A Book Review by Ron Jones

A Book Review by Ron Jones The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson eloquently explores the Great Migration, an exodus of six million Black Southerners to the Northern & Western United States from roughly 1915 to 1970. It’s the most significant intra-migration in American history. Black people left the lands of their enslaved forefathers in search oflivesgreater,freer,andmorelikewhatAmericapromised them at Reconstruction. The fusion of Black urban & rural shaped American music, politics, & cuisine like no other domestic phenomenon. If the writings of Toni Morrison or James Baldwin captivate you, the athletic feats of Jesse Owens or Serena Williams inspire you, Oprah or Michelle Obama’s podcasts inform & entertain you, a hat tip to the Great Migration is in order. But the Warmth of Other Suns does not explore the Great Migration through the lens of celebrities. Wilkerson dives deep into the lives of three of the millions of nameless faces in search of something more.

Ida Mae Gladney, George Starling, and Robert Pershing Foster were born in different states and left Dixie in different decades. They differ in job, educational attainment, and income. Yet the harrowing hand of Jim Crow controlled every aspect of their early lives. The will

to escape suffocating tyranny binds them the six million others wrapped up by the Great Migration, and frankly, humans in general. In the face of unyielding oppression, our innate strength, innovation, and courage lead us to search for better lives.

Ida Mae Gladney was born in 1913 in Chickasaw County, MS, across the state from the fertile Delta but still ruled by king cotton. And king cotton maintained a cruel castesystem:whiteplantersatthetop,Blacksharecroppers at the bottom. Ida Mae maintained a gap-toothed smile through the indignities inflicted by the caste, walking to a 1-room school for Black children of all ages, a father who died with no medical care because white doctors refused to treat Black patients, and feet hardened by the Mississippi clay because they couldn’t afford shoes. Ida Mae married in her teens and settled in for life as a sharecropper’s wife on Mr. Edd’s plantation. Sharecropping was slavery by another name. Black laborers worked the fields in exchange for seed, fertilizer, and life’s bare essentials while plantation owners sold the cotton and supposedly split the profits “equally” with the sharecroppers. Mr. Edd was fairer than most plantation owners in that he occasionally gave sharecroppers some earnings at the end of the year. A brutal industry with no oversight and violence for inquiring about a plantation owner’s accounting, some experts estimate >80% of plantation owners cheated sharecroppers. Ida Mae and her extended family also tended to animals & gardens. George, Ida Mae’s husband, decided the family was going to leave in 1937 after his cousin was accused of stealing turkeys that belonged to Mr. Edd, who formed a posse and stalked George’s cousin and beat him within an inch of his life. George and a few other men had to cut off his cousin’s clothes because the blood had stuck them to his body. The turkeys appeared a few days later after a hiatus in the woods. Mr. Edd nor anyone in the posse was ever charged for the brutal assault. George settled up with Mr. Edd and the family took the train north to Milwaukee where George had a sister. Many of the migrants followed relatives to their

destinations. Unable to find satisfying work in Milwaukee due to the Great Depression, the family moved to Chicago’s Black Belt on the Southside. Throughout the years Ida Mae’s gap-toothed smile carried her family through many of the same trials & triumphs that other migrants faced. She became a poll worker helping others vote before any Black person could exercise that right in her home state without being killed. Her family purchased a home once the segregated walls of the Black Belt crumbled and white flight began. Within a year of Ida Mae’s family moving in, the white neighbors fled their block.

In Ida Mae’s later years, her once middle-class neighborhood had given way to many urban social ills. Underfunded schools, mass incarceration, and the pillaging of wealth from Black homeowners like Ida Mae through unscrupulous housing practices made her southside neighborhood a ghetto rife with crime. 1

Undeterred, Ida Mae joined the block club to improve her neighborhood. Once a skinny state senator with a funny name spoke to the block club. The woman born into a world that killed Black people for attempting to vote did not know that she was listening to the man who would become the 1st Black President of the United States. Ida Mae’s superhuman ability to maintain a gap-toothed smile through all the hardships led to a fulfilling life. George Starling was born in Northern Florida in 1918. He grew up in Eustis near Orlando. Prior to being the happiest place on earth, central Florida was known for the best citrus fruit in the world. That juicy fruit, like king cotton,createdaracialcaste:whitegroveownersatthetop andBlackpickersatthebottom.Georgeexcelledinschool & sports and had no intention of living a life dangerously high in a citrus tree. He graduated valedictorian of his high school class and matriculated to Florida A&M, the only Florida college Black students could attend. George couldn’t afford tuition after his sophomore year. His father didn’t see the value in a son sitting in a classroom in Tallahassee while he could be making money pickingfruit.JimCrowallowednolocalschoolsforGeorge to attend. He found himself doing what he vowed to avoid at all costs, picking fruit. “Schoolboy”, as he was called by the pickers whenever he worked during summers and reviewed their wages to ensure they were being paid fairly by the foremen (they often weren’t), had wasted two years in school to find himself right back with them.

1 Making the Second Ghetto, Race & Housing in Chicago 1940-1960 by Arnold Hirsch

World War II began and George received a deferment due to a heart condition. The ensuing draft of many pickers led to a labor shortage. George saw opportunity. He created a make-shift union. Telling fellow pickers not to begin until they could negotiate a fair price. Pickers had higher wages, grove owners had a problem, and Jim Crow gave them a heinous solution, lynching.2 The grove owners in Lake County had a cartoonishly evil sheriff who also appears as the primary antagonist in a brilliant book detailing Thurgood Marshall’s case in Lake County.3 Sheriff William McCall would not merely look away but gladly join in a ghastly lynching of George. Luckily a friend overheard the grove owners decide to lynch George and the other union organizers early enough for a warning. George hitched a ride to the train station and was headed north to New York City within hours of the warning. He vowed to never live in Eustis again and decades later when fellow pensioners were returning to the warmth of the Florida sun George decided to stay in NYC. George got a job on the same rail line that took him from Florida to New York City in 1945. He was a porter, as respectable a job as many Black men could hope for in that era. George spent decades ushering migrants & their descendants to and from the land he’d left fearing for his life.

George was able to capture some semblance of theAmerican Dream in Harlem. He & his wife purchased a brownstone in Harlem where they raised a family. A bookish man, George never had the opportunity to return to college and fulfill his dreams of becoming a professor. Agnawing reality until his death. George Pershing Foster, “Bob”, hailed from Monroe, LA. He was born in 1918 to a teacher & principal at the local colored high school - a rare learned family amongst the Black mill workers of Jim Crow northern Louisiana. But their education did not translate into financial success. Black public school employees were paid a fraction of their white counterparts and colored schools received hand-me-downs from the local white schools throughout the Jim Crow South, yet Robert followed his siblings into prestigious Black universities.

2 On Lynchings by Ida B. Wells-Barnett 3 Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America by Gilbert King

He attended Morehouse, Black America’s feeder system into the middle class. There Robert saw “Blacks living the way they ought to live.” He attended medical school at Meharry, America’s foremost Black medical college. Robert settled on obstetrics and after a brief stint in the military, had to decide where to begin a practice. Robert’s older brother Madison, also a doctor, practiced in Monroe. The local hospital didn’t allow colored doctors, so Madison was practicing out of his medical bag, tending to Monroe’s Black residents who were just as likely to pay with ½ a pig as money. Robert dreamed bigger than Monroe, bigger than the humiliation of not actually being fitted for a suit prior to purchase, he dreamed of California. It became a reality in 1953 whenever his stylish Buick Roadmaster headed west for warmer suns.

While California, nicknamed “James Crow” for more sophisticated racism by Black migrants, was not perfecttoBob,hesucceeded.Onewouldnothavetosearch far in Black Los Angeles to find a “Robert” named after the affable obstetrician who delivered him. And one can still go listen to “Hide Nor Hair” speak of “Dr. Foster”, an ode to Bob by his most famous patient, a fellow migrant, Ray Charles. In spite of financial success, the caste perfected by Jim Crow followed Robert to California. Early on by his insistence on visiting then segregated Las Vegas for a weekend trip emblematic of any Los Angeles man of Bob’s lot. At the end of his career, Bob was haunted by unfair, racist treatment at a VAhospital. While Bob attained socioeconomic success unfathomable to any Black person born in Jim Crow Louisiana, he spent his life seemingly dissatisfied. Bob constantly searched for belonging and acceptance. He never forgot the embarrassing urine-filled hallways on the way to the balcony for colored moviegoers at the theater in Monroe or the roller skates he desperately wanted as a child, always quick to say “we could afford the roller skates but we couldn’t afford sidewalks.”

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Each character left a different state in the Jim Crow South for a different part of America. Their lives spanned decades in which their homelands evolved from a caste system controlling every aspect of life down to separate Bibles to swear oath upon to schools more integrated than their grandchildren would attend in the urbanNorth&West.Noneofthemfelttheywerejoininga mass movement that would reshapeAmerica, they simply wanted something better. Their courage, shared by 6 million other Black people, and millions of Irish, English, Italian, Mexican, Chinese, and dozens of other groups of immigrants to leave the only land that many of them had ever known for a better place is distinctlyAmerican. It isn’t lost on me that America finds itself at a crossroads. Unable to shake the remnants of the caste that forced Black migrants from Jim Crow to James Crow, and it’s unclear how we tackle such a daunting challenge. I don’t have the answer. But I have confidence that if we can progress from a country where a Black woman didn’t even know the location of her polling place because visiting could mean death into a country where that same Blackwoman speakswith theman whowouldbecome the 1st Black President of the United States, then we can figure this out as well.

Ronald “Ron” Jones, II is a proud Hugo, OK native currently practicing criminal defense law in Tulsa.

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Please call her at 918-599-7755 or 918-899-0900.