Katie Singer

The Labor of Working

“All other sources of labor having been exhausted, the migrants were the last resource.” This is how artist Jacob Lawrence captions his fourth panel in the Migration Series, a collection of 60 paintings telling the story of the Great Migration. He is referring to war-time work in this country, a time when factories were churning out weapons of war and were so desperate for labor that they even let Black people – and women — work for them. (Inject sarcastic tone).

See, one reason these jobs became open was that some immigrants were going home to fight in their own country’s army. At the same time, scores of American men were going off to war. So with this ensuing labor shortage, African Americans and women in general finally were enjoying access to some well-paying factory jobs.

A 1941 Works Projects Administration (WPA) report noted that, prior to 1917, approximately 75% of African Americans in the country were “gainfully employed, mostly in domestic and ‘personal service’ jobs.” (Not sure I would have used the term gainfully). At any rate, as would happen again post-World War II, after World War I white soldiers were returning home and to work, such that suddenly the recently hired were deemed no longer competent or capable enough to remain in their positions. Last-hired, first-fired was in full force.

Krueger-Scott narrator Katheryn Bethea, who ultimately retired as an English literature professor at Rutgers University-Newark explained:

When I got out of high school in 1940 there were really no jobs for young Black women except takin’ care of babies.

Eventually Bethea landed a job in a war plant making “inflatable mechanisms” for life rafts. She added:

When the war was over of course that job ceased.

Those who were able to hold on to their positions had a chance to create wealth. And when historians say wealth, it’s not as in wealthy, necessarily. But it’s about actually having money left over at the end of the month, an ability to save up, to ultimately pass something down to children, family, whomever. The fact that African Americans have had so much less access to well-paying, secure employment is in large part why we have the wealth gap we do today. In 2022, white families had an average wealth of $1.4 million, while Black families had an average wealth of $211,596.

Louise Epperson, one of the Krueger-Scott interviewees, landed one of these relatively lucrative jobs at the Western Electric factory and was ultimately able to purchase her own home a few years later. She made it clear in her interview that this was an accomplishment and point of pride.

Willie Bradwell started working as a domestic worker around eighteen years of age. But she was excited when she found factory work, which she liked much better. She started out at a paper-cup factory in North Newark at 55 cents an hour, minimum wage at the time. After a few months she secured an even better factory job, with H.A. Wilson at 97 Chestnut Street, sometime around 1946. Bradwell noted:

…they didn’t even hire Black people ‘til after the War. So when we went in there after the War, it wasn’t too much of a problem.

So apparently this factory was not even hiring African Americans during WWII, which implies that there may well have been other businesses willing to suffer through drastic labor shortages simply in order to retain the racial status quo.

Pearl Beatty told her interviewer how she was looking for work to support her family:

Well, my first job was in a factory two blocks from here. From the beginning we lived on Baldwin and Washington Streets. And one day I was walking down the street and I saw this sign, “employment needed.” And I went in and applied. I was sixteen. And they hired me. And I was thrilled because my job was just two blocks from home. We’re talking about, let’s see now, we’re talking about ’52.

Beatty worked at that factory job for eight years. During her interview, Beatty — who is biracial — shared a story about race in the workplace:

In fact, when I walked in [to the factory job], the white girls thought I was, uh, white. And this one white woman said to me, “I want you to know that the Black girls that work here are very clean.” And at my lunchtime I went over to the Black girls and introduced myself. And when I came back to my bench to work – the white lady said to me, “Now, just because I said that the Blacks were clean here, that didn’t mean that you have to go over there and eat with them.” And I politely let her know that I was Black… Now the Black women, they knew I was Black.

In my book, Alien Soil: Oral Histories of Great Migration Newark most of the factory stories come from the women. (Get the book and you’ll be able to read about so many fabulous women who few too many people know about). This predominance of women in factory work may be because Black men were still able to secure higher paying jobs than the women — and even a better education at times. These jobs may also have been fresher in the minds of the women, because for many it was their first and last job before getting married and staying home to raise children.

Notably, not everybody was satisfied with a factory job. This is one of the many benefits of oral histories, the reminder that not all members of a particular group do things the same way or want the same things. When it came to these sorts of jobs, people knew there was only so far one could go. Elma Bateman tells a story about how she asked her high school counselor for permission to register for a “commercial” course that taught typing and stenography, instead of one of the “basic” courses to which Black students were typically steered.

The counselor wanted to know why, when Black people aren’t hired as secretaries… [But] all you could do when you came out [of the basic courses] was work in a factory.

Bateman signed up for the commercial course without permission, and retired as an administrator for AT&T. The theme of persistence is rampant in these oral histories. As usual, these African Americans had to push their way into work, even as some employers were desperate for workers. Once employed, they contended quite often with racism and sexism, and certainly job insecurity. This is not a grossly different tale than that told today around the Black American work experience. I recently published an article laying out how oral histories show us that the narratives of 1950 can be eerily similar to those of 2024. This, I’m afraid is American history and America’s present. So let’s keep on learning our history, in part so we can understand just how we are perpetuating it today.

Memory and Fire

FIRE GETS SEARED INTO PEOPLE’S MINDS. The vision of fire, the smell, the heat… And even just the stories that include fire can often make deep inroads into the imagination. So much so, in fact, that some people even remember fires where there were none.

This is the case around the narratives of urban rebellion quite often. It is even a way, at times, for the media and other self-nominated reporters, to illustrate just how dangerous the city streets are for the average person. After all, our country has had a dysfunctional relationship with its cities since their inception, the issues typically centering around race and class. So if tales of burning buildings and flaming cars can get some people’s attention – and perhaps confirm the lack of civilization in these urban spaces – then why not light the narratives with fire, some think.

Another reason fiery images and tales are so effective is because a lot of city folk – especially poor and working class – have had to contend with fire on a personal basis. They know its all-consuming behavior and would prefer to never have to negotiate with it again. That was the experience of many of the Krueger-Scott African-American Oral History Project narrators who appear in my book, Alien Soil: Oral Histories of Great Migration Newark.

Coyt Jones was a postal worker in Newark, New Jersey – and the father of Amiri Baraka. He had arrived by train from Hartsville, South Carolina in 1927, at the age of 11. By himself. He was told to take a taxi from Newark’s Pennsylvania Station to a relative’s house when he got there. When asked in the interview about his trip north, he answered:

Jones: I don’t remember. There’s only one thing I can remember about that ride was the amount of people that crossed the street at Broad and Market. I had never seen that many people before.

Blount (interviewer): Were they African Americans or were they –

Jones: They were all people, mostly white I think. This was years ago, remember? I asked the taxi driver if there was a fire someplace. Where was all the people going!?

Jones apparently had also told his interviewer Mrs. Blount, when the tape recorder was off, that there was something he wanted to share on tape, a “significant incident.” Towards the end of the interview Mrs. Blount invited Jones to “go ahead” with the story. The incident in question concerned a fire Jones witnessed sometime around 1920, back in South Carolina. Jones and his family lived three houses down from the “Oil Mill Houses.” These were small company homes for the employees of the Hartsville Oil Mill which produced cottonseed oil. Jones recalled hearing that the rent was $2.00 to $3.00 per month.

One night an Oil Mill House caught fire, and ultimately the whole row of homes burned down. “The only thing standing in those houses was a chimney,” said Jones. His mother warned him not to go down to the site that night, but the young boy snuck out anyway:

I must have been about four or five years old. I don’t remember. Anyway, a lady got burned up in one of the houses, and she was still holding the baby to her bosom when she burned. She was layin’ on those springs and the bed and everything and the mattress was all burned up. I’ll never forget that. Never forget it. That’s one of the worse things I guess I’ve ever seen.

One might imagine that when the 1967 uprising began in Newark, and he was seeing flames – or being told that there were flames — that Mr. Jones may have been transported back to his childhood memory of his five-year-old self standing in front of the burned remains of a young mother.

Because of the efficacy of fire as a memory holder – and shaker – some of the conversations in the oral histories went from fire as the subject to fire as the fuel for further storytelling.

Glen Marie Brickus, one of the peer interviewers in the oral history collection, was born in Minden, Louisiana. Her father was a bricklayer there. Senator Wynona Lipman grew up in La Grange, Georgia and it turned out her father had been a bricklayer, too. She remembered her childhood with affection. “It was wonderful. We had a cow until the town made us get rid of it.”

She and Mrs. Brickus had a spirited exchange as they began comparing notes on growing up in the south. It all started when Mrs. Brickus asked a question about old folks using snuff:

Lipman: Oh, the snuff, yes. Snuff, the lady who helped us do the washing, at the wash pot outside, you know, where you boiled your clothes for washing over a fire. Oh, she was a snuff dipper I tell you. And my father chewed tobacco. Yes.

Brickus: Oh yeah. Yeah, we had one of those wash pots in the backyard. And somebody had to go and build a fire on the wash day.

Lipman: I remember killing pigs, too. And making crackling.

Brickus: Oh really? Yeah, we did too, we did too.

Lipman: We had chickens, and all of that.

Brickus: We did too. We raised chickens and guineas and there was, you know, you’d wait for special kinds of days as far as the weather to kill hogs. And then you may kill three or four or more at a time. And I can remember seeing them strung up. You know, they’d put up these special poles, with the poles across the top and hang them up there.

Lipman: We had a smoke house.

Brickus: We did too. They would first salt the meat down for so long, and then take it out and hang it up and smoke it. Keep the fire going day and night to smoke the meat. And it would never spoil.

Lipman. No.

Brickus: You could keep it indefinitely and it would never spoil.

The beauty of oral history is that it helps us learn things sometimes that we didn’t know we didn’t know. Even a peer such as Mrs. Brickus might not have gotten to the point of asking Lipman what farm life looked like for her in the south. But fire did. And if you want to read more histories like this, well, then you can always order my book!

In the last chapter of Alien Soil I echo many of the oral histories in explaining the ways in which fire can be weaponized. There are numerous examples of how it has been used to misrepresent people and places, both in the past and more recently. But other times fire is simply a portal, burning its way into recessed memories wherein we might even learn that an East Coast state Senator spent her childhood in the South on a farm killing pigs.

This is American history; please, let’s keep learning our history. It’s a radical act of resistance these days.

Hoping to Learn & Learning to Hope

“OVERHAULING THE AMERICAN PRISON INDUSTRY: A View From 20 Years of Incarceration” is the name of the seminar that my co-author Maurice Tyree and I appeared on this morning. Hosted by our publisher, Lived Places Publishing, it was an opportunity for people to learn about our book, hear Maurice’s thinking, and simply understand why we wrote the damn thing, The Darkest Parts of My Blackness: A Journey of Remorse, Reform, Reconciliation, and (R)evolution.

The why? Essentially, to effect change. To humanize the people held in cages in this country who are being sold a bill of goods that they are part of a rehabilitative system that is more often than not a site of cruelty and dehumanization.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

– Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

This was how Maurice led off, answering as to why people should care about what happens inside American prisons, why folks should wonder how roughly 1.8 million of their fellow citizens might be doing in there. I have had people remind me that some folks don’t believe criminals deserve any kind of “special” treatment, that they are paying dues for their wrongdoing and thus deserve the punishment they get. Yes, we know this belief system exists. In fact, good old “liberal” Blue-state California just voted down Proposition 6, which would have banned involuntary servitude in prisons. The 13^th amendment is alive and well:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime…

See, we never actually rid our country of slavery. It’s right there in the ironically entitled Bill of Rights. If you haven’t already, please watch Ava DuVernay’s film 13th. It explains a lot, in a most powerful and stunning fashion.

And guess what, you know who the majority of those involuntary servants are, Black people. You know why? It’s not because Black people are somehow more prone to crime, it’s simply that they are more prone to be exploited by the systems of racism in this country that place them in vulnerable positions which tend to be proximate to crime and criminal behavior. And of course, there is the fact that not everyone in prison is guilty. See the Innocence Project, as just one example of this fact. This is an injustice to so many. And, as Maurice points out, even if you don’t care what happens to them inside, they are eventually going to come out — and to a neighborhood near you. The previously incarcerated are present right now at the places you shop, work, and study. Wouldn’t you prefer to share those spaces with folks who have come out rehabilitated, instead of beaten down? Transformed, instead of hardened by anger? Hopeful instead of nihilistic?

Hope is something Maurice talks about a lot. Someone in the chat, during our seminar, asked how a prisoner could find hope in such a dark place. His answer: hope. Hope breeds hope. He calls it a revolution within that ultimately creates a revolutionary without. That is what he did with himself, but not everyone can. The point is that one should not have to be the smartest, most resilient human alive just to come out of prison with a chance at a redemptive life. Because most of us aren’t all that. That’s one reason he wanted this book to get published:

In the January 2012 letter to [my sister] Marquetta, I mentioned a “book writing idea.” What you are reading is basically the result of that idea. I wanted to “seek some form of liberation within the reader’s mentality” [as written in the letter] because I knew that people’s minds would need to be freed from a lot of preconceived notions. I wanted to encourage people to work hard to understand other people, people they didn’t know but maybe still had opinions about (59).

Education is a large theme in the book. How it’s denied, how it’s defined, how one snatches it up where one can. In our book, there are essentially three voices: one comes in Maurice’s letters that he wrote to family, friends, and associates while incarcerated; the second voice appears in his reflections on these letters as he re-reads and reconsiders them at the present; and the third voice is mine, providing historical and social context – and commentary – to all of the above. The Introduction begins with Maurice’s Compassionate Release Letter. It was submitted at the height of the COVID pandemic, when the prisons were veritable breeding grounds for infection. Over 6,000 incarcerated people died in the first year of the pandemic alone. Maurice had major health issues, already undergoing heart bypass surgery in prison.

In his letter to the presiding judge, Maurice addresses concerns expressed previously by that judge about his educational accomplishments (or lack thereof) while incarcerated. I provide this context:

Education is a complicated term, one that carries a very singular meaning for many people. Mr. Tyree, referencing Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book, Between the World and Me, explains that, like Coates, he was never much of a classroom person, even as he had definitely become a book person. Coates writes, “The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests(17).

Later he writes about how he sought out his own education:

I grew so much once I started reading about the ideas and lives of different people, especially the writing of Black thinkers and activists that I never heard of in school. They were the door to my mental liberation and I wanted others to take that journey, too (60).

And finally, he sums up education like this:

Everything we do in life can be considered school. School is school, but so is growing up in a rough neighborhood, selling drugs, and going to prison. I have chosen to learn from all my schooling, and I keep on learning now that I’m out. What I learn I like to pass on to others, maybe save them a couple years or so. And my brothers do the same for me. I have learned all manner of things in these life classrooms. It’s all about exchanging information and ideas, that’s how we grow and learn. That’s how we create community. That’s human connection (212).

I had two books come out this summer. And as distinct as they might seem at first glance, they are really quite the same. Alien Soil: Oral Histories of Great Migration Newark foregrounds stories of African Americans who came to Newark during the Great Migration. In their words, through oral history interviews, they describe an event, place, and time that is often left to outsiders to explain. Same goes with this book with Maurice. There is much scholarship, journalism, and political punditry surrounding America’s prison industrial complex. But this book provides explanation from one with lived experience. Fortunately, this practice is becoming a bit more common regarding the prison system, as newsletters, podcasts and journals surface, ringing with the voices of the incarcerated, as well as of those who have found their freedom — in one way or another.

I understand my assignment, as they say. It is to provide historical framework and social context for the narratives of Black Americans whose stories continue to be buried and just plain erased. Perhaps the reader will take on the assignment of listening to some of those voices. This seems all the more urgent in light of the recent changing of the guard in our American political system.

World on the Move

WORLD ON THE MOVE: 250,000 YEARS OF HUMAN MIGRATION is a traveling exhibition made possible through the partnership of the American Anthropological Association and the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. So believe me when I say I was thrilled when the principal librarian of Piscataway Public Library, Joy Robinson, contacted me to speak about my new book, Alien Soil: Oral Histories of Great Migration Newarkas part of this project. The Great Migration was being recognized as a global human migration movement, a grand contribution to history, and I couldn’t have been happier.

The audience that night, at the very lovely Kennedy Library, was made up of a diverse array of people. There were members of the African American Seniors Club; friends and colleagues of mine surprised me; and even some of Joy’s family was there. Within this community, I got to share some of the stories from my book, and honor a history that now more than ever, as they, say, is at risk of erasure.

I began my talk with a brief overview of the Great Migration, because you might be surprised at how many people don’t know what it is, unless they have family who participated. I spoke of Jacob Lawrence’s fabulous Migration Series, suggesting that there were probably folks in the audience like Lawrence, who had heard similar Great Migration stories in their day. Indeed, I learned afterwards, there were.

I explained that there were many ways in to understanding the Great Migration, like with Lawrence’s paintings. There is, for example, also historian Giles Wright’s book, Afro Americans in New Jersey. And then of course, there are oral histories and why I even wrote this book. Because I’m not telling anybody’s story – the narrators in these interviews are telling their stories. I am merely the publicist and contextualizer. (Spell-check says that’s not a word, but being an academic AND a creative writer I took license long ago to make up words whenever I wanted to).

I showed the attendees that night the Krueger-Scott African American Oral History collection’s website so that they could go on and listen to more of the interviews that I referenced in my talk. As can you, dear reader!

There are numerous questions asked about this time period. For example, Why did African Americans leave the South during this time. What made ultimately six million people leave their homes requires close to six million answers, but one big one is to save lives. As Lawrence captions Panel 15, “There were lynchings…after a lynching the migration quickened.”

Willa Rawlins said in her Krueger-Scott interview:

My father had preceded us to Newark…My uncles felt it was better for my father to be up North because he had a hot temper and they didn’t want to see him hanging from a tree down there. Period.

Of course it wasn’t like the North provided some fully safe space for African Americans either. All things are relative in racism. In fact, the wonderful NJ Social Justice Remembrance Coalition has been working to memorialize spaces where Black Americans have been lynched in New Jersey. They recently received funding to create a marker for the spot where Samuel Johnson was lynched in Eatontown. And now they are working with The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama to have Mr. Johnson’s name added to the museum’s exhibit that remembers the scourge of lynching in our country. I visited this site in the summer of 2023. It is incredible, and not an easy experience. But if everyone in this country went there, somehow someway, we might not have just elected ourselves a racist-plus president. But I digress.

Another reason that Black Southerners were leaving their homes was that they simply wanted to give their children the chances in life they never had. This is a parental instinct as old as parenting. A lot of the Krueger-Scott narrators were kids when they came to Newark. The above-quoted Willa Rawlins was 4 years old when she arrived; and John B. Ross came at age 5, in 1924, from Georgia; and there was Ethel Richards who was 9 when she arrived in Newark, in 1927. Most of these narrators, at the time of their interviews, were in their 70s and 80s, yet they often had vivid memories of coming to Newark as children. This is a human trait, remembering childhood moments well when our surroundings have shifted drastically.

Another question that often arises is, How did the African Americans travel to get to their new homes? Again, there are many answers to the question. Not everyone piled their luggage on top of a car, like this iconic photo that seems to show up every time the term Great Migration appears on the internet.

Unnamed members of an African American family preparing to leave North Carolina for New Jersey in 1940, during the Great Migration. https://www.britannica.com/event/Great-Migration#/media/1/973069/261415

One of the most popular modes of transit was the train. There are so many stories of that train ride in my book, and such different memories of the experience. One interviewee actually remembered sitting next to Jesse Owens on her trip and you can hear the excitement in her voice as she recalls this experience, all those decades later.

My commitment to oral history has to do with my mission to foreground the voices of people with lived historical experiences that so often are left untold. One perc of an oral history collection is that it reminds us that no one group is a monolith. This is an especially valuable reminder when it comes to African Americans and their history. In fact, one of the myths surrounding the Great Migration is that everyone who left the South was poor. In actuality, large numbers of educated, professional people were a part of this migration – and why cities like Newark – and Los Angeles — have the industries and institutions that they do. The Krueger-Scott oral histories alone feature teachers, doctors, politicians, clergy, radio personalities, musicians, activists, journalists, poets, psychologists, and law enforcement officers, amongst others. As Lawrence captions Panel #56, “The African American professionals were forced to follow their clients in order to make a living.”

At the library talk, I showed the audience how my book was organized – because it’s apparently unusual for a history book to focus on themes rather than timelines and famous people. I also shared the story of the Krueger-Scott Mansion – where the interviews were supposed to be housed in a Black cultural center. And of course, there was much more said that night, but suffice it to say the evening was a pleasure for numerous reasons. Joy raffled off my books and I signed them; others brought their books for me to personalize; there were even nice snacks. But most importantly to me, I had people comment that I was doing the right thing, doing right by these stories and their narrators. We all know what it means to have someone say they understand your work and see it as important. I drove home that night, in my son’s car that seems to beep at me incessantly, thinking that this book tour might not have been such a bad idea after all. So many of us really do want to keep on learning our history, and for that I am truly grateful.

Not On Her Watch

BLACK WOMEN ACTIVISTS still don’t get enough play in our country’s historiography. But slowly their stories are being foregrounded, such as in my colleague Hettie Williams’ new book, The Georgia of the North: Black Women and the Civil Rights Movement in New Jersey.

My recent book, Alien Soil: Oral Histories of Great Migration Newark also foregrounds the stories of these activists, in their own words. In sharing these stories, I argue for an expanded definition of the word, activism, itself. My hope is that this in turn will provide increased light on the subject of “everyday” people doing the good work, making the good trouble.

Today’s blog is dedicated to just such a woman, a participant in the Krueger-Scott African-American Oral History Project who is featured in my book. Allow me to introduce one of my favorite people, Louise Epperson.

Louise Epperson was born in Waynesboro, Georgia in 1908 and moved to Newark, New Jersey in 1932. She worked as a domestic, one of the few jobs available at the time for Black women. Epperson was living what she called “a quiet life” at her aunt’s house on Orange Street, and later on down the line saved up enough money to purchase a modest home of her own on 12^th Avenue.

She ultimately secured a position as an aide at the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island, a facility for the mentally disabled. Once hired, she started eyeing the occupational therapist position but was told that a Black woman would never be hired for the relatively prestigious job. Yet she persisted.

And I bidded on that job and I got the high score and I received it and I was the first Black to work on that. I was the first Black to work in occupational therapy. Everybody say when I saw that on the board, “Oh Mrs. Epperson they don’t hire no Blacks.” And I say, “You don’t know what they’ll hire until you try.”

Her plan was to retire from Willowbrook in 1967, going back to that quiet life of her early years. That was until a newspaper headline changed those plans. On January 1, 1967 she read in her morning paper that the New Jersey College of Medicine and Dentistry (NJCMD) was planning to expand right into her own backyard:

It said that this school was gonna move into Newark regardless of what anyone said, and they were coming from Jersey City because they was runnin’ Jersey City broke. So they were going to come into Newark, and first thing they were gonna do was to blight all the land that they wanted. And they wanted something like over 300 acres of land at that time. And they had already blighted part of 12th Avenue where I lived, and one side of the street was blighted. And they called that urban renewal. Well I say it looks more like Negro Removal than urban renewal, you know.

This was just one more land grab that was happening to urban neighborhoods across the country at the time. The official name of this act, “eminent domain.” But Epperson wasn’t having it. Starting out with meetings at her kitchen table, attended by just a few neighbors, Epperson ultimately founded the Committee Against Negro and Puerto Rican Removal, a group that would become a cornerstone of Newark’s political history. It is probably clear by now that this is not the story of some unwitting woman caught up by the winds of a turbulent historical moment — a trope regularly perpetuated upon women of color, especially. Rather, this is a tale of yet another longtime feminist activist of color, a household name in her community, who is scarcely acknowledged in the history books.

People had already started moving out of Louise Epperson’s 12^th Avenue neighborhood. Some did so in order to remain one step ahead of what was presented by the media and municipality as a fait accompli. It was in the middle of all this that the July 1967 rebellion erupted:

When I started the fight with the med school, I tried to get everybody in the city and the state and the county and the federal government to help me. I went to everybody. Everybody gave me the runaround. To go to this one, and go to that one . . . I had contacted everyone that I possibly could in higher, upper powers. Then the riots broke out. Everybody that I tried to contact before this happened, everyone, everyone, including the Governor, including the president from the College, Dr. Cadmus, including Chancellor Dungan, Paul Ylvisaker, they all came to my door to see what they could do to sit down for a community meeting in the City of Newark.

The Governor ended up sending two buses to Newark, inviting Louise Epperson and her comrades to ride down to Trenton and talk with him about the development plan. Other leaders simply asked Louise Epperson to “call them off.”

I said, “I can’t call them off, I didn’t call them on… You know, you did that not me. You called the State Troopers in here. You barbed-wired our city off where nobody could come in or go out. I didn’t do those things. You did it. And people are dead, and I’m feeling very sad and very low because it could have been avoided if you’d have only took time to meet with me. I was willing to come any place to meet with you so that we could settle this thing before it got this far, with all the dead people and the hospital.”

Louise Epperson, along with a number of other groups and individuals, organized, mobilized, and battled against political and administrative powers — from municipal to federal — for many years. The outcome of this long and drawn-out fight was the Newark Agreements. This plan included a decrease in the hospital’s land allocation which would have initially displaced approximately 20,000 Black and Puerto Rican residents in the Central Ward. There was a moderate increase in financial subsidy for those who would be displaced by the medical school development as well. Eventually the hospital was built on 58 acres, much less than the initially proposed 300 acres. In addition, 60 acres in nearby neighborhoods were to be “relinquished,” designated expressly for new and affordable housing.

In the end, of course, there were still numerous families who suffered under yet another relocation, but because of the work of Mrs. Epperson and other local activists, more people received better compensation than that which was initially promised. In addition, extra beds were designated at the hospital specifically for use by the local community, and gradually the medical school delivered on supplying much needed medical services — and a handful of jobs — to the residents of Newark.

Meanwhile, Louise Epperson received a job offer from the very hospital against which she had organized. The community encouraged her to take it, she said. This way she would be sure that the hospital kept its promises.

I went home, and I thought it over and I prayed on it. I decided to come to work for the College of Medicine and Dentistry — providing that I had an open-door policy: I could go direct to the President anytime I wanted.

Indeed, she was given full access to Dr. Cadmus and was seen marching into his office on a regular basis with issues brought to her by the community. Mrs. Epperson continued to advocate for her city until her retirement at age 87, and even thereafter. She passed away in 2002, at the age of 96.

Just one more example of why I say, “let’s keep learning our history!”

Book Me

BOOKCLUB MAVENS! (A gender-neutral term, I’ll have you know). This week I am here to suggest that my book would be superperfect for your next gathering. I’ve done some major research in my day when it comes to book clubs, let me tell you. And it occurs to me that my new book, Alien Soil: Oral Histories of Great Migration Newark would make for a great book club book.

After some thorough Googling (!) I have found that there are certain factors involved that make for an excellent book club book. I will now share a few of those factors and provide support as to why my book satisfies these requirements. (Can you tell I’m in the midst of teaching composition right now)?!

Okay, for one thing the book apparently needs to have enough substance for robust discussion. I can assure you that my book is substantive and prime for discussion. You can talk church, baseball, music, politics, labor issues, art, fire, race, cities, historic preservation and rebellions. Something for everybody! For example, take these excerpts from Chapter One which details the story of why the esteemed Krueger-Scott Mansion couldn’t ever quite get turned into the Black Cultural Center so many wanted it to be.

The Mansion was the proverbial elephant described very differently by each individual in a group of blind men. The edifice symbolized an outdated Newark for some, a point away from which the city needed to move. Others saw the house as a reflection of the long history of the people who came to Newark and who were in large part responsible for what it had become – a modern city of culture, trade, and learning. The Mansion’s beauty – and value – were in the eye of the beholder. Lou Danzig, Newark Housing Authority (NHA) Director, declared it a “monstrosity” in 1966 at one particularly contentious public hearing. At the same meeting J. Stewart Johnson, curator for the Newark Museum and president of the Victorian Society of America, argued for the protection of the Mansion, out of respect for the city’s early history. “…We are destroying the 19^th century here as fast as we possibly can,” he warned.

In 1979 the Krueger-Scott Mansion was still in fair condition, although it had suffered a fire on the third floor which “damaged the structure’s heating system” and “destroyed the dome’s crystal skylight.” The following year the City of Newark made its first investment in the Mansion’s preservation, approving a $50,000 grant for “emergency repairs.” The Mansion had finally made its way into the conversation that was already surrounding several local historic preservation efforts. “Mrs. Scott is to be admired for holding onto the mansion for so long…” said Margaret Mandhart of the Newark Preservation and Landmarks Committee in 1981. The hope was that Scott’s hard work would not be in vain.

The physical realities of what it would take to reconstruct and repair the Mansion were becoming ever clearer, although of course not everyone agreed just what those realities were. A July 1991 report by Glenn Boornazian Architectural Conservators stated that removing the stucco surface (that was probably applied by the Scottish Rite Masons) in a non-destructive manner from the brick was “unfeasible if not impossible.” (Handwritten next to that section on the document is the word, “shit,” circled and with an exclamation mark).

Scottish Rite Freemasons brochue

Catherine Lenix-Hooker [executive director of the project] has asserted that the Krueger-Scott African-American Cultural Center project was not a failure, that they “went the distance” with what they had. A dwindling tax base, concerns over struggling schools, and corruption in government are just some of the reasons she gave for the inability to finish what was started. Mayor [Sharpe]James has insisted that cost came in as the number one issue surrounding the Mansion project, followed closely by just who would control what once it was finally completed. “Cost and control ruled the day!!!” exclaimed James. The simple conclusion is that economics vanquished this historic preservation effort. When asked, both Lenix-Hooker and James were adamant that race played no part in the Mansion’s demise. But as late historian Clement A. Price said many times, including in his documentary, The Once and Future Newark, “Race matters in America. Race matters in Newark.” Race matters in the story of the Krueger-Scott project.

The Mansion, circa 2011
Photo by Samantha Boardman

How’s that for a soap opera starring a mansion?! The good news is that the property has finally been restored, but alas, not as a Black Cultural Center.

Second on the book-club-factor-list is that the book has to be widely available. Well, I think we all know by now how widely available this puppy is. (See its link in the first paragraph). Of course, I prefer you order it through the publisher – as opposed to that other place that starts with an A. (See just the latest in a list of labor exploitations this company perpetrates upon its workers). But do you. The book can also be purchased from me, if you live nearby OR if you attend one of my upcoming events. You could even get it personalized that way!

Another suggestion is that book club books not be too long. Well, mine is a tidy 170 pages – with pictures, too! Plus, don’t be freaked out that it’s from an academic press. If you’re reading this now then know I write in pretty plain English — no jargon here. In fact I was literally told in grad school that I didn’t write like a historian and, well, that felt like a good thing. Who wants to write like a something? I’m a storyteller and everyone loves stories!

And get this, I would come to your meeting (as long as wine and cheese are available, of course). I’ll even Zoom in if you’re far away from me — and then have my own wine and cheese. Plus I can provide some discussion questions for you all if you’d like. It’d be fun! I’ve been in book clubs where the author comes and it just changes everything. Of course you probably won’t want to be too snarky when they’re there, so easy on the Chardonnay if that’s something that happens to you. (Talking to myself here)!

So yeah, read my book; review it on Goodreads (and other sites); then suggest it to your book club. Let’s keep learning our history – but not be bored in the process. Thanks!

Southern Ways

“From every southern town migrants left by the hundreds to travel north.”
Panel 3: The Migration Series, Jacob Lawrence.

“SOUTHERN TOWN.” The term can evoke images of racism and violence. And this was the case quite often, through the 20^th century – and of course still occurring even today. But, as oral histories are so wonderful in reminding us, nothing and no one is all one thing. And the interviews from the Krueger-Scott African-American Oral History Project that appear in my book also remind us that not every Black migrant left an agricultural life – another image we often see through depictions of this historical event. After all, some folks came from the cities; they abandoned spaces both rural and urban, as they headed north, east, and west. And while this Migration may have started out “by the hundreds,” in the end approximately six million humans uprooted themselves, and their loved ones, from their homes to escape whatever it was they no longer could abide by. Hence a Great Migration. Below I am going to share some bits of discussion around this leaving. And, as you know by now, you can always order my book to read so very many more of these kinds of stories.

Louise Scott, who left Florence (probably), South Carolina in 1936, became a millionaire beauty culturist in Newark, NJ. She built an empire, running many businesses out of the Krueger-Scott Mansion on High Street (now MLK Blvd.). A foundation has been created to honor and continue her legacy, the Newark Scott Civic and Cultural Foundation. And many of the narrators in my book speak of Madam Scott and the Mansion; she was an integral part of the Black Newark community for decades.

Now, the City of Florence was chartered in 1871 by the Reconstruction government and ultimately named after a railroad magnate’s daughter. Florence was what many might imagine as a place African Americans would leave, if they could, for “a better life.” Sharecropping, for example, was a major occupation for many Black citizens, growing mostly rice and tobacco. And if you know anything about the system of sharecropping, then you know it was not really set up to benefit those who worked within it.

Attorney Eugene Thompson spoke about his mother working as a domestic while living in Norfolk, Virginia. But she moved to Newark, met her husband, and gave birth to her son. Eugene. Mr. Thompson’s father, a journalist, was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and just “followed the Mississippi River,” finally ending up in Newark, according to Thompson.

In 1923, Norfolk’s city limits were expanded as it annexed several cities, while also adding a naval base and miles of beach property. The Norfolk Naval Base grew rapidly because of World War I, and this created a housing shortage in the area. I would imagine that then, like now, those most affected by the housing shortage were the poor and working class. And at that time, that would mean a preponderance of African Americans.

Memphis, Tennessee is well known today for many things, including its music scene. I visited the city last summer on a civil rights tour. It was a hard place to be Black person for a very long time, even though many famous African Americans lived their lives in Memphis — including W.C. Handy and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Cotton was still “king” there, even in the early 20^th century – and racist violence was rampant, including lynchings.

Matthew Little, retired factory worker for General Motors, was born in Starr, South Carolina. In his interview, he was explaining differences between northerners and southerners in terms of attire:

“Oh, in the South you wore what they call overalls, with suspenders, and here they even wore coveralls, which covered the whole body, you know. And in the South, especially in the country, they wash their shirts and overalls and starch ‘em and wear ‘em on Sunday. Instead of dressing in suits and ties.”

Starr, South Carolina was founded in the late 1830s under the name Twiggs. It was renamed Starr in honor of Captain W.W. Starr, another railroad official. Like many southern cities it was an agricultural hub, with early 20th-century “stately” homes — as the publicity material called them — including the Evergreen Plantation. (You can have your wedding there, if you’d like). More than 400 individuals were enslaved at Evergreen Plantation over the course of 150 years. That’s a tough culture to break, and probably a tough place to be an African American, even decades later.

Mary Roberts, a retired Newark Public Schools teacher and one-time district leader of the South Ward, was also thinking of fashion in her interview. Her memories took her back to her childhood in Greensboro, North Carolina.

“My mother washed the little white girls’ dresses, and I would just admire them, they were so pretty. I think that’s why I have a lot of clothes now. Because I always said ‘One day I’m going to have those pretty dresses.’”

Sometimes it’s necessary to read between the lines when researching the history of American cities. For example, one piece of material states that between, “1902 and 1905, [Greensboro] was the largest cotton mill in the south and produced more denim than any other mill in the world. In the northeast part of the city, the Cones built hundreds of homes for their workers in villages surrounding their mills.” Consider who worked in these “mills” and what the housing was like. In my own book, a terrifying memory of cotton mill housing is recounted by one of the interviewees. And well, fast forward some decades to Greensboro’s famous “sit-ins” of the civil rights movement. Clearly, things had yet to improve there, as far as many African Americans were concerned.

Pauline Faison Mathis was born in 1932 in Clinton, North Carolina. Speaking of fashion, Mathis tried to get a job at the famous Bamberger’s department store in Newark, sometime around the early 1950s. But she was told that she “wouldn’t like it” because she was so educated. “That was the word going then, ‘You have too much education, you wouldn’t be too happy here,’” explained Mathis.

I came upon several history publications about Clinton that literally didn’t mention African Americans or Black people. This is how our history still gets told, as if they were never there. As if Pauline Faison Mathis’ family didn’t have a life in Clinton at one time. A particular name comes up regularly in searching the African-American history search of the city: Charles Clinton Spaulding. He was apparently known as “Mr. Negro Business” and established the famous Black insurance company, North Carolina Mutual. Oh, and in 2018 numerous unmarked graves of enslaved people were discovered in the town. So there’s that.

As Jacob Lawrence tells us, African-American migrants were leaving southern towns. Florence, Norfolk, Memphis… Starr, Greensboro, Clinton… This departure was done in such a manner that a name had to ultimately be provided for the situation: the Great Migration. It changed our country; African Americans transformed the United States. We need to understand how – and why. And so, until next time, let’s keep learning our history!

War, What is it Good For?

“The war had caused a labor shortage in northern industry. Citizens of foreign countries were returning to their native lands.”
Panel 2: The Migration Series, Jacob Lawrence.

WAR HAS ALWAYS BEEN GOOD FOR OUR ECONOMY. (And politicians know it, by the way). When WWI began — and again in WWII — some immigrants went back to their countries of origin to fight in those armies. This departure greatly affected urban centers like Newark, as they had been the sites of so much early European migration. The industrial revolution that this country was undergoing at the time is an era of major transformation, especially in the cities.

Newark, New Jersey was a major hub of military supply manufacturing and shipping during both wars. In fact Newark was held up as an early example of modern industry such that an exposition was held in the city in 1872, with President Ulysses S. Grant in attendance.

Urban America looks like it does now, for better and worse, in large part due to this revolution and its aftermath. And if cities are something you want to know more about, then you can always order my book and read about Newark as a microcosm of urban America!

So, at the same time that some immigrants are reverse-migrating, scores of American men are also going off to war. Most of these enlistees are white men who had been working decent jobs for a decent paycheck, in factories and other industrial locations. While Black men also enlisted, there were fewer opportunities for them as soldiers; most branches of the military were still segregated by race – or they simply barred Black men altogether. In addition, the assignments that Black soldiers did receive were most often at the bottom of the hierarchical ladder: kitchen work, menial tasks around dangerous weapons, etc. These, therefore, paid far less than other assignments.

Circumstances did not change all that much, even as WWII was declared. In fact, just one story illustrates the ways in which Black soldiers were treated during the second World War. It happened at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine, here in California. Basically, a large group of Black soldiers were forced to handle munitions they had no training for. Pushed by their superiors to expedite their work, a terrible explosion occurred, killing hundreds of people. 256 of those Black soldiers were court marshaled while most of the white men involved were simply given leave. However, just this year, these men were exonerated – of course posthumously, as is often the case with reparations for African Americans.

Naturally, there are always exceptions to these tales of subservience and exploitation, including the famous WWI “Harlem Hellfighters.” But we must understand that even they did not achieve their status without conquering a myriad of obstacles along their way.

So it is wartime in America and the country is full of factories and other industries in need of laborers. At the same time, African Americans are continuing that Great Migration towards exactly these urban centers where the work exists. The labor shortage benefited African Americans, as well as women, for a time being anyway. They finally were able to enjoy some access to the kinds of well-paying jobs they probably never would have otherwise due to discrimination.

While Jacob Lawrence notes in his caption that there was most certainly a labor shortage, the Krueger-Scott oral histories tell us that not everyone could just suddenly waltz into one of these high-paying jobs now:

Willie Bradwell started working as a domestic when she first came to Newark in 1939, at the age of eighteen. She did not like domestic work, neither the tasks nor some of the people for whom she worked. “I hated it. I don’t like housework, not even my own,” she told her interviewer. One day her employer insisted that Bradwell get all her work finished before eating lunch. “So when I had my lunch it was time to come home…” said Bradwell. “I didn’t go back.”

Bradwell next found some factory work, which she liked much better. She started out at a paper-cup factory in North Newark at 55 cents an hour, minimum wage at the time. After a few months she secured a better factory job, with H.A. Wilson at 97 Chestnut Street, sometime around 1946.

“…they didn’t even hire Black people ‘til after the War. So when we went in there after the War, it wasn’t too much of a problem.”

The racial make-up at H.A. Wilson was about 25% Black and 75% white, Bradwell reported.

Notably, according to Bradwell the factory was not hiring African Americans during WWII. This therefore implies that other businesses may also have been willing to suffer through ongoing wartime labor shortages, simply in order to keep the racial status quo.

For many of the narrators in my book, factories were the promised land of better pay and working conditions, a big reason for leaving the South for the industrial North, East and West. Matthew Little was born in South Carolina and came to Newark in 1947, after finishing his tour in the Navy. (In 1944 the Navy commissioned its first-ever African-American officers. Things were changing, however slowly). Little worked on the factory floor at General Motors in Newark for thirty-two years.

Louise Epperson, after working yet another domestic job in nearby Montclair (the town I myself lived in for 20 years), landed a job at the Western Electric factory in Keraney, next door to Newark. Because of this relatively lucrative position, Mrs. Epperson was able to purchase her own home a few years later, a fact of which she was very proud.

Katheryn Bethea, who ultimately retired as an assistant professor of English literature at Rutgers University-Newark, worked multiple jobs in her lifetime – including at a dress factory when she was in need of extra money.

And Hortense Williams Powell told her interviewer that her family first received welfare, because Powell’s father had died in 1938, but later…

“…my youngest brother was old enough that my mother could go out and work, and she got a job at National Union Radio Tube Corporation. That was in Newark. And she worked there for ten years…They had labor problems, and the union walk-out, and all of that type of thing. It was after the War, the second World War… The factory closed down and it never reopened, and my mother stopped working. But by this time, this was about 1955, all of us were grown up then.”

Indeed, the 1950s saw the beginning of the end of the industrial revolution. A revolution that included many more human stories than most of us ever learned about in school.

Next week I’ll be highlighting some more of these interesting people and what they did with their lives once arriving from the south. Until then, let’s keep learning our history!

Painting History

“During World War I there was a great migration north by southern African Americans.”
Panel 1: The Migration Series, Jacob Lawrence.

JACOB LAWRENCE WAS A JERSEY KID, and an artist whose work many of us are familiar with – even if we don’t know his name. Lawrence was born in Atlantic City, his parents a part of the Great Migration. But he moved to Harlem as a teenager and spent most of life there. And while his art deeply reflects the influence of that mid-20^th-century Harlem neighborhood, one famous series of his stands out from this theme. Lawrence’s Migration Series is based upon stories he heard his family tell as he was growing up, and throughout his time in New York. These were stories of the Great Migration. And if you, too, are interested in stories of the Great Migration, well, then you can always order my book!

Lawrence’s painting above is the first of the 60-panel Migration Series. The series was completed in 1941, funded in part by the Works Progress Administration (WPA). It was to be viewed as one piece in his thinking, not 60 separate works of art, because it told one continuous story. Perhaps we can even think of each painting as a chapter in his unwritten book. Ultimately, two museums would split this collection – New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and Washington DC’s Phillips Collection. At times they have collaborated to show this whole series together, and I was able to view one such exhibit, entitled “One-Way Ticket,” at MoMA in 2015. Every panel, by the way, includes a caption. Lawrence initially wrote these captions in the 1940s, but as language and culture (somewhat) evolved he made modifications to most all of them in 1993, prior to an upcoming exhibit of his work. Most commonly, the word “negro” was changed to “Black” or “African American.”

The commencement date of the Great Migration differs depending upon whom you ask. Many, like Lawrence, place its origins around the beginning of WWI, some calling that the First Great Migration. (The “second” would come around the time of WWII). But African Americans were certainly leaving the South for places North, East, and West way before then. For example, in Newark, New Jersey, the African-American Bethany Baptist Church was already being established in 1870, when a group met together in Deacon Jackson Watson’s home at 187 Commerce Street. The church became officially sanctioned in 1871. The need for Black churches was growing as migrants moved from the South. And Bethany Baptist continues to be central to many African-American religious lives today, even as some have moved far outside the city limits within which they first lived.

The Great Migration, as with so many migration streams, can be characterized by both pushes and pulls. Pushing Black Americans out of the South at this time was the continued and escalating violence directed at Black southerners; many whites resented the “freedoms” that they were enjoying for the first time. As well, for African Americans in the rural south – and remember, not everyone who left the south came from a farm! – agricultural disasters quite often precipitated the departure. And finally, there was the hope for a life less fettered by racism. A hope that some felt was dashed, while others discovered was well worth the trip. As former mayor Sharpe James said towards the end of his Krueger-Scott interview:

Newark has given me everything, and the only thing I want to do is give something back to the city that took this poor boy who was a transient from the south, gave him hope, gave him love, kept him alive, gave him an education.

The period around WWI saw a lot happening in this country, and participants of the Great Migration were key to many of these events, directly and indirectly. For example, George Baker, known as Father Divine and the self-proclaimed God incarnate, was from the South — North Carolina or Maryland, depending upon what records one reviews. Divine started the multiracial International Peace Mission Movement sometime around 1915 in the Brooklyn, New York area, and ended up becoming one of the most revered and followed religious leaders of the time period. So much so that many would even call his organization a cult. There is plenty of discussion about Divine by the narrators in my book — from the live radio shows he recorded, to the lavish, yet extremely cheap, meals he would host at the Riviera Hotel.

In April 1935, the Newark Evening News described a banquet attended by Father Divine where there were “baskets of fruit and candy everywhere. More than 500 men, women and children were seated at the table and at least that many stood around the perimeter. From the audience a woman shouted, ‘Oh father, our Saviour, I love you.’ Father Divine sat in a satin-backed chair at the head of the banquet table. Every course passed through his hands.”

For Father Divine, leaving the South meant reinventing himself. He chose to leave his past behind so intentionally that very little is known of his family or birthplace. Although he died in 1965, Divine’s followers still participate in some of the Mission’s proscribed rituals today, carrying on his traditions and ideology throughout this country. Recent pieces in mainstream papers and journals can attest to this fact.

In terms of work at this time, studies show that prior to 1917 approximately 75% of African Americans in the country were “gainfully employed, mostly in domestic and ‘personal service’ jobs.” The war provided many of them a chance to leave these sorts of jobs, to work in factories and shipyards and earn more money than ever before. (Yet not typically equal to what the white laborers were making). But as would happen again post-World War II, after World War I when the white soldiers returned home to work, suddenly the recently hired Black laborers (and women, for that matter) were deemed no longer competent or capable to remain in those positions. “Last hired, first fired” would be the employment model for many a decade to come.

So there will be more on labor shortages, the influx of Black workers, and the changing landscape of U.S. cities in the early 20^th century in next week’s blog. Until then, let’s keep learning our history!

Alien Soil: Leaving the South

I HAVE A NEW BOOK as some of you know, out from Rutgers University Press: Alien Soil: Oral Histories of Great Migration Newark. Last year I spent some time writing about the subject matter of my book through the images of the painter. Jacob Lawrence’s, Great Migration series. So many readers enjoyed the art — whether as a reminder of how much they loved his work, or as introduction to a brand new artist. And I learned, through discussion around my book, that many people are just plain unfamiliar with the historical era and/or term, Great Migration. So, through images and words, I’d like to share stories of this pivotal time in American history. The dialogue included here comes from the oral histories contained within Alien Soil. And if you want to read more, well, then you can always order my book!

Today I want to start with some prose you might be familiar with; it is the inspiration for my book title. Have you read Black Boy yet?

Yet, deep down, I knew that I could never really leave the South, for my feelings had already been formed by the South, for there had been slowly instilled into my personality and consciousness, black though I was, the culture of the South. So, in leaving, I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns, and, perhaps, to bloom . . .

Richard Wright. Black Boy [1945 edition]

You might recognize the tail end of this quote, “…the warmth of other suns…” as the title of Isabel Wilkerson’s wonderful book on the Great Migration. And while the narrators of the Krueger-Scott African-American Oral History Project — the stars of my book — found warmth at times under the Newark, New Jersey sun, they also experienced quite often that they were living on alien soil. It didn’t look the same, feel the same, or even smell the same. And sometimes that was a good thing, but even good things can feel strange at first.

“The culture of the South,” as Wright puts it, takes shape in numerous ways for the participants of the Great Migration. In the discussions between narrator and interviewer in the oral history collection (who were always familiar with each other, which is unusual for an oral history project) we hear about the foods of childhood, chores performed that had no place in the concrete neighborhoods of Newark, and traditions clung to even while assimilating to Northern ways.

I always remember how you stop trains in the South at the location, build a fire by the railroad. The train stopped. We got on it…”

– Sharpe James, former Newark mayor

Folks sure didn’t have to do that in Newark — or in other major cities that so many Southern Blacks migrated to. After all, Newark’s Penn Station provided an organized system of trains, schedules, and ticket booths instead. Now, there are stories that some migrants, intending on living in New York City, errantly disembarked in Newark. Why? Because when the conductor, with his East Coast accent announced, “Newark, Penn Station,” it sounded very much like, “New York, Penn Station” to some. I have yet to find a person to attest to this through personal experience, but it makes for a good story, anyway. And isn’t that what history is, a chain of human stories fit together like puzzle pieces in order to create a bigger picture.

In her oral history interview, Senator Wynona Lipman, the first African-American woman elected to the New Jersey Senate, and the longest-serving member of the State Senate, was asked by Mrs. Glen Marie Brickus if she knew anybody who used snuff or chewing tobacco. Oral histories are so wonderful in the way that one question can often lead to an unlikely response. The great minds of the late historians Giles Wright and Dr. Clem Price created a questionnaire based on this understanding.

Lipman: Oh, the snuff, yes. Snuff, the lady who helped us do the washing, at the wash pot outside, you know, where you boiled your clothes for washing over a fire. Oh, she was a snuff dipper I tell you. And my father chewed tobacco. Yes.

Brickus: Oh yeah. Yeah, we had one of those wash pots in the backyard. And somebody had to go and build a fire on the wash day.

Lipman: I remember killing pigs, too. And making crackling.

Brickus: Oh really? Yeah, we did too, we did too.

Lipman: We had chickens, and all of that.

Brickus: We did too. We raised chickens and guineas and there was, you know, you’d wait for special kinds of days as far as the weather to kill hogs. And then you may kill three or four or more at a time. And I can remember seeing them strung up. You know, they’d put up these special poles, with the poles across the top and hang them up there.

Lipman: We had a smoke house.

Brickus: We did too. They would first salt the meat down for so long, and then take it out and hang it up and smoke it. Keep the fire going day and night to smoke the meat. And it would never spoil.

Lipman. No.

Brickus: You could keep it indefinitely and it would never spoil.

Lipman: It was wonderful. We had a cow until the town made us get rid of it. Senator Lipman concluded this conversation with an assertion that farming was a hard life, and Brickus ended this section of the interview saying, “Oh, we have more in common than we knew about.”

Talk about an opportunity to “see” the South in a way so many of us non-Southerners will ever get to. Now, granted this is the rural South, which is not what all of the land below the Mason-Dixon line looks like now – nor did then. Certainly, African Americans from the southern cities also left their homes for better jobs and somewhat less racism (although it often tended just to be more different than less). But because of a confluence of agricultural issues, especially around the early 1900s, those living off the land often had to leave that land behind. There will be more on this later.

Alright, thanks for reading the first installment of my own Great Migration series. Not as artfully done as Jacob Lawrence, but perhaps with the same intention: to ensure that the story of the people who left their homes for “a better life,” and in turn transformed our country for the better, get told. Tune in next time for a look at WWI and the Great Migration. Until then, keep learning our history!