"THE GREAT MIGRATION"

“THE GREAT MIGRATION”

             Caroline and I heard Isabel Wilkerson speak a couple of week ago at Agnes Scott College on the issue of migration.  It was right in the middle of the Congressional negotiations over the Trump Wall, and she used her fine book, “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration,” as the basis for her presentation.  In her talk, she noted that there were three main routes of the great migration of African-Americans from the South from 1915-1970.  Some went northeast to New York, Newark, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh.  Some went north to the Midwest – Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago.  And some went west to Los Angeles.  In all of these migrations, she emphasized that America gained greatly because, while these new regions were not free of neo-slavery and segregation, they were dramatically more open to the humanity of African-Americans than the South had been.

            She shared many stories of these contributions of African-Americans once their dreams could begin to bear fruit, but this one stuck with me.  One such family lived in Oakville, Alabama, in the early 1920’s, and they were hoping to migrate to Cleveland, Ohio.  The parents were sharecroppers, meaning that they were held in neo-slavery, and they had ten children, because they needed them to work on the small amount of land that they leased.  They had been dreaming of going north to Cleveland, as many other African-Americans had done from their area.  The mother was anxious to migrate, but the father was hesitant – he was scared, because the white supremacist society in which they lived heavily discouraged migration.  Some immigrants were arrested before they left, some were thrown off their farms or lost their jobs, and some were beaten or killed.  The message was clear – stay here and provide the cheap labor, or great harm will come to you. 

            Things changed for the family when their youngest was born.  In hope of going to Cleveland, they named him that:  James Cleveland.  As the baby grew, he was thin and sickly, and he could not work in the fields without getting deathly ill.  This situation pushed the dad to take action on migration – they would head to Cleveland and the new world there.  As Wilkerson tells it, as they were preparing to leave, the little boy happened to bump into the dad, as they were packing to leave.  The dad put his hands on the boy’s shoulders to steady himself, and it was only then that the boy noticed how afraid his dad was – his hands were shaking with fright. 

            They did safely arrive in Cleveland, and on the first day of school, James Cleveland went to school at age nine.  The teacher asked him what his name was, and he replied that he was called “J.C.”  She could not understand his strong Southern accent, so she took his name to be “Jesse,” and she called him that.  When JC went home to tell his parents about the mistake, they advised him to stick with the name “Jesse,” and he did.  So did everyone else, and instead of being James Cleveland Owens, he became Jesse Owens.   He became a track and field star, and as we all likely know, he went into another white supremacist venue in the Berlin Olympics in 1936, presided over by Adolf Hitler.   He would win 4 gold medals in these Olympics, the first American ever to do so in track and field.  In so doing, he burst wide open the white supremacist theory that was the foundation of Nazi Germany and white America.  Had he stayed in the fields of neo-slavery Alabama, he likely would have shriveled up there, if not dying of his respiratory disease. 

            Of course, Jesse Owens did not end white supremacy.  Hitler went on to the horrific suffering of World War II, and when Owens returned to the USA, he was greeted with segregation.  In a reception given in his honor at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, he was forced to ride up the freight elevator rather than be allowed to ride on the “white” elevator.  Yet, he put a dent in the armor of neo-slavery and segregation, and his witness resonates now to us, so much so that those twins of white supremacy have been put back in the basement of American history.

            As Trump rattles on about the wall, let us remember the migrants, let us remember all the doctors and lawyers and artists and preachers and athletes and justice workers who have come here as immigrants, and let us dedicate ourselves to justice and equity for them and for ourselves, not only because it is right but also because it is our salvation.