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December 5, 2011

Two books I've just finished, the only connection between them is they are about the great lengths to which people will go to achieve freedom.

First, The Long Walk, the 1956 book upon which an unfortunately renamed major motion picture is based. A straightforward, well told account of Slavomir Rawicz who was arrested by the Soviets after they invaded Poland in World War II. He was charged with being a Pole in the wrong place, found guilty and sentenced to 25 years in the gulag. We get the NKVD torture, the long train trip east which should seem harrowing enough, but it's followed by an 800 mile, 40-day forced winter march in Siberia to the prison camp. As you have probably guessed, if you've seen the movie trailers, a small group of men eventually managed to escape from the prison. Considering that heading west would only take them into the more heavily populated parts of the Soviet Union, and heading east would take them to the highly secure, highly militarized Pacific coast where the Soviets were anticipating an invasion from Japan, taking a route south was the only way to go. That, then, is the second half of the book—the journey to and across Mongolia, the Gobi Desert, Tibet and even the Himalayas to finally reach India. I'm not giving away the story here. After all, the author wrote the book, so you know he survived. Others died along the way. It's a good story of determination and luck.

Second, and much closer to home, The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson which personalizes the Great Migration by focusing on three Americans who managed to successfully escape the Jim Crow south and make their ways to New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. Until I read this book I wasn't even aware of the term "Great Migration" for the migration of blacks from the south to the north and west from 1910 to 1970.

Historians would come to call it the Great Migration. It would become perhaps the biggest underreported story of the twentieth century. It was vast. It was leaderless. It crept along so many thousands of currents over so long a stretch of time as to be difficult for the press truly to capture while it was under way. Over the course of six decades, some six million black southerners left the land of their forefathers and fanned out across the country for an uncertain existence in nearly every other corner of America. The Great Migration would become a turning point in history. It would transform urban America and recast the social and political order of every city it touched. It would force the South to search its soul and finally to lay aside a feudal caste system. It grew out of the unmet promises made after the Civil War and, through the sheer weight of it, helped push the country toward the civil rights revolutions of the 1960s.

By the time it was over, no northern or western city would be the same. In Chicago alone, the black population rocketed from 44,103 (just under three percent of the population) at the start of the Migration to more than one million at the end of it. By the turn of the twenty-first century, blacks made up a third of the city’s residents, with more blacks living in Chicago than in the entire state of Mississippi.

The actions of the people in this book were both universal and distinctly American. Their migration was a response to an economic and social structure not of their making. They did what humans have done for centuries when life became untenable—what the pilgrims did under the tyranny of British rule, what the Scotch-Irish did in Oklahoma when the land turned to dust, what the Irish did when there was nothing to eat, what the European Jews did during the spread of Nazism, what the landless in Russia, Italy, China, and elsewhere did when something better across the ocean called to them. What binds these stories together was the back-against-the-wall, reluctant yet hopeful search for something better, any place but where they were. They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done. They left.

In contrast with stereotypes two-thirds of those who migrated out of the south came from urban areas - they were not farm workers. They tended to be better educated than those who stayed behind. A 1965 census analysis showed that the average educational level of blacks immigrating from the south was the same as or higher than the average of white residents of the northern and western cities to which the immigrants traveled. In Philadelphia, for example, 39% of the blacks who had immigrated from urban areas of the south were high school graduates, compared to only 33% of the native white people in Philadelphia. The black immigrants tended to be "of substantially higher socio-economic status...than the resident Negro population." Immigrant blacks were more likely to be married and remain married than the blacks who already lived in the northern cities.

And though this immigration theory may be structurally sound, with sociologists even calling them immigrants in the early years of the Migration, nearly every black migrant I interviewed vehemently resisted the immigrant label. They did not see themselves as immigrants under any circumstances, their behavior notwithstanding. The idea conjured up the deepest pains of centuries of rejection by their own country. They had been forced to become immigrants in their own land just to secure their freedom. But they were not immigrants and had never been actual immigrants. The South may have acted like a different country and been proud of it, but it was a part of the United States, and anyone born there was born an American.

This book should be required reading alongside The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It's available as an ebook from the Riverside County Digital Library in Kindle and other formats.

Filed under Books | permalink | December 5, 2011 at 01:39 PM

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