CultureWatch: A Debut Author - The Warmth of Other Suns; DVD Tip: The Forsyte Saga

But my brief exposure to the South didn’t begin to make me aware of the ubiquity of the Jim Crow laws, which covered minutiae as well as more visible restrictions. Blacks were forced to sit at the back of public conveyances, and to give up their seats if the bus or streetcar was crowded. Water fountains and restrooms were labeled “colored” or “whites only.” A Negro had to step off the sidewalk if a white person approached. When driving a car, if a white person came to an intersection at the same time as the black person, the white person had the right of way. Public parks were segregated, and their maintenance and equipment reflected which race was the privileged one, if indeed there happened to be a rare, small park allotted to the Negroes.

By the early years of the 20th century, conditions were so difficult for most blacks that, slowly at first, a great migration began. It was not, as Ms. Wilkerson points out, just another wave of immigration, like the ones from Europe or the Orient. This was a migration of American citizens in search of a more viable existence. Many of them had ancestors who had been in America since before the birth of the country.

Along with an astounding amount of general information about this exodus from the South, the author has narrowed her focus to give us a detailed history of three individuals, each of whom wound up in one of the major cities that attracted a large number of blacks fleeing the segregated south, i.e. New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Youth Administration Girls

*National Youth Administration girls and their instructor at the Good Shepherd community center, Chicago (south side), Illinois, April 1941 Russell Lee, Photographer Photomural from gelatin-sliver print FSA-OWI Collection Prints and Photographs Division (122); Library of Congress

Robert Joseph Pershing Foster was a determined and brilliant young man who found a way to get an education, and ultimately graduated from medical school. In his burning desire to leave the South, he focused on Los Angeles, where he knew a doctor who might help him to set up his practice. In time, he had great success, both financial and social, and hobnobbed with famous people like Ray Charles. He married well, lived in a mansion, and spent an inordinate amount of time in Las Vegas, gambling amid glitz and glamour. Ultimately, after the death of his wife, and suffering from severe health problems, he wound up a lonely old man, living alone, but for his servants, in the big house.

George Swanson Starling was also a bright youngster who yearned for more education, but an early marriage tied him down to the few jobs available to young, black men at that time in Florida. His brains and determination soon made him an outspoken leader, thereby making him a target for the repressive practices of his white bosses, and he eventually escaped the South just ahead of a lynch mob. He settled in New York City, and found work as a railroad porter. Despite an unfulfilling marriage and a disappointing, drug-addicted son, he managed to buy a house, and to become a well-respected member of his community. He was a regular church-goer, and a valued member of the choir, because he had a beautiful singing voice. In a crazy irony, he was assigned to the north/south passenger trains, New York to Florida. This meant that just outside of Washington, DC, it fell to George to explain to his passengers that the train had now added a “colored only” car, and whites and blacks who had been sitting in the same car for the first part of the journey must now rise from their seats and be separated for the remaining miles, as the train went deeper into the south.

It took ten years before Starling felt it safe to return for a visit to the town where he had lived in Florida. After that, he visited often, but remained in the Harlem brownstone he had scrimped and saved to buy. At his death, there were two funerals, one in Harlem, and one in Florida, where he was buried.

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CultureWatch: A Debut Author - The Warmth of Other Suns; DVD Tip: The Forsyte Saga

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