The Warmth of Other Suns (43 page)

“All that crowd over there, and then some,” Robert said. “They didn’t come. My father taught half of ’em. There’s enough people in this town to give me the biggest practice in the world that I went to grade school with.”

He learned he would have to make do without them. He was feeling anxious and slightly desperate and could not bear the thought of failure. Big Madison was back in Monroe, looking to hear how his little brother was handling all those patients he bragged about. Alice and the girls were awaiting word as to when they would join him in what everyone expected would be a fabulous new home. And his father-in-law was surely expecting a progress report on how his practice was faring in Los Angeles, a city the father-in-law had argued against in the first place.

As it was, the Clements were beside themselves with excitement over developments back in Atlanta. President Clement had decided to make a historic bid to become the first colored member of the Atlanta Board of Education. Colored people could not vote in most of the South and could lose their lives for even trying to register, and here was Clement running for public office in the biggest city in the South. It was such a long shot that Robert was too weary to pay it much attention.

Somehow Robert had to find a way out of this new desert he was in. So he wasted no time seeking out prospects wherever he could. Rather than bemoan his lowered position as a traveling hack for an insurance company, he started viewing every insurance customer needing a physical as a potential patient. He dug deep into himself and resurrected the earnest little boy selling figs and buttermilk back in Monroe. He put on his most charming self and tried to win over whoever was placed before him, no matter how surly or resistant or lowly the patient was.

“If people saw you and liked you,” he began, “it’s your job to charm ’em, show how efficient you were.”

He spent many lonely hours crisscrossing neighborhoods in South Central Los Angeles, far from the Becks’ and the manicured places he wanted to be, conducting those insurance examinations.

Then, in May, a month after he had arrived in Los Angeles, he got word from Atlanta: President Clement had beaten the longest of odds and been elected to the Board of Education. He had defeated an incumbent, 22,259 votes to 13,936 votes, in an election in which Red-baiting detractors tried to get him disqualified in the eleventh hour and his opponent, who had been on the board since 1927, had been so confident that he didn’t even campaign.

“I didn’t think the people were ready for this,” his opponent, J.
³⁶
H. Landers, told
The Atlanta Constitution
.

The win made Clement the first colored man to win a major office in Georgia since Reconstruction and was significant enough to merit a story in
The New York Times
and articles in
Time
and
Newsweek
. “For the first time since Reconstruction days,” the
Times
wrote, “a Negro won nomination to Atlanta’s Board of Education.”
³⁷

The news filtered back as Robert was knocking on doors collecting urine samples and still boarding with the Becks. He was feeling even more isolated and alone and could not let on to anyone back home the truth of his situation. Just as he was needing to muster more faith than ever, the South chose a rare instance to let slip a colored victory—and to President Clement, no less, the man who had never thought Robert measured up, who had taken over his role as the head of his own family, and who second-guessed his every decision, even his choice to leave the South. Robert was struggling with that choice at that very moment and now could not escape his father-in-law’s triumph because it was national news.

Robert was now feeling the accumulated weight of all the pressure he was under. With the Clements unwittingly gaining a greater hold on Alice and the girls as President Clement rose in stature, Robert fretted over his options. He had to get himself established, and soon. He devised a new plan to gain a foothold in Los Angeles: he now decided to canvass physicians door-to-door to try to build up referrals. He would market himself at the big middle-class churches in town. He would court potential patients wherever he could and dress in such a way that they wouldn’t forget him.

So, in between insurance exams, he went from building to building, office to office, up and down Jefferson Avenue and off Vermont and Figueroa, tracking down physicians like a homeless man looking for change. He knocked on glass doors with a doctor’s name etched on them as he dreamed his, too, would be one day. He sucked in his pride and took in a deep breath and tried introducing himself to physicians who knew or thought little of him to get into their good graces. He showed them his surgery credentials and asked if they wouldn’t mind referring cases to him if they didn’t do surgery themselves.

“That was met with poor success,” Robert said. Here he was, a perfect stranger from someplace down south—Louisiana, was it?—asking for a favor. The big-city doctors who happened to beat him to California or had grown up there didn’t take to it kindly. “So you took a lump in the jaw and kept on to the next office.”

He made his pitch again and again and got the same response. “All the cordiality in the world,” Robert said. “They would say, ‘I’ve been using Dr. XYZ for all these years. Show me one good reason I should change to you.’ ”

He didn’t have an answer then, but he was determined that one day he would. So he set about trying to make a name for himself the best he knew how. He started going to churches even though he was rarely seen in them otherwise. He decided to put on his loudest, most ostentatious suit and tie so the people would remember him. He made a show of dropping more than he really could afford when the collection plate came his way, enough for the church people to be sure to notice. He asked the ministers if they would introduce him to their congregations from the pulpit as they did politicians and visitors from back South.

“I didn’t have any responses,” he said.

But Golden State Insurance kept sending him out, and those after-hours insurance examinations were adding up. So he decided to turn his attention to the people themselves. He was doing more and more of those exams, and the anonymous working-class colored people of South Central L.A., many newly arrived from Texas or Arkansas or parts of Louisiana that Robert did not know, began to notice this smooth-talking physician, who looked more like a high roller than a doctor in his loud, tailored suits and stingy-brim hats and who made you feel as though you were the most important person in the world.

He conducted enough of those examinations and collected enough of those critical vials of urine to move into an apartment west of Crenshaw, near the Becks. He had been in Los Angeles a couple of months, getting himself set up, and could send for Alice and the girls now. His name was now forming on the lips of cleaning ladies and laborers, gamblers and seamstresses, postal workers and stevedores scattered all over South Central who wanted a doctor they could relate to, the humble and exuberant people who would eventually become the foundation of everything he would ever do in Los Angeles and among the most loyal people ever to enter his life.

I walked to the elevator and rode down with Shorty.
³⁸
“You lucky bastard,” he said bitterly.
“Why do you say that?”
“You saved your goddamn money and now you’re gone.”
“My problems are just starting.
”

—R
ICHARD
W
RIGHT
,
Black Boy/American Hunger

THE NORTH AND WEST, 1915 TO THE 1970S

UNKNOWINGLY
, the migrants were walking into a headwind of resentment and suspicion. They could not hide the rough-cast clothes ill suited for northern winters or the slow syrup accents some northerners could not decipher. They carried with them the scents of the South, of lye soap and earthen field. They had emerged from a cave of restrictions into wide-open, anonymous hives that viewed them with bemusement and contempt. They had been trained to walk humbly, look down when spoken to. It would take time to learn the ways of the North.

What they could not have realized was the calcifying untruths they would have to overcome on top of everything else. As soon as the North took note of the flood of colored people from the South, sociologists and economists began studying the consequences of their arrival and drawing conclusions about who these people were and why they were coming.

“With few exceptions,” wrote the economist Sadie Mossell of the migration to Philadelphia, “the migrants were untrained, often illiterate, and generally void of culture.”
³⁹

“The inarticulate and resigned masses came to the city,” wrote the preeminent sociologist E.
⁴⁰
Franklin Frazier of the 1930s migration to Chicago, adding that “the disorganization of Negro life in the city seems at times to be a disease.”

In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an official in the U.S. Department of Labor, called the inner cities after the arrival of the southern migrants “a tangle of pathology.”
⁴¹
He argued that what had attracted southerners like Ida Mae, George, and Robert was welfare: “the differential in payments between jurisdictions
has
to encourage
some
migration toward urban centers in the North,” he wrote, adding his own italics.
⁴²

Their reputation had preceded them. It had not been good. Neither was it accurate. The general laws of migration hold that the greater the obstacles and the farther the distance traveled, the more ambitious the migrants. “It is the higher status segments of a population which are most residentially mobile,” the sociologists Karl and Alma Taeuber wrote in a 1965 analysis of census data on the migrants, published the same year as the Moynihan Report.
⁴³
“As the distance of migration increases,” wrote the migration scholar Everett Lee, “the migrants become an increasingly superior group.”
⁴⁴

Any migration takes some measure of energy, planning, and forethought. It requires not only the desire for something better but the willingness to act on that desire to achieve it. Thus the people who undertake such a journey are more likely to be either among the better educated of their homes of origin or those most motivated to make it in the New World, researchers have found. “Migrants who overcome a considerable set of intervening obstacles do so for compelling reasons, and such migrations are not taken lightly,” Lee wrote.
⁴⁵
“Intervening obstacles serve to weed out some of the weak or the incapable.”

The South had erected some of the highest barriers to migration of any people seeking to leave one place for another in this country. By the time the migrants made it out, they were likely willing to do whatever it took to make it, so as not to have to return south and admit defeat. It would be decades before census data could be further analyzed and bear out these observations.

One myth they had to overcome was that they were bedraggled hayseeds just off the plantation. Census figures paint a different picture. By the 1930s, nearly two out of every three colored migrants to the big cities of the North and West were coming from towns or cities in the South, as did George Starling and Robert Foster, rather than straight from the field. “The move to northern cities was dominated by urban southerners,” wrote the scholar J.
⁴⁶
Trent Alexander. Thus the latter wave of migrants brought a higher level of sophistication than was assumed at the time. “Most Negro migrants to northern metropolitan areas have had considerable previous experience with urban living,” the Taeuber study observed.
⁴⁷

Overall, southern migrants represented the most educated segment of the southern black population they left, the sociologist Stewart Tolnay wrote in 1998. In 1940 and 1950, colored people who left the South “averaged nearly two more years of completed schooling than those who remained in the South.”
⁴⁸
That middle wave of migrants found themselves, on average, more than two years behind the blacks they encountered in the North.

But by the 1950s, those numbers would change. As the Migration matured, the migrants would arrive with higher levels of education than earlier waves of migrants and thus greater employment potential than both the blacks they left behind and the blacks they joined. A 1965 study of ninety-four migrants to Chicago, most of them from Mississippi and Arkansas, found that thirteen percent were illiterate (defined as having five or fewer years of schooling), compared to forty-five percent of the people in the southern counties they came from.
⁴⁹
The migrants and the blacks they encountered in the poor west side neighborhood of North Lawndale had roughly the same amount of schooling—an average of about eight years, the study found. “There is no support,” the sociologist Frank T.
⁵⁰
Cherry wrote, for the notion of “a less-well-educated” pool of migrants entering Chicago “than it already has.”

A seminal study that would be published that same year went even further. Across the North as a whole, the post–World War II migrants “were
not
[italics in original] of lower average socioeconomic status than the resident Negro population,” the Taeubers wrote in their 1965 census analysis of migrants arriving north from 1955 to 1960.
⁵¹
“Indeed, in educational attainment, Negro in-migrants to northern cities were equal to or slightly higher than the resident
white
population.”

Against nearly every assumption about the Migration, the 1965 census study found that the migrants of the 1950s—particularly those who came from towns and cities, as had George Starling and Robert Foster—had more education than even the northern white population they joined.
⁵²
The percentage of postwar black migrants who had graduated from high school was as high as or higher than that of native whites in New York, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and St. Louis and close to the percentage of whites in Chicago.

As for blacks who had the advantage of having come from the urban South, the percentage who had graduated from high school was higher than that of the whites they joined, by significant margins in some cases, in each of the seven northern cities the study examined.

In Philadelphia, for instance, some thirty-nine percent of the blacks who had migrated from towns or cities had graduated from high school, compared with thirty-three percent of the native whites. In Cleveland, forty percent of migrants from the urban South were high school graduates compared to thirty-one percent of the native whites. This was the case for George Starling, Robert Foster, and hundreds of thousands of other colored migrants from the small-town South, who, it turns out, often had as much as or more education than those they met, colored or white, in the cities to which they fled, though they were often looked down upon.

Indeed, when it came to their black counterparts, the Taeuber study found that, in every major city the migrants fled to, a higher percentage of migrants had completed at least one year of high school than the black population they joined—sixty-one percent of migrants compared to fifty-three percent of native blacks in New York, fifty-six percent of migrants compared to fifty-two percent of native blacks in Chicago, sixty-three percent of migrants compared to fifty-four percent of native blacks in Cleveland, sixty-six percent of migrants compared to fifty-four percent of black natives in Washington, D.C., sixty percent of migrants compared to forty-eight percent of native blacks in Philadelphia, and so on.

The migrants, the Taeubers found, “resemble in educational levels the whites among whom they live,” and they tended to be “of substantially higher socioeconomic status, on the average, than the resident Negro population.”
⁵³
The researchers added that “these findings are at variance with most previous discussions of Negro migration.”

The misconceptions about the migrants carried over to their presumed behavior upon arrival. Contrary to popular convention, the migrants were more likely to be married and remain married, less likely to bear children out of wedlock, and less likely to head single-parent households than the black northerners they encountered at their destinations. They were more likely to be employed, and, due to their willingness to work longer hours or more than one job, they actually earned more as a group than their northern black counterparts, despite being relegated to the lowliest positions.

“Black men who have been out of the South for five years or more are, in every instance, more likely to be in the labor force than other black men in the North,” wrote Larry H.
⁵⁴
Long and Lynne R. Heltman of the Census Bureau in 1975. They found that, among young black men in the North, fifteen percent of those born in the North were jobless as against nine percent of the southern migrants they studied. “The same pattern applies to all other age groups and to the West,” the census found.

Whatever their educational level, the migrants “more successfully avoided poverty,” wrote Long and his colleague Kristin A.
⁵⁵
Hansen of the Census Bureau, “because of higher rates of labor force participation and other (unmeasured) characteristics.”

There developed several theories as to why. One was that, because of the migrants’ hard-laboring lives in the South, they had “a stronger attachment to the labor force as a result of their work-oriented values,” Long and Hansen wrote. Another explanation pointed to disadvantages facing the northern-born blacks in the migrants’ destinations—“exposure to drugs, crime and other conditions in big cities that may be handicaps in obtaining and holding jobs.”

There is yet another possible reason—that the migrants who would make it out of the South and outlast others who gave up and returned home were a particularly resilient group of survivors. “The migration of blacks out of the South has clearly been selective of the best educated,” Long and Hansen wrote. “It is possible that the least capable returned, leaving in the North a very able and determined group of migrants.”

Those who would tough it out in the North and West were “not willing to risk relocation in the South because of possible greater advantages in their current location,” wrote the sociologists Wen Lang Li and Sheron L.
⁵⁶
Randolph in a 1982 study of the migrants.

This would suggest that the people of the Great Migration who ultimately made lives for themselves in the North and West were among the most determined of those in the South, among the most resilient of those who left, and among the most resourceful of blacks in the North, not unlike immigrant groups from other parts of the world who made a way for themselves in the big cities of the North and West.

There appeared to be an overarching phenomenon that sociologists call a “migrant advantage.” It is some internal resolve that perhaps exists in any immigrant compelled to leave one place for another. It made them “especially goal oriented, leading them to persist in their work and not be easily discouraged,” Long and Heltman of the Census Bureau wrote in a 1975 report.
⁵⁷
In San Francisco, for instance, the migrants doubled up like their Chinese counterparts and, as in other cities, tended to “immigrate as groups and to remain together in the new environment for purposes of mutual aid,” wrote the sociologist Charles S.
⁵⁸
Johnson.

The willingness to do whatever it took to survive appeared to offer some protection from the ills surrounding them, North and South. The San Francisco study found that the migrants were half as likely to be separated, divorced, or widowed as the blacks they encountered upon arrival. Overall, wherever they went, they tended to be “more family-stable compared both to those they left behind at their origin and those they encountered at their destination,” the sociologist Thomas Wilson wrote in 2001.
⁵⁹
“They are less likely to bear children outside of marriage and less likely to be divorced or separated from their spouses.”