 meaning for people far beyond the reach :30 of the stories itself themselves these 2:33 people who left had the immigrant heart 2:35 they had the same longing and 2 :37 determination for something better as 02:39 anyone who ever crossed the Atlantic in 2:41 steerage across the Pacific Ocean and hopes for something better across the 2:46 Rio Grande to get to this country and in 2:48 fact it's the story if you think of it 02:51 of almost every American because who :53 among us would even be here had there 2:56 not been someone in our backgrounds from :58 someplace far away who had the courage 3:01 the will the determination and the grit 03:07 to leave the only place that they'd ever 03:09 known for a place that they'd never seen 03:12 in hopes that life might be better no 03:14 guarantees whatsoever and we all in some 03:17 ways though our existence to that how 03:18 many of us have I've know if so many 03:21 people who have say an Irish 03:23 great-grandmother who met an Italian 03:27 great-grandfather on the Lower East Side 03:29 of Manhattan or on the southwest side of 03:32 Chicago or perhaps in Boston and they 03:35 never would have met they came here and 03:37 created whole new lineages and we in 03:40 fact Oh a debt our very existence in 03:42 fact to someone who did that otherwise 03:45 we wouldn't be here that is truly the 03:46 American story and that's what happened 03:48 within the own borders of our of our own 03:50 country now these six million people who 03:55 left this great migration began during 03:58 World War one and did not end until 1970 04:01 when the essential conditions that had led to the - this migration were finally 04:07 resolved in the south I consider this to be what I call the overground railroad 04:15 because in some ways they were 04:17 responding to and acting upon the unmet promises of the Emancipation 04:23 Proclamation in other words theEmancipation Proclamation did not live up to its name and it took these people 04:29 to actually make it become real to free 04:32 themselves these were in my view 04:36 defections from a caste 04:38 these people were seeking political 04:41 asylum as any group of people might 04:43 think political asylum in this country ECON 3248 Fall 2020 Isabel Wilkerson on the Great Migration from the Warmth of Other Suns p 15 04:46 except they were citizens already and that makes it all the more poignant to 04:49 me all the more tragic in some ways and 04:51 all the more daring in its own way and that is in fact the reason why it went 04:56 underreported for so long because people didn't take notice of people who were 5:01 migrating within their own borders there 05:03 was there was no Ellis Island to through 05:07 which the people had to be processed 05:09 they if they could manage to get out 05:12 they were they were free to leave the 05:15 question was how they were going to get out 05:17 now I focus so much on trying to 05:21 understand what was the world that they 05:24 were leaving what would propel six 05:26 million people to leave the land of 05:28 their forefathers for a place that 05:29 they'd never seen in search of what 05:31 Richard Wright calls the warmth of other 05:33 Suns they in fact we're not leaving for 05:36 a warmer Thunder they were leaving for 05:38 Suns as we know so well just looking 05:40 outside today is clearly not any warmer 05:44 than those that they were leaving but 05:47 symbolically they were my mother 05:50 actually was always a believer in this 05:53 title so the book was a nameless orphan 05:55 child for a very long time and I while I 05:58 was working on it and settled on this title for reasons I could talk about a 6:02 little bit later and she said to me she 06:04 was a part of this great migration she 06:07 said to me yes we had to leave 06:09 because our son was cold our son was 06:12 cold 06:13 now they were living under an artificial 06:16 hierarchy a caste system which as with 06:20 the it's it's related word caste as one 06:24 would put on a broken bone is in some 06:28 ways a stricter it holds one fast in a 06:32 certain place and that's exactly what 06:33 this caste system did people were 06:36 assigned to a certain caste upon birth 06:40 based upon lineage and what they look 06:43 like such that there was no opportunity 06:48 at 06:49 a point for there to be almost any 06:51 interaction between the races save for 06:53 the actual mechanics of work that was 06:59 the only way that they could be that 7:01 there could be any interaction between the two so that in Birmingham it was actually against the law for a black person and a white person to play checkers together one has to imagine how someone came up with that as a law someone must have seen a black person and a white person playing checkers in some courthouse square in Birmingham and perhaps the two were having too good a time maybe they were laughing joking I'm between the two of them and someone must have seen it and said that the entire foundation of the American South is imperiled and we must end this now so someone had to go and write this out as a law so that this would not happen anymore this would have heard everyone would have heard the black person who wanted to play and the white person who might have really quite enjoyed playing checkers with their friend but this was an indication of just how far the southern caste system was going to go to 8:03 maintain this system which was required 08:06 to ensure that there would be an 08:08 oversupply of ready and willing cheap 08:13 labour to work the cotton to work the 08:17 cotton fields to work the tobacco fields 08:19 to raise the rice the sugar cane and 08:23 all the other things that the southern 08:25 caste system had relied upon in order to 08:28 make the economy work throughout the 08:32 south in courtrooms there was a black 08:36 Bible and a white Bible to swear to tell 08:38 the truth on I could asked about that 08:40 when I mention it they say well was it a 08:42 different kind of Bible like the King 08:44 James Version for one an American 08:45 Standard for another it turns out that 08:48 it was the exact same Bible that wasn't 08:50 the point the point was that they could 08:52 not touch the same sacred text and I 08:56 found out about this law almost by 9:00 accident I was looking for something 09:02 else and I came 09:02 a client across an article in a North 09:05 North Carolina newspaper and the North 09:07 Carolina newspaper was commenting on the 09:09 fact that this was a law but not out of 09:11 alarm or shame or embarrassment or even 09:14 really announcing that there was a law 09:16 they the story came about because 09:19 the need for a second Bible had created 09:24 a disruption in the courthouse in the 09:25 courtroom that day they had to suspend 09:28 the trial in order to ECON 3248 Fall 2020 Isabel Wilkerson on the Great Migration from the Warmth of Other Suns p 16 find a Bible 09:31 because they could not find the black 09:33 Bible so they had to look for the black 09:35 Bible and that meant that the bailiff 09:37 and all the court officers had to go 09:40 from courtroom to courtroom search that 09:43 courtroom in order to find the Bible for 09:44 the black witness that had just taken 09:47 the stand and so this is an indication 09:49 of just how normal it was viewed it was 09:51 considered just an ordinary thing and 09:53 the judge upon ordering the bailiff to 09:56 find the black Bible said well this is 10:00 the court this is a court of law 10:02 and this is the law of the state and 10:03 therefore we must abide by that so we 10:06 must find this black Bible and they did 10:08 now when I talk about the Jim Crow 10:12 which is what is the term that weed 10:14 is often used to describe what I call a 10:16 caste system I often looked I was look I 10:21 spend a lot of time looking for all of 10:23 the possible ways that were devised to 10:26 keep these races these different levels 10:28 of the caste separate there are no 10:30 references in the book to water 10:33 fountains or restrooms because we know 10:35 that already so there are no references 10:37 to that I was looking for any other 10:39 possible example to make real for the 10:43 reader what it was like to be in that 10:45 circumstance so that a person might have 10:46 to would be forced I would hope to think 10:49 what would I do if I were in that 10:51 situation what would I do what I stay or 10:55 what I leave so one of the examples that 10:58 I find in talking about this book I find 11:03 that one example seems to get to people 11:05 quite a bit and I'd like to see if 11:08 people would be willing to raise their 11:09 hand if they have ever passed someone 11:13 on the road he was driving too slowly 11:15 anyone ever passed someone why would you 11:19 do that 11:21 this is laughter because it's so obvious 11:23 well it turns out that under the caste 11:26 system an African American motorist was 11:29 not permitted to pass a white motorist 11:32 on the road no matter how slowly that 11:35 person was driving no matter how many 11:37 times and we all have been through this 11:39 the person stopped because they thought 11:41 that was the turn but no it was not the 11:44 turn maybe it's the next to turn and 11:46 then the next turn and there was nothing 11:49 that that person could do and as I have 11:51 talked with with younger people about it 11:55 with the high school students even about 11:57 the reality of this caste system 12:00 and I tell them about this they will often say well I would have hopped someone even said I would bump them and I said no you would not because one of the one of the realities of this caste system is that because it was so artificial, it was an artificial hierarchy that had been created in order to maintain an economic system that really truly was in peril to begin with and unsustainable to begin with so that it had to be brutally enforced it was enforced with such sent a level of terror and violence that every four days every four days somewhere in the South an African American was lynched over all kinds of things and not always the things that traditionally have been viewed as the precipitating events that would lead to lynching such as the accusation of the rape of a white woman that was one of the many reasons that a person could be lynched but I came across so many other examples one man was lynched for having been accused of having stealing 75 cents for 75 cents he was lynched others were lynched because they had been accused of stealing a hog others were lynched for the accusation of having been have having acted like a white person whatever that means that means for whatever reason they or they had not stepped off the sidewalk they had not stopped for the white mode of motorists they had looked straight into the eyes of a white person and called them by their first name they had made some breach of southern protocol that warranted action that would then be put all the other people in that same caste on notice that this was not acceptable behavior so for many many reasons these people many purported reasons these people were we're living under extreme terror that is almost hard to 13:58 believe it doesn't even sound like the 13:59 United States of America it sounds like the Soviet Union but during the Cold War and yet this was within our own country 14:07 so that meant that for much of the 20th 14:12 century and particularly in the 14:14 of the 20th century until the 1960s 14:17 every African American family in the 14:20 South had a decision to make they had to 14:22 think about whether they were one of 14:23 today or whether they want to go and I 14:25 wanted to read ECON 3248 Fall 2020 Isabel Wilkerson on the Great Migration from the Warmth of Other Suns p 17 you a passage a very 14:27 short one it was an anonymous quote 14:32 anonymous because it was too dangerous 14:34 for this woman to let her name be known 14:36 as she was expressing the sense of fear 14:39 and and agitation among the people to 14:44 try to figure out what to do she wrote 14:46 in our homes in our churches wherever 14:48 two or three are gathered there is a 14:51 discussion of what is best to do must we 14:54 remain in the south or go elsewhere 14:56 where can we go to find that security 14:59 which other people feel is it best to go 15:01 in great numbers or only in several 15:03 families these and many other things are 15:06 discussed over and over this is a woman 15:10 in Alabama of 1902 in the on the cusp of 15:15 the great migration so it turned out 15:20 that the people had wanted to go all 15:23 along but because there had been no 15:25 opening for them to leave that actually 15:29 from the time from emancipation until 15:31 the beginning of the great migration 15:32 there actually were very few people who 15:36 actually made it out we know about the 15:37 Underground Railroad that occurred 15:39 during slavery but afterward you would 15:41 think that things were open and they 15:43 were putative Lee free they would have 15:44 left but it turns out that they needed 15:46 to they needed a signal that there were 15:49 options someplace else and that signal 15:52 came during World War one during World 15:54 War one the North had a problem the 15:57 North had a great need for labor because 16:00 the emigration from Europe came to a 16:02 virtual halt because Europe was at war 16:04 and with Europe at war that the 16:07 immigrants the European immigrants who 16:09 were already here we often call back 16:11 home to help with the war effort and 16:12 that meant that the northern factories 16:15 the foundries the steel mills the 16:18 slaughterhouses the railroads all needed 16:21 labor at a time when there was a great 16:23 urgency because the world was at war and 16:26 yet they didn't have war 16:28 to fill those slots and so they began to 16:31 look around and to figure out where can 16:32 we go to find the labor that we need and 16:34 they went to the cheapest labor in the 16:36 country the cheapest labor in the land 16:37 and that would have been African 16:39 Americans in the South because many 16:41 African Americans in the South many of 16:43 them were sharecroppers or farmers and 16:45 they were working merely for the right 16:47 to live on the land they were farming 16:49 and that meant that they were readily 16:53 and quite anxious to leave if there were 16:57 a signal that there were options 16:59 recruiters from the north came to the 17:02 south to began looking for labor and 17:04 found it found it there and that is how 17:09 the great migration began however once 17:13 that began the South went into a deep 17:16 panic they could see that there were 17:19 going to be they were this was a great 17:21 threat to the economic system and the 17:23 social and cultural system and life of 17:25 those in the South would come to depend 17:27 upon an oversupply of cheap labor to do 17:30 whatever was needed to serve the needs 17:32 of the highest caste and so this is what 17:34 the make and Telegraph had to say at 17:36 this moment everybody seems to be asleep 17:39 about what is going on right under our 17:41 noses that is everybody but those 17:43 farmers who have wakened up on mornings 17:45 recently to find every Negro over 21 on 17:49 his place gone to Cleveland to 17:52 Pittsburgh to Chicago to Indianapolis 17:53 and while our very solvency are very 17:57 solvency not people not human beings but 18:00 our very solvency is being sucked out 18:02 beneath us we go about our affairs as 18:05 usual this is September 1916 when it 18:08 began to hit the south when it became 18:11 clear that these people were leaving 18:14 they were leaving because they now have 18:16 the option to do so which they had not 18:18 had before and so what this meant was 18:20 the South had to go to great lengths to 18:23 see what it could do or what it thought 18:24 it could do to keep the people from 18:26 leaving so what did they do they began 18:29 to arrest people from the railroad 18:32 platforms when there were large numbers 18:33 of black people with tickets leading 18:36 heading north they would board the 18:38 trains and arrest them from this 18:40 and accused ECON 3248 Fall 2020 Isabel Wilkerson on the Great Migration from the Warmth of Other Suns p 18 them of or charge them with 18:43 vagrancy or not of not working which of 18:47 course they were not working at the 18:48 moment cuz they were leaving they would 18:51 when there were too many people for them 18:53 to arrest they would wave the train on 18:55 through so for the train would not stop 18:57 and so with the people the people who 18:59 had saved up all those months or perhaps 19:02 even over a year for that train ticket 19:04 to go had could see the train that the 19:09 train that they had hoped would lead 19:10 them to freedom passing right by them 19:12 and there was nothing they could do 19:13 about it at that time they began to find 19:16 other ways to get out instead they would 19:18 go to nearby nearby towns they would go 19:21 south in order to go north they would 19:24 leave in the middle of the night and 19:26 pack their things and not tell anyone 19:28 they became to be aware that if they 19:31 were seen in large numbers attempting to 19:34 lead that that could imperil their 19:35 efforts to get out and so they found 19:37 other ways to get around it and in fact 19:39 the but the preeminent sociologists of 19:43 the day who did much of the work on 19:46 covering the great migration dr. Charles 19:48 Johnson I became a president of Fisk 19:50 University he wrote that actually these 19:52 efforts by the south to keep the people 19:55 from leaving only fed the urge to leave 19:57 because it was a reminder that this 19:59 place was not a place that was going to get better for them or that would 20:03 make life tenable for them now there was 20:07 a great urgency in quest that they had 20:09 in the South some people wondered 20:11 whether they should treat the people 20:12 better and there was an example of one 20:15 one planter who made the ultimate 20:18 sacrifice 20:19 he decided that what I'm doing is not 20:23 working so what I shall do is I think I 20:26 will put away my whip and gun and maybe 20:29 they will stay now and he made that 20:33 clear to the people but the people had 20:36 decided at that point that they were 20:37 going to go and so then we had this 20:40 migration on I want to say a little bit 20:42 about how I and why I decided to spend 20:45 so much of my time working on this I 20:50 myself am a product of this great migration and it has touched me so many times as 20:56 I've worked on this book that I would not even have existed and perhaps the 21:02 majority of African Americans would not 21:04 even have existed had there been no great migration simply wouldn't have existed which is also the case for most Americans if you're descended from two streams of migration one from say China and another from Ireland and you 21:16 simply wouldn't have existed they would never have met had had these two streams not come together in this continent and it's the same is the case for most African Americans my mother migrated from Rome Georgia to Washington DC my father from Petersburg Virginia to 21:34 Washington DC after he had been a Tuskegee Airmen and they would never have met had they not been part of great migration but growing up no one talked about it as a great migration no one very rarely would you even hear the term 21:49 used no one said things like well remember when the great migration began or remember when all those people came 21:56 up in the great migration or remember how during the great migration people 22:01 did this or did that people don't talk about it people in fact did not talk about what they had experienced people 22:06 in fact did not talk about the south it's almost as if we had just landed 22:10 from another planet and just were there there was no backstory there was nothing that preceded that in fact many of them 22:20 when they left because they were leaving such such heartache and and terror in 22:25 fact for some of them that they often changed their names they changed their 22:30 accents they became northern they turned 22:34 their backs on all that they had known 22:36 and became as northern and or American 22:40 as they could imagine themselves to be and so I grew up in a world in which I 22:44 was surrounded by people from North 22:46 Carolina and South Carolina which I 22:48 understand and know is the one of the 22:51 great tributaries to Newhaven 22:54 example that in some ways much of 22:57 Connecticut is sort of North Carolina 22:59 South Carolina north and and I grew up 23:03 in that same that same environment but 23:05 you know he hearing the language the 23:09 music partaking of the food and the 23:12 folkways the spiritual values the folk 23:17 ECON 3248 Fall 2020 Isabel Wilkerson on the Great Migration from the Warmth of Other Suns p 19 wisdom that comes from that rural rural 23:21 southern culture a small-town culture 23:23 that is what I grew up with but no one 23:25 ever described it as anything beyond 23:27 just I left and so I wanted to 23:30 understand that better and that's the 23:31 reason why I set out to tell this story 23:34 with great urgency when I began it 23:37 because the people this migration began 23:39 in 1916 and that means that these people 23:42 were leaving us rapidly I went about it 23:45 with great urgency knowing that the 23:47 stories were this in order to get the 23:50 story I had to act fast because the 23:52 stories were not going to be there 23:53 forever these people were not going to 23:55 be with us forever and I needed to get 23:57 to them very quickly before before was 24:00 too late so I set out on a course in 24:02 which I went out and interviewed people 24:04 in all these different senior centers 24:07 and AARP meetings and meetings of 24:09 retired postal workers and quilting 24:11 clubs and churches in in Brooklyn where 24:14 everybody was from South Carolina and 24:16 Catholic churches in Louisiana I'm sorry 24:19 in Los Angeles where everyone is from 24:20 Louisiana and so all of these all of 24:23 these in all of these places I went 24:24 looking for people who might be able to 24:27 share their stories and when I would go 24:28 in it turned out that everywhere you 24:31 went you were running into these 24:33 beautiful streams that showed the 24:37 the predictability and the kind of 24:41 comforting movements of people that 24:45 could be predicted so precisely that if 24:48 you go to Los Angeles you could be 24:49 pretty much assured that many of the 24:50 people you run into her from Texas or 24:52 Louisiana that is just the way this 24:54 migration unfolded the migration 24:56 unfolded in three separate streams three 24:59 major streams with tributaries along the 25:01 way one was the East Coast stream where 25:04 we're pretty much at the end of that 25:05 stream people really wanted to get a 25:08 when they came up to Connecticut I think 25:12 this stream is the one that took people 25:14 from Florida the Carolinas Georgia and 25:17 Virginia to Washington DC the first stop 25:20 some people said this is far enough for 25:22 me and then up to Philadelphia New York 25:26 Connecticut Boston and that was this 25:29 East Coast dream that was a stream that 25:31 my family was a part of and to give you 25:33 an example of how beautifully 25:34 predictable it is when I went to these 25:36 other places to do the reporting and 25:38 this reporting took off took almost two 25:40 years just to settle on these three 25:42 people when I would go to California I 25:44 would run into people from a different 25:46 stream and I almost had to prove myself 25:48 because the question was where are your 25:51 people from the expectation was if I'm 25:53 in California then clearly you from 25:55 Texas of Louisiana which I was not and 25:57 the food was different they were eating 25:59 ox tails and red beans and rice my 26:02 mother wasn't didn't make that when I 26:03 was growing up when I was in Chicago 26:05 talking to doing the research on this 26:08 they ate different food suddenly I was 26:10 exposed to something called hog head 26:12 cheese how many of you heard of that and 26:14 I was I didn't know what it was and it 26:18 was a delicacy which was offered on on a 26:20 bus trip to one of the floating casinos 26:22 in Iowa and the seniors there were so 26:25 excited because someone had the good 26:27 stuff direct from the source in 26:29 Mississippi and they were passing it 26:31 around and I had to find a way to let 26:34 them know that I was just going to pass on 26:37 that and I would get it the next time I 26:39 didn't know what it was I literally 26:40 don't know what it was my mother had 26:41 made that and it's true that many people 26:43 force took everything and actually did 26:45 not make anything from the old country 26:47 my mother actually did but ours was a 26:49 different thing was more scrapple and 26:51 grits and collard greens a turnip greens 26:53 which she preferred but in any case I 26:55 found that there were cultural 26:57 differences it actually created some 26:58 challenges and they've been just doing 27:00 the work so when I was in California I 27:02 had to prove myself many times over had 27:05 to learn the names the pronunciations of 27:07 the small towns in Louisiana which 27:09 weren't not just rolling off the tongue 27:11 for me given what I was exposed to and 27:13 where I was from same goes for 27:15 for Mississippi where had to learn the 27:17 language and the and the pronunciations 27:19 almost as if you're talking about 27:21 different country but when I got to New 27:23 York which was my focus for this for the 27:28 for this migration stream for the 27:29 protagonist for my book I actually ran 27:33 into people who knew my father from 27:36 Petersburg Virginia that is how 27:38 beautifully predictable this migration 27:40 is in the same way that if you go to 27:42 Minnesota you went to a ECON 3248 Fall 2020 Isabel Wilkerson on the Great Migration from the Warmth of Other Suns p 20 lot of people 27:44 from Scandinavia and it's the same thing 27:46 with this migration I just find that to 27:48 be one of the comforting things about 27:51 human human behavior is that we're 27:54 actually quite predictable and we like 27:56 to do things in an orderly fashion and 27:58 this was a fairly this is not a 28:00 haphazard unfurling of lost souls this 28:02 was a very orderly transfer of a good 28:06 portion of the black population of an 28:08 entire population along the bus routes 28:11 and the railroad lines that took them 28:13 out the most direct routes out of 28:16 wherever they happen to be and that is 28:17 the reason why when I went to these 28:19 different places I was running in to 28:20 certain people from certain places and 28:22 very few people very little 28:25 cross-pollination when it came to this 28:27 which is quite comforting in and of 28:30 itself 28:30 now that means then that the majority of 28:34 African Americans that you meet in the 28:36 north and west are descended from this 28:38 great migration the majority this 28:40 migration began 90% of all 28:44 African Americans 90% we're living in 28:46 the south all concentrated in this one 28:49 region of the country by the end of this 28:51 great migration nearly half of living 28:53 all in all parts North Midwest and west 28:56 from Washington to this great arc north 29:00 to to Connecticut in Boston New England 29:03 over to Cleveland and Detroit in Chicago 29:06 and all the way over to the west coast 29:07 they were everywhere but the south and 29:09 that caused a total redistribution of an 29:12 entire people which had the effect of 29:15 putting pressure on the south in ways 29:17 that it had not anticipated pressure on 29:19 the north that could not have been 29:21 anticipated and this unfolding of this 29:24 migration which at every point along the 29:27 way every key point 29:28 the end of World War one at the end of 29:30 World War two people were saying it's 29:32 over the people are not gonna come 29:34 anymore clearly there's no reason for 29:35 them to come but no one told the people 29:37 that make kept coming because you know 29:39 human behavior is not always so 29:41 controllable as that no one told them 29:43 that it was over so they kept coming 29:44 this migration has changed American 29:48 culture in ways that we are still trying 29:50 to understand to give you a few examples 29:53 of the ways that it affected our culture 29:56 one example is the effect on the 30:00 politics of our country and I mean the 30:02 laws and politics and the ultimate end 30:05 of the caste system is as it had been 30:07 known in the south this end of the caste 30:10 system would have ended eventually it 30:11 would have ended eventually but this 30:14 great migration helped to accelerate it 30:16 the people at the time of the great 30:18 migration began we're not in a position 30:20 to have exerted their will as even 30:25 though they might have wanted to they 30:26 were not in a position even to honk at 30:28 someone who was driving slowly in front 30:30 of them much less tell them you will let 30:32 us vote you will let us walk into the 30:35 front door of the courthouse they were 30:37 not in a position to do that the time 30:39 was not right for it and the 30:41 demographics of the south meant that 30:43 economically speaking there were too 30:45 many African Americans too much too many 30:48 of the low of the cheap labor all 30:51 concentrated an oversupply which meant 30:54 that they had there that the value of 30:56 that labor had been quite low and to 31:00 increase the value of that labor meant 31:02 there needed to be less of that labor in 31:06 the south and these people without a 31:08 leader this is a leaderless revolution 31:10 which is perhaps to me the most 31:12 inspiring part of this entire migration 31:15 and the most inspiring thing about any 31:17 immigrant experience is that no one 31:20 sounds the hour or the day as to when it 31:23 shall begin 31:24 no one said on this day we shall all go 31:27 no leader said that it is best for us to 31:32 leave because economically we will have 31:34 will have more power if we and more 31:36 influence and greater value if we are 31:39 someplace 31:39 the people within their hearts took an 31:43 accounting of their circumstance and 31:46 said it would be better for us to leave 31:48 these were individual decisions when you 31:50 talk with them they don't speak of 31:51 themselves as being a part of the great 31:53 migration when I would go to these 31:54 senior centers and talk with them if I 31:56 were to say to them how many of you were 31:58 a part of the great migration not a 31:59 single hand would go up if I asked them 32:02 how many of you left Louisiana or Texas 32:05 for California between the years of 1960 32:09 to 1970 every hand would go up because 32:12 they didn't view themselves as part of 32:13 this great migration they were ECON 3248 Fall 2020 Isabel Wilkerson on the Great Migration from the Warmth of Other Suns p 21 making 32:15 decisions that were particular to them 32:17 and their circumstances at that time at 32:19 that place and they decided that they 32:21 could not take this caste system one day 32:24 longer and they made this decision so 32:26 this is a leaderless revolution and that 32:29 revolution slowly person by person one 32:33 by one one put extreme pressure on the 32:37 South to change and it did it had effect 32:40 on the people who stayed there were 32:42 people who stayed and they needed to 32:44 stay because it needed to be someone to 32:45 be there to fight the ultimate battle 32:47 which we call the civil rights movement 32:50 of the 1960s there needed to be people 32:53 there to brave those sheriffs hoses and 32:55 those dogs and to March those marches 32:58 but there also needed to people be 33:00 people outside of it the effect of the 33:02 people on the outside was tremendous in 33:05 the same way that from our perch here in 33:08 the United States we can have tremendous 33:10 influence on other parts of the world 33:12 where there are atrocities or human 33:16 rights abuses because we have the means 33:18 to do that we can be more watchful we 33:20 can make contributions financially we 33:23 can provide a political lever for those 33:25 people in other places and the exact 33:28 same thing happened north and south with 33:30 this great migration having so many 33:33 people in the North that the people in 33:35 the south could now point to and say if 33:38 things get difficult I can go to a 33:41 cousin in Cleveland that makes a big 33:43 difference as you're going out and 33:44 braving those sheriff's hoses they also 33:48 were they were exposed to the options 33:51 and to what life could be like when you 33:53 were free Martin Luther King himself had 33:56 gone to Boston University and gotten his 33:58 doctorate there and it was in Boston 34:00 that he met his wife Coretta Scott King 34:01 that had a tremendous impact on his 34:04 ability to then go return to the south 34:06 and fight the fact the final battle for 34:08 freedom ultimately for his people for 34:10 african-americans but it was a exposure 34:12 to the north being able to get on a 34:14 train and I have to sit in the back 34:16 being able to to actually shake the hand 34:19 of a person of a different race which 34:20 was not permitted in the in the South 34:23 believed in I was another one of the 34:25 strictures one of the protocols it was 34:27 not permitted such that a historian said 34:29 that in the South very very few people 34:32 of one race or the other had ever shaken 34:34 the hand of someone of another race 34:36 because I was not permitted so the 34:39 existence of large numbers of 34:41 african- americans in the north and west 34:43 did several things it provided an a 34:45 political psychological emotional and 34:48 political lever that could be used by 34:51 those in the south it exposed those in 34:53 the south to the freedoms that could be 34:55 experienced by people who look just like 34:57 them in a different place that was was 35:00 always looming there it also meant that 35:03 there were people in the North who had 35:04 means just by going to the north while 35:07 that might not have been their initial 35:09 their primary concern at the time they 35:11 were leaving some people leaving just 35:13 merely to save - in order to avoid being 35:17 killed but by being in the north they 35:20 were automatically going to be making more 35:22 money than the people in the south and 35:23 they were sending money back home just 35:25 like every immigrant group does they 35:27 were sending money back much more often 35:29 that they could eat then they could even 35:30 afford and they were sending money back 35:32 to the mothers and the fathers that 35:34 needed their help and to support this 35:36 this nascent 35:38 civil rights movement that ultimately 35:40 was going to need a lot of support in 35:42 order to succeed so all of these things 35:44 were working north and south to help 35:47 change the south helped to affect change 35:50 in the north even and ultimately to open 35:53 the way for all other kinds of freedom 35:56 movements 35:56 now can take for granted freedom from 35:58 women freedom for other immigrant groups 36:00 freedom for even the disabled all of 36:02 these things that grew out of the 36:04 initial efforts that occurred during the 36:06 early there in the mid-1960s that were 36:10 the catalyst for other kind of types of 36:12 change and which started because the 36:15 people the lowest caste people in the 36:18 south sent a signal to the north and the 36:21 south that they had options and they 36:23 were willing to take them now that's one 36:26 part of the effect but the effect that I 36:28 think I like to talk about the most is 36:29 the effect that is really the perhaps 36:32 the major way of gauging the effect 36:38 of any immigration and that is the 36:41 children who are in some ways the 36:44 great legacy of any any great movement 36:47 of people what is it that what is it 36:50 that the people were leaving when they 36:52 left the ECON 3248 Fall 2020 Isabel Wilkerson on the Great Migration from the Warmth of Other Suns p 22 sovereign what was on their 36:53 hearts and on their minds when they were 36:54 leaving for almost any immigrant it is 36:57 almost too late for them truly to 36:59 benefit from the migration that they're 37:01 about to embark on whatever limits on 37:05 education they had there was not much it 37:09 was going to change that once they were 37:10 30 years old and packing up their 37:14 Pontiac and heading north or boarding 37:16 the train with their young children and 37:18 heading north or leaving the leaving 37:22 Ireland or Poland or what war or Italy 37:24 for this for the new world their lives 37:27 had already been fairly well established 37:30 whatever lacking and nutrition made 37:33 experience they had already experienced 37:35 but that wasn't the case for the 37:37 children the children might have it 37:39 better and any emigration involves hope 37:43 that life will be better for the 37:44 children and that was what that is where 37:47 you can see the true impact of this 37:49 great migration these children of the 37:51 great migration had the opportunity to 37:53 do things that their parents could only 37:55 have dreamt of some of the people who 37:57 are part of this great migration include 38:01 Toni Morrison for example Toni Morrison 38:04 her parents migrated from Alabama to 38:07 Ohio where she got the opportunity 38:10 which her parents never would have had 38:11 never had and what she would not have 38:13 had had they stayed which is merely to 38:15 walk into a library and to borrow to 38:19 take out a library book she would not 38:21 have been able to do that in Alabama 38:23 during the time that she would have been 38:25 growing up and that's kind of an 38:26 important thing to be able to do if 38:28 you're going to be a Nobel laureate you 38:29 know you need to be able to read a book 38:31 to get access to a book and she would 38:33 not have been able to do that so many 38:35 other writers in fact much of the 38:37 African American literature of the 20th 38:39 century is essentially about the great 38:41 migration which is one of the things 38:43 that I found someone's firing about this 38:45 I mean much of the poetry were speaking 38:48 of Gwendolyn Brooks for example when we 38:50 speak of Toni Morrison's work herself a 38:54 Richard writer almost everything he 38:56 wrote was about the great migration it 38:57 was about reconciling his experience in 39:00 the south and his search for freedom 39:02 somewhere outside of the south and 39:04 feeling bound by that somehow invisible 39:06 man even is about the great migration on 39:08 some level and about the the ship 39:10 from the Southern College to life in New 39:14 York and feeling invisible as a result 39:17 of that migration in theatre Lorraine 39:21 Hansberry and August Wilson there were 39:24 all the schools of entire cycle is 39:26 essentially about the great migration 39:27 the uprooting of people from the south 39:30 to Pittsburgh and he used that as at the 39:33 centerpiece to understand what had this 39:35 done to an entire people to be uprooted 39:37 from a place that they had not really 39:39 wanted to leave and had been forced to 39:40 leave and that's just in literature in 39:43 art romare bearden and jacob lawrence 39:46 devoted all most of their energy to 39:48 cataloging into - to describing and to 39:52 somehow trying to interpret and make 39:54 real and there are the pain and the 39:59 the heartache and the joys even that 40:02 came from this great migration they are 40:05 symbols of the very thing that we're 40:07 talking about this means that much of 40:10 twentieth-century art as and create 40:12 creativity as we know it was all born 40:15 out of this great migration when it 40:18 comes to music music simply would not be 40:22 is where there nope no great migration 40:24 in fact I would argue that the American 40:26 ear has been reshaped by the transfer of 40:30 southern folk music to the north through 40:34 this great migration and the 40:37 marriage of both southern music to to 40:40 the to the north and the mout metabolize 40:43 differently here and got exposure in 40:46 ways that it would not have been exposed 40:47 otherwise for example we all know about 40:50 the blues Muddy Waters and BB King all 40:53 were migrants themselves coming to the 40:55 north from the Mississippi Delta with 40:57 their 12 string guitars and the music's 40:59 and that music in their head but I like 41:02 to think about other things too which 41:04 simply would not have existed Motown for 41:08 example simply wouldn't have existed 41:09 without the great migration it 41:10 absolutely would not have existed and 41:12 that's because Berry Gordy the founder 41:15 of of Motown his parents migrated from 41:17 Georgia and they migrated from Georgia 41:21 to Detroit where once he grew up he 41:23 decided and want to go into music he did 41:25 not have necessarily great singing voice 41:28 nor was he necessarily a musician but he 41:30 wanted to go into music he wanted to 41:31 create music company but he didn't have 41:35 the money to go all over the country 41:36 scouting out the best ECON 3248 Fall 2020 Isabel Wilkerson on the Great Migration from the Warmth of Other Suns p 23 talent so what did 41:38 he do he looked around him and there 41:41 were teenagers all around him who were 41:42 the children of the great migration 41:43 children of people who had made this 41:45 great leap of faith into a northern city 41:48 forbidding northern city and one of them 41:52 was a 14 year old girl who had two 41:54 friends the 14 year old girl 41:57 the main one her parents her mother had 41:59 migrated from Alabama my father from 42:01 West Virginia they never would have met 42:02 had there been no great migration she 42:04 wouldn't even have existed had there 42:05 been no great migration she had two 42:07 friends who Mary Wilson and Florence 42:11 Ballard who both were also children of 42:13 the great migration their parents had 42:15 come from the south the Maine when I'm 42:17 mentioning is Diana Ross we simply would 42:19 not even know her name had there been a 42:21 great migration because first she 42:22 wouldn't have existed and Barry Gordy 42:25 wouldn't have been been able to meet 42:27 someone it didn't 42:29 so we wouldn't even know her name and of 42:32 course that he he found them against her 42:37 parents wishes they did not want her to 42:38 go into music but she did anyway and 42:40 there were born The Supremes 42:42 he also heard about it of course that 42:45 the temptations and all those other 42:47 groups all had roots in the south a tall 42:49 we're all part of this ascent the same 42:51 wave of people so an entire you know an 42:54 entire art form you might say or subset 42:56 of music was created as a result of this 42:59 great migration but berry gordy also 43:01 heard about this very large family in 43:04 Gary Indiana very large but there were 43:07 nine or ten kids nine or ten kids and 43:10 there were five boys in this large 43:15 family who were known for going around 43:18 to the different talent shows and 43:20 apparently winning all these talent 43:21 shows talent contests and the of the 43:25 five boys it was the youngest who seemed 43:27 to be the most talented some even the 43:30 father would have admitted and he was a 43:32 frontman at eight four for this group 43:34 and Barry Gordy discovered them of 43:38 course I'm talking about the Jackson 43:39 five who we would not even know the 43:42 names of because they wouldn't they too 43:44 would not have existed their mother 43:46 migrated from Alabama father from 43:48 Arkansas they meet outside of Chicago 43:52 moved to Gary Indiana have a lot of kids 43:55 who have amazing talent and therefore an 43:59 entire legendary family comes into being 44:04 that we would never even have known 44:05 about those are just a few of the 44:07 examples of popular music that just 44:11 simply wouldn't have existed had there 44:13 been no great migration there's so many 44:15 other people who are part of that as 44:16 well 44:17 but when it comes to jazz for example 44:20 and we'll give you two more examples of 44:22 things that would not have existed had 44:24 there been no great migration when it 44:25 comes to jazz the three pillars of jazz 44:30 again simply would we would not even 44:32 know their names Miles Davis for example 44:34 we wouldn't know his name 44:35 Miles Davis has his parents migrated 44:38 from Arkansas 44:40 Illinois where he had the opportunity to 44:42 the luxury really of being able to 44:44 practice to learn music to practice 44:48 music but she would never have had in 44:49 the cotton country of Arkansas now he'd 44:52 come from a fairly well situated family 44:55 but even then he would not have had the 44:57 opportunity to go to better schools 44:58 would have allowed him the option of 45:00 being able to take music in the way that 45:02 he ultimately was Thelonious Monk 45:04 because parents migrated from from North 45:07 Carolina to Harlem when he was five 45:10 years old where he too got the luxury of 45:12 being able to practice the piano to 45:15 learn music in a way that he never would 45:18 have had the opportunity to do had his 45:20 parents stayed in the tobacco country of 45:22 North Carolina and John Coltrane John 45:26 Coltrane migrated at the ripe old age of 45:30 seventeen which is kind of old beginning 45:32 a musical career in today's world he 45:36 left at age 17 from North Carolina to 45:40 Philadelphia and it was in Philadelphia 45:43 that he got his first alto sax he did 45:45 not touch an alto sax until he got to 45:48 Philadelphia his mother gave him one it 45:50 was a used one and then he went to the 45:52 Ornstein School of Music in Philadelphia 45:54 and he apparently played and played and 45:57 played on his off hours he was working 45:59 in a factory and I would submit to this 46:01 day that the people in his apartment 46:03 building would would deny this to this 46:08 day that they did what they did but they 46:10 actually complained to the landlord and 46:12 said there's this man in 12 C was 46:15 playing at all hours of the night and 46:17 you must make him stop because we can't 46:19 sleep little they know they were saying 46:22 that there's you know John ECON 3248 Fall 2020 Isabel Wilkerson on the Great Migration from the Warmth of Other Suns p 24 Coltrane is 46:24 playing it we don't want to hear him 46:26 they would deny that I'm sure but where 46:29 where would where would jazz be where 46:32 would usik be where would culture be not 46:35 just American culture but culture in 46:38 this in the world because John Coltrane 46:41 is as popular in Tokyo in Paris as he is 46:44 here in the United States where we're 46:46 culture be had John Coltrane not gotten 46:49 on a train 46:50 and got into Philadelphia and gotten 46:52 ahold of an alto sax it's unfathomable 46:54 what that would have meant to music and 46:57 to our culture the culture as we know it 47:00 and that's just one example but I want 47:02 to leave you with one of the most to 47:06 me stunning examples and I've so 47:10 grateful to have been able to actually 47:12 meet him Bill Russell Bill Russell the 47:16 NBA great it's frightening to think that 47:20 we might even might not even know his 47:22 name bill Russell's parents were living 47:25 in Monroe Louisiana which is a place 47:29 that I had to go back to for the book 47:32 which is the reason why is even in the 47:33 book because Monroe Louisiana figures 47:35 prominently in the book one of my three 47:36 protagonists was from Monroe and his 47:40 parents were having a very hard time of 47:41 it in the late 1930s and early 1940s at 47:46 one point his father went to a gas 47:49 station to get gas and he was having a 47:52 difficult time getting served and the 47:54 reason was because the southern protocol 47:56 required that all white patrons had to 48:00 be served before any black person could 48:02 be served no matter when the white 48:04 person showed up so if white patrons 48:06 kept coming up that meant he was going 48:08 to have to wait and wait and wait until 48:10 plate basically the place was empty or 48:12 the only person left to be served was 48:14 another black person in which case he 48:16 would then move to the front of the line 48:17 because he'd been there first well he 48:19 waited and he waited and white patrons 48:22 kept coming and he decided he was 48:24 running out of time and it needed to go 48:25 and he would just get gas another time 48:27 as he was backing out of the gas station 48:30 the proprietor set down the hose from 48:32 which he was using which he was using to 48:34 to service one of the white patrons and 48:37 he went over to bill Russell's father he 48:39 put a gun to his head and he said you'll 48:41 leave when I say you can leave and don't 48:43 ever do that again 48:45 bill Russell's mother at around the same 48:48 time was walking down in downtown Monroe 48:51 when a police officer stopped her she 48:54 was wearing her church clothes she had 48:56 saved up a long time to get this outfit 48:59 the police officer did not appreciate 49:01 what she had on because he thought that 49:02 it was 49:03 not in her not fit for someone of her 49:06 caste and he said he said go home right 49:10 now 49:11 take that off don't ever let me see that 49:14 see that on you again what you have on 49:17 is not fit for a colored woman only a 49:19 white woman should be in what you have 49:21 on if I see that in you on you again I 49:24 will arrest you this is your last 49:26 warning 49:27 Bill Russell was about eight or nine 49:29 years old at the time and he went came 49:30 home from school and he saw his mother 49:32 at the kitchen table and tears over the 49:34 streets that they were in because this 49:36 was a world but there was closing in on 49:37 them and there were no options there 49:39 were reminders from the moment they woke 49:40 up to the time they went to sleep that 49:43 they were in a different caste and that 49:45 there was no way out and that that it in 49:49 fact danger attended any potential 49:53 breach of that caste system so they set 49:56 out on a course for California they 49:58 decided that they would go to California 50:00 they caught the train first to st. Louis 50:02 in the state and the segregated train 50:05 and then when they got the st. Louis 50:07 which was a border city as is Washington 50:09 DC and El Paso and Texas they in the 50:14 border city they could switch over to an 50:16 integrated train and it was called the 50:18 American Eagle and he remembered it to 50:20 this day Bill Russell with a little boy 50:21 and they set out on a course for Oakland 50:25 where he was able to go to integrate at 50:27 schools he said that we were like 50:29 immigrants we had to learn the language 50:30 that people spoke differently they ate 50:32 different kind of food which is exactly 50:33 what I experienced growing up too in a 50:35 way that the that we had to learn the 50:39 ways of this new place that we were in 50:41 and I felt like an immigrant he had the 50:43 opportunity to go to college in an 50:46 integrated school which he would never 50:48 been able to do in Louisiana because the 50:51 state schools even though African 50:53 Americans were contributing to the funds 50:55 because they were paying taxes they 50:57 could not go to the integrated state 50:59 schools actually they weren't integrated 51:01 they were white the white schools in 51:03 there 51:03 and ECON 3248 Fall 2020 Isabel Wilkerson on the Great Migration from the Warmth of Other Suns p 25 there are respective states and so 51:06 he would not have had the opportunity to 51:07 go to the state school in Louisiana or 51:12 any white school in Louisiana but in 51:14 California in this new world he was able 51:17 to go to the University of San Francisco 51:18 and the University of San Francisco 51:20 happen to be an NCAA school he was very 51:24 tall as we all know and it turned out 51:28 that he was not just tall but he was 51:30 quite skilled and he led his team the 51:33 Dons to two n-c-double-a championships 51:35 which of course he never would even have 51:37 been able to go to an NC double-a school 51:40 had he been had his family stayed in 51:42 Louisiana it was because he was at that 51:45 school and had led that school to two 51:47 NCAA championships that he came to thee 51:50 to the attention of the Boston Celtics 51:54 he was hired onto the baltic boston 51:57 celtics and it was there that he led 51:59 boston to 11 of 13 championships NBA 52:04 championships and is considered even to 52:07 this day one of the greatest men ever to 52:09 played the game one of the greatest 52:12 defensive players ever and people who 52:14 follow the game for people who follow 52:17 the game it's almost unimaginable what 52:19 professional basketball would be had 52:22 there been no Bill Russell and yet we 52:24 might not even know his name had his 52:26 parents not migrated because he would 52:28 not have had the opportunity to even get 52:31 to the NBA to come to the attention of 52:33 the NBA he would very likely be working 52:35 in a sawmill and no one would know his 52:37 name that is the impact that this 52:40 migration had multiplied times six 52:42 million people and all of their children 52:44 and their children's children to the 52:46 point that I am even standing before you 52:48 today I wouldn't even be here where 52:50 they're not a great migration I want to 52:53 end this my discussion with I haven't 52:59 had a chance to talk much about the 53:00 three people the three people are item 53:02 an item a Gladney who migrated from 53:06 Luisi from Mississippi to Chicago in 53:09 1937 she had been a sharecroppers wife 53:12 who was terrible at picking cotton 53:14 and they ended up having to leave 53:16 because a cousin was beaten to women 53:18 within an inch of his life over a theft 53:20 that he did not commit afterward there 53:23 were no apologies it just was one of 53:25 those things that would happen in 1937 53:28 in Mississippi and after that her her 53:30 husband decided he said to her after he 53:33 saw what had happened to his cousin this 53:34 is the last crop were making and they 53:36 set out on a course for the north the 53:39 second person was a man who had been a 53:41 college student but the money ran out 53:43 and there was no opportunity for him to 53:45 go to this to the school near his family 53:48 which would have made it possible for 53:49 him to go to school he couldn't go he 53:52 could no longer afford board really and 53:55 so he and he couldn't go to the white 53:57 school and in his region so he had to 53:59 return to the work of the region of 54:01 Florida where he was which was citrus 54:03 picking and ultimately he had to flee 54:06 for his life to Harlem because he had 54:09 been agitating for better wages and work 54:12 conditions for the people were picking 54:13 fruit the work was very dangerous and a 54:15 crime and a 40-foot trees the pay was 54:17 was reflected the what what little value 54:22 the growers ascribed to the work which 54:26 was meaning that they paid them ten or 54:28 twelve cents for a box of fruit which 54:30 might take them over several several 54:32 most of the day to pick and so under 54:36 great peril and so he was trying to 54:38 agitate for better wages and as a result 54:40 of that he had he had to flee for his 54:43 life because unions were not welcome at 54:46 that time and particularly not from 54:47 African Americans who would have the 54:50 gall to stand up to the growers in the 54:52 way that George Starling was doing that 54:54 so he fled from from Florida to Harlem 54:57 in 1945 and then the last person was 55:01 Robert Joseph Pershing Foster who was a 55:04 physician a surgeon in the US Army and 55:07 he had performed Abele in the army and 55:11 and had been permitted to to practice 55:14 medicine but when he got out of the army 55:16 after the Korean conflict it turned out 55:18 that he could not practice surgery in 55:20 his/her own home 55:21 of Monroe Louisiana the same town that 55:24 bill Russell's family had come from and 55:27 so he decided that he was going to set 55:29 out for for California and that meant a 55:32 perilous journey of driving through the 55:34 night multiple nights without sleep 55:38 because he could not find a place to 55:40 rest no place would allow him to would 55:43 give him a went would rent him a room 55:45 and he had to go through the hairpin 55:47 curves and the mountains in the desert 55:50 of Arizona New Mexico and into 55:54 California he had not anticipated that 55:56 he after he would have to drive that far ECON 3248 Fall 2020 Isabel Wilkerson on the Great Migration from the Warmth of Other Suns p 26 55:58 without rest and it was it was not only 56:00 perilous but it was dispiriting to him 56:03 because he realized that perhaps they 56:05 made him wonder what was this place he 56:07 was going to and would it in fact be any 56:08 better not something that probably 56:10 weighs on the mind of anyone who ever 56:12 leaves one place for another because 56:13 there are no guarantees what is it that 56:16 you're doing and you often think about 56:17 what you this person had to go through 56:20 just to make the decision and once you 56:22 made the decision you'd like to believe 56:24 you made the right decision 56:25 and he was not certain as it did that 56:27 but I want to read to you this passage 56:28 about him about where when I first met 56:30 him this was the this was the day that I 56:32 first met Robert Joseph Pershing Foster 56:35 a character unto himself Los Angeles 56:39 1996 the panel door rises a story high 56:43 and would be fit a museum or government 56:45 office but is actually the front door of 56:46 a Spanish Revival south of Wilshire the 56:49 door opens and there stands a one-time 56:51 bourbon swilling army captain and deft 56:54 handed surgeon who now in his later 56:56 years as a regular at the blackjack 56:57 tables and the trifectas at Santa Anita 56:59 but he is at the heart of it all and 57:02 perhaps most important a long-standing 57:04 still bitter and somewhat obsessive 57:06 expatriate from the 20th century south 57:09 the heartbreak Jim Crowe Landy chose to 57:11 reject the for could reject him again 57:13 he's a Californian now this Robert 57:16 Joseph Pershing Foster he is the color 57:18 of strong coffee and has ways in his 57:20 hair which he lets grow as untamed 57:22 design Stein's but then brushes back 57:24 like the boys in the band he's wearing a 57:26 white cotton Island shirt loose slacks 57:28 and sandals the uniform of the 57:30 well-to-do LA pensioner he has the build 57:32 and bearing 57:33 Sammy Davis jr. and not a little of the 57:35 showmanship and delightful delightful 57:38 superficiality that seemed to grow on 57:40 people in certain circles of LA whenever 57:43 I read that in LA I think to myself I 57:46 needed to edit that out I meant to edit 57:48 out the superficiality part but then you 57:51 know when I've read it they just say yep 57:53 that's us we're superficial they loved 57:56 it he walked straight back and flutes we 57:59 footed into the 4ea past the curve fo 58:02 Gone with the Wind staircase in the East 58:04 Asian pottery he just restored the 58:06 living room an imposing space that 58:08 dwarfs him in its volume fairly frozen 58:10 in the seafoam carpet and hot pink tulip 58:12 chairs out of a sure buddy Doris Day 58:14 movie from the 50s the whole effect is a 58:17 starched and formal as a tuxedos II used 58:19 to wear to the parties he threw for 58:20 himself back when Alice his wife was 58:23 alive and the money was raining down 58:25 like confetti 58:25 he seems accustomed to people fawning 58:27 over the place and with the prim air of 58:29 leading men of his favorite movies from 58:31 back in the 40s insists on serving his 58:33 guests a slice of lemon pound cake and 58:36 vanilla ice cream on Rosenthal China 58:38 whether they would like to have it or 58:40 not he is a physician or was for most of 58:43 his adult life and by most accounts a 58:45 very good one and is prone to 58:47 pontificate like a man of his years and 58:49 accomplishments but he's just as likely 58:51 to interrupt himself and check the time 58:52 to see if he can still make the one 58:54 o'clock at the Hollywood Park Racetrack 58:56 his photo albums are filled with an 58:58 unlikely assortment of bookies and blues 59:01 singers and dentists and fraternity men 59:03 and surgeons and society people whose 59:05 approval he craved even though he knew 59:07 they were too pretentious to matter 59:08 really he doesn't say it because it 59:11 would be gauche and hardly worth 59:12 mentioning from his point of view but 59:14 there happened to be a lot of little 59:17 Roberts around town due to the fact that 59:19 over the years he delivered a number of 59:21 baby boys his mother's were so grateful 59:23 for his firm hand and calming 59:25 reassurances at the precise moment of 59:27 truth that they named their sons not 59:29 after their husbands but after the 59:32 doctor who delivered their babies before 59:34 he begins the story he tells you it's a 59:36 long one and you can't get it all he's 59:38 lived too many lives done too much known 59:41 too many people 59:42 written so high and so low that there's 59:45 no point in fooling us 59:46 into thinking you can capture the whole 59:48 of it you could try of course and he 59:50 agrees to give as much as he can I love 59:52 to talk he says a smile forming on his 59:55 still chiseled face as he sits upright 59:57 in his tulip chair and I am my favorite 60:01 subject thank you so much I'm so happy 60:06 to take your question ECON 3248 Fall 2020 Isabel Wilkerson on the Great Migration from the Warmth of Other Suns p 27 ** Return home and start new businesses: internal migration in China L Lin, MD Revindo, C Gan, QTT Nguyen Asian‐Pacific Economic Literature - 8 days ago Internal migration patterns in China are characterised by rapid urbanisation and cross‐regional movement and more recently by the return of migrants to their native counties. This study investigates the drivers of migrants' permanent return and their likelihood of starting new businesses in their counties of origin. The results suggest that migrants are discouraged from permanent resettlement in urban areas because of family ties and the aspiration to start businesses in their villages of origin. The study also provides evidence that the probability of starting a business upon return is affected by the migrants' accumulation of work experience, business experience, the savings earned while away, financial stability, and the social capital they have in their home counties. The results provide important insights for emerging countries in overcoming rapid urbanisation and imbalanced regional economic growth.

References Lin, Liqiong, Mohamad D. Revindo, Christopher Gan, and Quang Thi Thieu Nguyen (2021) "Return home and start new businesses: internal migration in China." Asian‐Pacific Economic Literature.. Hausmann, Ricardo, and Ljubica Nedelkoska (2018). "Welcome home in a crisis: Effects of return migration on the non-migrants' wages and employment." European Economic Review 101: 101-132. Cited by 41 https://albania.growthlab.cid.harvard.edu/files/albaniagrowthlab/files/return_migration_cidwp_330.pdf