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“We lived with constant fear.” (Encore: Freedom Summer, Part 2)

Image Credit:  The Guardian

John Robert Lewis was born on February 21, 1940, in Pike County, Alabama. As he learned during a filming of Finding Your Roots, his great-great-grandfather, Tobias Carter, registered to voted in 1867, 2 years after the abolition of slavery.  But almost 100 years later, Lewis, his sharecropper parents, and thousands of other descendants of enslaved people were prevented from voting.

Inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Montgomery bus boycott, Lewis organized non-violent protests such as sit-ins, and joined the 1961 Freedom Rides. He assumed leadership of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1963.  In ’64, SNCC and other civil rights groups led an effort to educate African Americans in Mississippi, and register them to vote.  Reflecting on it in 1985, Lewis wrote,

“The Mississippi Freedom Summer was an attempt to bring the nation to Mississippi, to open up the state and the South and bring the dirt of racism and violence from under the rug so all of America could see and deal with it …
During the summer many churches were bombed and burned, particularly black churches in small towns and rural communities that had been headquarters for Freedom Schools and for voter registration rallies. There was shooting at homes; we lived with constant fear. We felt that we were part of a nonviolent army, and in the group you had a sense of solidarity, and you knew you had to move on in spite of your fear.”

Lewis’s advocacy for the disenfranchised, marginalized, and oppressed continued beyond Freedom Summer into the rest of his life.  He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives (GA-5) in November, 1986.  His numerous awards include the Medal of Freedom, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Non-Violent Peace Prize, and the John F. Kennedy “Profile in Courage Award” for Lifetime Achievement.  Congressman Lewis died Friday, July 17, 2020.

This episode was originally posted on September 7, 2019.

Many letters and narratives in this series were read with permission from the Wisconsin Historical Society and the University of Southern Mississippi.  The letters of Cephas Hughes are accessible via the Miami University Libraries Walter Havighurst Special Collections and University Archives.

The following sources were also used:

Finding Your Roots:  John Lewis and Cory Booker

Freedom Summer, Mississippi 1964, snccdigital.org

Freedom Summer:  The 1964 Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi, Susan Goldman Rubin

Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC

Letters from Mississippi, Elizabeth Sutherland Martinez

Mississippi Freedom Summer–20 Years Later, Dissent Magazine

Mississippi Freedom Summer Events, Civil Rights Movement Veterans

Freedom Summer, Bruce Watson

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“We have to be shot down here like rabbits.” (Encore: The Great Migration, Part 1)

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“The Migrants Arrived in Great Numbers,” Jacob Lawrence
Image credit:  Museum of Modern Ar
“…the slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” — W.E.B. duBois

The Civil War was supposed to mean the end of slavery and the beginning of freedom, franchise, and full citizenship for African Americans. And in the decades after the war, many blacks did make legislative, educational, and financial gains.  But as we learned in the first episode of American Epistles, many more formerly enslaved people and their children faced limited economic opportunity and the constant threat of violence.

With the outbreak of World War I, immigration to the United States decreased and production demands increased.   Low unemployment in the North meant that African Americans had a new opportunity to escape life in the South.

Men and women, the young and the older, regardless of education level, wrote letters to the Chicago Defender newspaper, the Chicago Urban League, and other organizations.  The following letter was one of many that expressed their desperation:

Macon, GA
April 1, 1917

Dear Sir:
I am writing you for information. I want to come north east, but I have not sufficient funds, and I am writing you to see if there is any way that you can help me by giving me the names of some of the firms that will send me a transportation, as we are down here where we have to be shot down here like rabbits for every little [offense], as I seen an [occurrence] [happen] down here this after noon when three [deputies] from the [sheriff’s] office [and] one Negro spotter come out and found some of our [race men] in a crap game. And it makes me want to leave the south worse than I ever did when such things hapen right at my door, hopeing to have a reply soon and will in close a stamp from the same.“

 
This was the first episode of a three-part series on the Great Migration.
 

Recommended Reading—
The Warmth of Other Suns:  Isabel Wilkerson took 15 years to write this book, and it shows. The book is THOROUGH. Think of it as Everything That You Didn’t Know That You Didn’t Know About the Great Migration.

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow:  Richard Wormser covers a lot of ground in a relative few pages.  It opens with Reconstruction and ends at 1954.

I referred to several sources, but used the following most heavily–

“Black Workers and the Great Migration North,” Carole Marks

“Blowing the Trumpet: The ‘Chicago Defender’ and Black Migration during World War I,” James R. Grossman

“The Civil War:  The Senate’s History“

The Great Black Migration:  A Historical Encyclopedia of the American Mosaic, Steven A. Reich

“Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration,” James R. Grossman

“The Other Black Wall Streets“

Race, Class, and Power in the Alabama Coalfields, Brian Kelly

“Separate is Not Equal:  Brown v. Board of Education“

Slavery by Another Name, Douglas Blackmon

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“Don’t drop them pies!” (Women’s Welfare Work in WWI, Part 2)

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Salvation Army Worker Serving Donuts to the AEF; Image credit:  Smithsonian Magazine

“August 10, 1917
I get my appointment and go loco w joy. It seems to me my reason for existence is explained. All my training and experience seem to have fitted me for just this. Bradford Knapp talks and I get two ideas. Unless one gives all one is not giving enough, and if one can go one should. The other thing was that to our generation has come this great chance for sacrifice. There is a joy in my heart that this has come. Everyone is awfully good about my going away. I did not know how much my work meant to me.”

–Diary of Mary Paxton Keeley

On April 6, 1917, Congress voted for a declaration of war on Germany. War had already been raging for three years. And for the whole of those three years, American women had been involved in the care and comfort of European soldiers and civilians. Now that American men would be fighting, American women took on service as a patriotic duty.  But not all women were given an equal opportunity to serve, nor did all American soldiers receive equal access to the welfare services.

Recommended Reading:

America’s Women:  400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines, Gail Collins

The Women Who Fried Donuts and Dodged Bombs on the Front Lines of WWI, Smithsonian Magazine

Credits for Primary Sources:

Diary of Mary Paxton Keeley, read with permission from the State Historical Society of Missouri

Letters of Emma Young Dickson, read with permission from the Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries

The overseas war record of the Winsor school, 1914-1919, (Constance Cunningham’s letter)

Canteening Overseas, 1917-1919, (Memoir of Marian Baldwin)

Into the Breach, American Women Overseas in World War I, Dorothy and Carl Schneider

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“I have the right not to vote.” (Women’s Suffrage: Mini Episode)

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Image credit:  Public Domain


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Topeka Feb 11, 1887

To Gov Martin

Dear Sir:

Ten thousand Women who have enough rights without voting and also plenty to do, to attend to their own affairs without meddling with men’s business, ask you to Veto this Suffrage bill.  We don’t want to vote, and go to the polls with n****rs — and all kinds of woman.

Mrs G Monroe
and thousands of others

We’ve all heard of Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass, but there were millions of women and men who spoke for, and against, women’s suffrage.  Today’s mini-episode shares a few of those voices.

Other podcasts about women’s suffrage:

History Chicks

Stuff You Missed in History Class

Credits for Primary Sources:

The letters of Effie B. Frost and Mrs. G. Monroe, as well as the Woman Suffrage Pamphlet by Rev. Stephen Estey, are read with permission from the Kanas State Historical Society.

The petition by Mrs. Kate T. F. Cornell is in the public domain and available at docsteach.org.

Anti-Suffrage Essays by Massachusetts Women is in the public domain and available at gutenberg.org.

Sources:
The Frederick Douglass Encyclopedia, James L. Conyers Jr., Nancy J. Dawson, Lee E. Thompson, Mary Joan Thompson

“The Great Schism,” Ta-nehisi Coates for The Atlantic

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“Nothing here but money.” (The Great Migration, Part 3)

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“In the North the African American had more educational opportunities.” Jacob Lawrence
Image credit: The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC


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“South State Street was in its glory then, a teeming Negro street with crowded theatres, restaurants and cabarets.  And excitement from noon to noon.  Midnight was like day.  The street was full of workers and gamblers, prostitutes and pimps, church folks and sinners.” — Langston Hughes

In many ways, the North delivered on its promise.  The migrants enjoyed higher wages, better education for their children, and the opportunity to participate in the political process.  Perhaps most refreshingly, they no longer had to behave in a subservient manner to white people. Letters from migrants to their Southern friends and families, drew more and more blacks out of the South.

 Dear Sir:

I take this method of thanking you for your early responding and the glorious effect of the treatment. Oh. I do feel so fine. Dr., the treatment reach[ed] me almost ready to move. I am now housekeeping again. I like it so much better than rooming. Well, Dr., with the aid of God I am making very good. I make $75 per month. I am carrying enough insurance to pay me $20 per week if I am not able to be on duty. I don’t have to work hard, don’t have to mister every little white boy comes along. I haven’t heard a white man call a colored a n*****r you know now–since I been in the state of PA. I can ride in the electric street and steam cars anywhere I get a seat. I don’t care to mix with white. What I mean–I am not crazy about being with white folks, but if I have to pay the same fare, I have learn[ed] to want the same accommodation. And if you are first in a place here shopping, you don’t have to wait until the white folks get through trading. Yet amid all this, I shall ever love the good old South and I am praying that God may give every well wisher a chance to be a man regardless of his color, and if my going to the front would bring about such conditions, I am ready any day.  Well, Dr., I don’t want to worry you but read between lines; and maybe you can see a little sense in my weak statement. The kids are in school every day. I have only two, and I guess that [is] all. Dr., when you find time, I would be delighted to have a word from the good old home state. Wife join[s] me in sending love you and yours.

 I am your friend and patient.

However, while wages were higher than the migrants had earned before, the pay was often low relative to the higher cost of living.  Many migrants were forced to live in overcrowded and dilapidated neighborhoods.  In Chicago, the newcomers clashed culturally with the Old Settlers–blacks who had lived in the city much longer.  And, they clashed violently with whites, in Chicago and throughout the North.

I referred to several sources, but used the following most heavily–

“The Forgotten March That Started the National Civil Rights Movement Took Place 100 Years Ago”

“Blowing the Trumpet: The ‘Chicago Defender’ and Black Migration during World War I,” James R. Grossman

Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration, James R. Grossman

“In Motion: The African-American Experience (The Great Migration)

“The Origins and Diffusion of Racial Restrictive Covenants,” Michael Jones-Correa

The Journal of Negro History, Volume IV, 1919

The Journal of Negro History, Volume VI, 1921

“‘If You Can’t Push, Pull, If You Can’t Pull, Please Get Out of the Way’: The Phyllis Wheatley Club and Home in Chicago, 1896 to 1920,”Anne Meis Knupfer

The Defender: How a Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America, Ethan Michaeli

The Great Black Migration:  A Historical Encyclopedia of the American Mosaic, Steven A. Reich

“Negro Migration During the War,” Emmett J. Scott Read more