And there in the King’s Highway sits a figure veiled and bowed, by which the traveller’s footsteps hasten as they go. On the tainted air broods fear. Three centuries’ thought has been the raising and unveiling of that bowed human heart, and now behold a century new for the duty and the deed. The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.
When Du Bois wrote those words a full century ago, he could scarcely have imagined that running straight through the center of Atlanta, the King’s Highway would be named after a black man, Martin Luther King, Jr.—or that Atlanta would be the mecca of the black middle class.
During segregation, one of Atlanta’s neighborhoods, known affectionately as Sweet Auburn, was home to a large black middle class that has been a source of a series of brilliant religious, political, and intellectual leaders for well over a century. Most notable among these was Dr. King himself. The house where he was born still stands here, as does the church where he began his ministry.
Today Atlanta’s mayor is a black woman. Atlanta boasts one of the highest concentrations of black-owned companies in America. Atlanta is heralded as
the
place where middle-class black people can live together in their own neighborhoods, enjoy the same standards of living as their white peers,
and
retain their property values.
As a result, middle-class black families from all over the North are migrating here in the hundreds of thousands. Indeed, since 1980, the black population of Atlanta has increased by 648,000 people. And Atlanta leads the nation’s metropolitan areas in total black population gains—459,000—in the last decade.
Mrs. Carmen Johnson is a real estate agent in Atlanta’s wealthy suburbs. She helps Northern middle-class black migrants realize their dreams of returning to the New South. She took me to see the kinds of properties black people are buying.
“The culturally diverse upper-middle-class neighborhoods tend to cluster around DeKalb County, which is just east of Atlanta . . . When you hear of DeKalb County, people generally know that it is highly culturally diverse . . . The Sandstone Estates comprise one of the premier subdivisions of DeKalb County. There are write-ups on it all the time . . . A house that sold there several years ago for $465,000 would now go for about $700,000 plus. A single female doctor at Emory bought a house in the Sandstone Estates for $600,000. There’s a new house going up, and I’m not sure how much it’s going to run. The Sandstone homes go up to $2 million plus. Most of the owners are of color . . .
“An African-American CNN news anchor lives at Sandstone. We have the recording artists Kelly Price and Montell Jordan. I can’t point to their houses because I do work with a lot of celebrities and their privacy is protected.”
What Carmen Johnson is saying is that some of the most affluent of these “culturally diverse” neighborhoods are truly culturally diverse. What she
isn’t
saying is that some of the wealthiest so-called culturally diverse neighborhoods are, in fact, predominantly black. Is it this that has made Atlanta the mecca of the black middle class?
Deirdre and Jerald Wolff are a professional couple from Detroit who moved to Atlanta with their two sons two years ago. Deirdre is an attorney, and Jerald is a manager for an Atlanta power company. What drew them here? Why leave the North and move to the South?
“I had heard tales about the South—stories that left me believing that black people were not treated fairly, had substandard living conditions, and feared for their safety,” said Jerald. “Some of this was misinformation, but it spread within predominantly black neighborhoods and instilled in me a fear of living in the South . . . I had good friends in Atlanta who helped convince me to fully consider relocating there. Years later, when a job opportunity came up in Atlanta, I weighed my options in light of my largely unfounded trepidation. The real paradigm shift about living in the South,” he added, “occurred when some friends I had met in graduate school relocated from Chicago to Atlanta and were extolling its virtues. I was ready to make a change . . . Atlanta seemed like a place where my family and I could progress and prosper.”
“Most likely,” said Deirdre, “had the job been in a city less desirable to us, we would not have relocated. But Atlanta made all the difference . . . There are many African-American professionals here, as in Detroit. The distinction I notice is that in Atlanta, African Americans hold a wider variety of professions. Not only do many successful African-American doctors, lawyers, and corporate executives live here, but African Americans in Atlanta also own golf courses, publish books, and own dirt businesses, meat companies, and a great variety of other enterprises . . .
“We did not live in predominantly white areas of other cities to escape our own people,” Deirdre continued. “We sought the typical American dream: a nice house near nice grocery stores in a good school district . . . Atlanta is refreshingly unique in that it is not uncommon to find African-American communities with subdivisions of homes valued in the $300,000 to $500,000 range. Many of these subdivisions are large, consisting of more than two hundred homes, pleasantly spaced on rolling hills. Several are gated communities of affluent African-American families living in homes valued at half a million to a million dollars. So, why not?”
But this is the home of Martin Luther King, I countered, one of the birthplaces of the Civil Rights Movement. White people who were defending their right to live in all-white neighborhoods used to say, “We want to keep our neighborhood pure; we want to live with people who embrace the same values.” How would they respond to that? What if somebody said to them, “You’re all being racist. There is nothing but black people in this neighborhood”?
“Let me answer,” said Jerald. “My neighborhood in Atlanta is virtually all black. I would not mind at all if whites moved in. I just want good neighbors. I honestly believe that if a white family chose to move into our neighborhood, they would be welcome. On the other hand, if whites do not wish to live around me, I have no complaint. Our neighborhood is open to anyone who has the income to purchase the homes that are for sale.”
“I sometimes see white people looking at the model home in our subdivision,” added Deirdre. “They come and they look, and then they drive around, and they keep on driving around and around. I imagine they probably peek at the pool and the tennis courts and then go on out. Why? Perhaps they see that the community is African American. It is their choice to stay or go. People have the freedom to choose among whom they will live.”
The right of families like the Wolffs to choose where they live was a cornerstone of the Civil Rights Movement. But in the 1960s, this meant the right to integrate white neighborhoods, not the forming of all-black ones. In fact, integration was designed to end all-black and all-white neighborhoods. Nevertheless, the trend toward exactly these kinds of neighborhoods is strong and growing. Blacks are flocking to Atlanta. But is this really the kind of New South envisaged by the Civil Rights Movement?
Before I ended my journey, I went to talk with another Atlanta resident, someone who knew Martin Luther King personally and who marched in his movement: the legendary writer Maya Angelou.
“It was thanks to the Civil Rights Movement and the leveling of the playing field that we had the possibility of Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young as mayors of the great Southern city,” said Angelou. “Then the congressmen and -women began coming from the South to Washington, D.C., to plan a better world. I believe that those events freed people from the painful memories of Southern treatment. They began to look south again and see it as they want it to be.”
It’s almost as if Angelou was saying that, ironically, our people had been in exile in the North for most of the past century.
“Yes, I am saying that,” she responded. “Our people are coming home. The South is rich with memories of kindness and courage and cowardice and brutality. It is beautiful physically, and spiritually rich.”
I have to admit that it astonishes me that black people are congregating in some of the most affluent neighborhoods in Atlanta: black people have chosen to live with other affluent black people. I asked Angelou if she found this troubling.
She replied: “Martin Luther King told a story that after the Montgomery bus boycott ended and the companies capitulated, a black woman got onto the bus and walked all the way back and sat in the backseat. A young man who had been so adamant about voter registration, so adamant, and about the boycotting, went back and he said, ‘Ma’am, excuse me, we have walked eighteen miles so that you don’t have to sit here.’ And she said, ‘Son, I walked with you, but now that I can sit anywhere, I’m sitting in the back. It’s much more comfortable. I can relax, put my bags down, and stretch my legs out.’ Then she smiled. With choices comes a different kind of criticism.”
A hundred years ago black people begged, borrowed, and stole to get out of the South. They used any means necessary to escape the racism and economic oppression that were associated with the white racism in this area. And now, at the beginning of a new century, to the astonishment I think of just about everybody, black people are flocking
back
to the South. And they’re doing it with alacrity; they’re doing it with a sense of spirituality and passion and commitment to our history, to our people, and to their property values!
But something else is happening too. The black people coming back to the South—given the choice and opportunities for integration—are opting to live with people in their own class and ethnic identity, which is leading to a new kind of residential self-segregation.
I thought about how ironic that was, as I sat near the tomb of Martin Luther King. You think about what Dr. King lived for and what he died for, and in a word, that was integration. And I admit that part of me finds these neighborhoods attractive, warm, and comfortable—sort of like my childhood and adolescence back in Piedmont, except that all these people are rich. But I can’t help but wonder what Dr. King would think of this whole thing. Is the right to associate freely and willingly part of the dream that he died for, even if it leads to a new form of segregation?
Hollywood actor, producer, and director Morgan Freeman was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and intends to be buried there. “I believe the movement of blacks from the North back to the South is a way of getting back to who we are and what we built,” he told me.
On August 28, 1963, as Martin Luther King spoke to hundreds of thousands of people at the March on Washington, I watched the speech on TV. I was working for the post office in San Francisco, delivering mail. I was also studying dance and doing some dancing. A few months earlier I had been knocking around with theater, making no money. Then I met a guy in San Francisco who was from Paris—the only black man I had ever met from another country. I’d been studying French since college days, so we conversed in French. He said to me, if you come to Europe, you and I will preside over jazz dance there. We’ll open studios in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Paris, and Stockholm. So I said, fine, that sounds like a working idea, and I decided, if I’m going to Paris, I’m going to have to build up a little kitty.
If you want to make some money, one way to do it is to get a job at the post office. I started delivering mail in March, so I had March, April, May, June, July, August, and September to get my stake together. On August 28, I was still working, but I was getting ready to fly to Paris.
Every time I hear Martin Luther King talk—I can name other speeches of his that had the same effect as “I Have a Dream,” and that still do—I experience an upwelling of emotion that is hard to describe. I feel pride, and a sense of being present at a moment in history. On August 28, I was witness to what may have been the greatest speech of the twentieth century.
Dr. King’s speech that day reminds me of a sermon by Adam Clayton Powell that brought tears to my eyes, called “What’s in Your Hand?” You just weep when you hear it because it’s the secret to life, the secret to success. He was saying, look at what’s in your hand instead of complaining about what you don’t have. Look around you. See what you have and work with it. Build on it. And that hope, that moving forward despite all odds, believing that in the end justice will prevail if we work for it, was Dr. King’s message as well.
By April of 1968, I’d gone from a job at the post office to New York and a Broadway stage. I was appearing in
Hello, Dolly!
with Pearl Bailey and Cab Calloway. On the night of April 4, Pearl Bailey came onstage before the show was over, and she made the announcement. It was one of two announcements she would make that year. There was a hush in the theater. Sometimes you’ll hear a sob in a situation like that, but we heard nothing. I don’t think we finished the show that night. It’s hard to remember exactly what you were thinking, because your mind was blurred. You walked home, or got home somehow, and you didn’t know exactly what you were thinking about.
In Memphis Dr. King had said, I’m not afraid to die. That meant, I know you’re going to get me. He had powerful enemies, like J. Edgar Hoover. You can’t get much more powerful than that. It was foretold. He foretold it. And if anybody ever comes back and says Hoover had anything to do with it, I’m going to go, I knew it. Most black people think that. I’m not trying to solve the mystery. I accept that Dr. King was going to be martyred. He accepted that he was going to be not martyred, but murdered. But it is martyrdom. The Kennedys and King, they were like a single entity that had to be completely dealt with. Otherwise, from the perspective of their enemies, this nation was in serious trouble.
Pearl made the second announcement two months later, on June 5, the night Bobby Kennedy was shot. I think that caused more of a stir because now they’d gotten all of them. For some reason or other the black community had set a great store by the Kennedys. They seemed to speak to everyone rather than just to a select group of people. And they were inside the power structure, as inside as you could get.
We’ve realized quite a bit of Dr. King’s dream of integration since 1963. I believe Dr. King could look upon today and see that he’d made a difference. One of the things that have helped bring about these changes is our media. What we see in our media is what represents us, as far as we know. And what we see now is just about everybody. There’s an inclusiveness; everybody is represented. When you think of our print media and our visual media, you always think, what are the children seeing, because they’re paying no attention to what you say. Children watch what you do. It’s like people who say, I’m not prejudiced. Well then, how did your kid get to be prejudiced? He didn’t pick it up through the blood.
I was walking down the street in Los Angeles one day and this cute little girl walked up, stood and looked at me walk past, and she said, mister, you’re a nigger, did you know that? I didn’t know what to say. I just stood there, having it wash over me that, gosh, this is a child. This was in 1959 or 1960. That’s the only time I lived in Los Angeles. I’m from Mississippi. People tell me this was the sort of thing I was supposed to run into at home. But there I was in Los Angeles. And there it was, racism, on the street.
I was born in Memphis, Tennessee. My parents happened to be working at John Gaston Hospital, the colored hospital in Memphis. Everyone else in my family was born in Mississippi, quite a few of them in the little town I live in now, Charleston. I grew up in Greenwood, Mississippi, for the most part. I spent a few years in Charleston as a little boy with my paternal grandmother. She died when I was six. My biological father came and got my sister and me, took us up to Chicago, where my mother was. That was 1943. I got off the train in Chicago in December 1943. It was the first time I ever was slapped by cold. It was the kind of cold that makes your heart jump up and grab you. I don’t think I ever got acclimated to Chicago’s weather, and I was there, off and on, from age six and a half to eleven, back and forth.
It felt safe growing up in the South. I lived in a little village in a place called Baptist Town, part of the black communities of Greenwood. At that time we had two schools, an elementary school and a high school. But high school went from seventh grade up, so junior high and high school were connected. I had great teachers and received a wonderful education. I learned this subsequently, when I was out of school—out among other people who had graduated from high school or who had two years of college. I could quote Shakespeare when I got out of high school in Mississippi, and that’s not the stereotype of Mississippi and black education.
In 1954, when I was a senior in high school, I spent some time in Nashville and attended the illustrious Pearl High School, which served only black students then and had a very high academic rating. They were giving PSAT tests to students in the area’s black high schools. I could have gone to any university I wanted, places like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, because I qualified in the top seventh percentile of my senior class. So I was a bright young man.
My teachers were not only outstanding academically; they encouraged me. That’s the thing; that’s the key. You’ve got to have teachers—and there are many of them—who find the child and cup them in their hands and say you’re special, and make you understand that all you have to do now is work.
People asked me when I went home to live, after becoming a major persona in theater, in film, good Lord, what is wrong with you? You can live anywhere in the world you want to. Why did you come here? And I said, because I can live anywhere in the world I want to, that’s why. This is home. This is where my roots are. This is where my parents are buried. This is where I’ve always felt safest.
At the time I was growing up in Greenwood, most northerners were raised with the idea that the South was a place of the Klan, a place of racism—not warm and nurturing, but alienating. In reality, the idea that it was the best thing at the time for a black person to get out of the South had to do with the fact that there was no work. It had nothing to do with anything else. You weren’t going to find any less racism in the North. Traveling around the country and living in different places, I could never see that any place was any better racially than Mississippi. The black people migrating north at the time lived in cities more than they had in the South, and they found themselves experiencing more racism. It was more painful than in the South because you were given to think in the North that oh, it’s different here. You’re free, boy.
What’s different for a black person about the South, in contrast to the North or the West of the United States, is that we built the South, and we know it. What I own in the South isn’t because I went and bought it. What I own is my place here, because my mother, my father, my grandmother, my grandfather, my great-grandmother, my great-grandfather, great-great-grandmother, great-great-grandfather, all the way back to my great-great-great-grandmother, who happened to be a Virginian—that’s where they had the farms. They got my great-great-great-grandmother off a ship.
That was the image, though, that the South was a place black people had to flee from. Booker T. Washington gave a great speech in 1895 in Atlanta, at the Cotton States and International Exposition. He said to black people, don’t go to the North—“Cast down your bucket where you are.” And as soon as they could, black people got a railroad ticket and went to Detroit and went to Chicago. They got bottlenecked in the South Side of Chicago and lived a life that was horrendous. You can’t raise a child in a situation like that. I was there and I know. Those were hoodlums. And they weren’t hoodlums because they were living in Chicago; they were hoodlums because life—survival itself—was marginal. People were too crowded. There was too little hope. Too many people were trying to scrabble out these little piecemeal jobs they were giving them. People were going up there, and all they’d done was hoe cotton; what did they know? Gee whiz. No fresh air. None.
More than a hundred years after Booker T. Washington exhorted African Americans to stay where they were, many are migrating back to the South. I wouldn’t say we lost something because so many of our people fled their Southern roots and went to the North. We didn’t lose anything. We probably gained something, and it just took a long time to perceive that gain. For instance, having grown up in Mississippi, left, gone away, and learned something that I didn’t know and probably wasn’t going to learn there, I can now bring that back. The people who are going back are bringing their knowledge back.
Integrating in society only means that people receive equal opportunity; it doesn’t necessarily lead to widespread miscegenation. The mistake was associating the South with a place from which to flee. What goes around comes around, that’s all. The South is the new comfort zone for blacks. If Dr. King were back and he were told that, I think he’d believe it. Of course he would. That’s what he meant to happen, that the South would be a place we don’t have to run away from. As a matter of fact, we want to run home. We want to go back. So we’re going.
Look at Atlanta. They’re flooding into Atlanta. I said to my daughter, when she was going to college, where are you going to go to school, and she said, well, I don’t know. I said, go to Atlanta; go to Spelman. And when you get out of Spelman, you’ll have a network. Well, she liked Spelman, and she’s still in Atlanta.
It would probably be arrogant to try to speak for anyone else, but in my case, I recognize the South as being that safe place, the womb of nativity. Whatever I am—and some people say that’s a lot, and I’ll accept that—whatever I am was nurtured there. I can’t give that credit anywhere else; don’t want to and won’t. And I’m going to surmise that there are a lot of people who are beginning to feel the same way. A lot of people have been going back to visit, and they’ve seen a gradual shift in attitude among southerners.
What we have always been blessed with is a sense of hospitality. And we have that for the simple reason that we’re not overcrowded. There’s room. In Washington, New York, L.A., you’ll drive down the highway and you’ll give that finger to the guy coming toward you—Chicago, San Francisco, any metropolis, any place where people are stuffed so close together. You won’t get that here in the South. As soon as you get here, you don’t have that problem. It’s not just the South; there are places in Montana and Iowa that have that hospitality, that sense of space. But what they have going against them is the horrendous weather, and in the South we have our temperate climate.
So I’ll be buried here. My mother and father are buried right here, in front of the house. I’ve come back to my home place. Very few of us can go back to the home where we grew up. But those of us who can and do, I think will be very pleased in later years, when they sit on the front porch in a rocking chair, eat watermelon, fan the flies, and say, why did we give this up in the first place?
Of course I experienced racism as a kid in the South. But that’s not the point. Whether I experienced racism in the South is not it. It’s where else I experienced it. I don’t care anything about experiencing racism in the South; I don’t and I won’t experience it now. It’s back to that little girl in Los Angeles who said, mister, you’re a nigger, did you know that? You’re going to experience racism, and it had nothing to do with the South.
I never worried about going up to some hollow in Mississippi and having some Klansmen come jumping out from behind some tree to get me. Actually, I never saw the Klan when I was growing up; I only heard about them. And the whole idea of it pretty much doesn’t exist anymore because the Mississippi legal system broke them. They’ve been tracking down every miscreant who was involved in those activities forty years ago.
On the one hand, the migration of blacks from North to South is bound to go a long way toward redressing all the social problems that our people still have—our people who are stuck in the ghettos, stuck in the North. On the other hand, one of the problems with dense poverty—with poverty that is both financial and mental—is that it’s self-perpetuating. Poor people have babies; seems to be all they do. You’re talking now about a self-perpetuating thing that’s hard to stop. For a fifteen-year-old trying to raise a child and getting help from her mother, who is by now thirty-one, there’s no hope. None. How do you stop that? We say, well, you’ve got to educate, give them sex education. No, it’s not about sex education. You’ve got to teach them. You’ve got to say, you’re fourteen; you keep your pants up, and you keep your dress down. No two ways about it. No liberalness here, because otherwise you’re just going to continue to overcrowd.