I’m a product of The Great Migration. A first-generation Los Angeleno (and, I mean, shout out to Kendrick, since we’re here), my family was planted in southern California in the 1950s when my grandmother, Bernice (or Christine, because to this day we aren’t really sure of her original name or birthday, but that’s another story for another day) Taylor, left Star, MS, children in tow, all in an attempt to escape the rural reality of her native land. My grandmother left to get away from several evils — an abusive first husband, the lack of opportunity, a place that wouldn’t let her be her brilliant self simply because she was female, Black and dark-skinned, and the thing that likely underpinned all those woes: the racism that was sewed into the very fabric of the only country she’d ever known.
Like so many before her, my grandmother had joined The Great Migration without even knowing it, planting a seed that would sprout, grow and spread another five generations under Los Angeles’s smog suppressed sun. The movement she joined, which wouldn’t be pegged “The Great Migration” until decades later, meant the relocation of six millions Black Americans, most of whom were the descendants of enslaved Africans, to the north, east and west in search of better economic and educational opportunities while fleeing racial violence and the oppression of the Jim Crow south.
Held hostage under the strict, and most times, unwritten rules of the Jim Crow-era south, most Blacks had only known the south. Though free on paper, most Blacks in the south were locked out of the type of opportunity that could lead to any semblance of true freedom. Forced to find work in fields as sharecroppers, wherein Black families would serve as tenant farmers, paying rent with what should have been a portion, but often meant their entire yearly crop yield, Blacks in the Deep South rarely had any real opportunity to get ahead. Most sharecroppers became accustom to breaking even year after year all while being forced to endure the very real reality that at any moment, any slight perceived offense towards a white person in the Jim Crow south could mean their lives.
As such, Blacks in the Deep South went searching for better. For many, that search led them out of the south and to the north, east and west. The first to “make it out” would eventually send for immediate family, and in the 1910s, the The Great Migration would be born. A trickle at first, the migration would grow exponentially as migrators reported of their new lives in the new land, peaking the interests of those still struggling in the old land.
The Great Migration opened up more opportunity than many imagined, sure, but others found the new land to be just as oppressive, though in a different way. Isabel Wilkerson’s book, The Warmth of Other Suns brilliantly follows the journey of three migrators, all of whom took their hopes, dreams and families from separate corners of the nation, to separate corners of the nation, during very different parts of the Great Migration’s 60-year stretch.
One such story is that of Ida Mae Brandon Gladney. Born and raised in rural Mississippi, she and her husband George worked as cotton sharecroppers who spent years “breaking even” under a farmer who was considered to be one of the fairer landowners in the area. Ida Mae and her husband would decide in 1937 to pack what they could, along with their two young children, and essentially sneak out of Mississippi after a family member was almost beaten to death over some missing turkeys that belonged to a white man.
Ida Mae would describe their new life in Chicago through a series of interviews with Wilkerson. Though free from Jim Crow riddled Mississippi, the new life meant a completely new set of challenges. Housing segregation, joblessness, the prevalence of drugs and violence, and the struggle to assimilate in the new world, feeling the pressure to model themselves after Blacks who’d been in the north for some time and done the work of stripping themselves of their southern thoughts and twang. Ida Mae would explain in her interviews that while she struggled to find balance between who she was and who Chicago sought to make her, that struggle also included how to instill some of the old ways into her children, who’d essentially been raised in the new land and under a new set of rules.
That attempt to find balance came into the light again when Ida Mae attended the funeral of 14-year old lynching victim Emmett Till. Till, like many first generation northerns, had only heard stories of the old land and the old ways. The teenager was, like me, a product of the Great Migration – his roots and bloodline, like mine, tied to rural Mississippi. Till had been raised under different freedoms that those before him, including his mother, hadn’t always known. Though one can imagine that Till certainly understood the relevant struggles of Chicago as a young Black boy, it’s probably fair to assume that he’d never stepped off a sidewalk or refrained from looking a white person in the eyes for fear of consequences that could range from scolding to death. Till’s bloodline had watered lands in rural Mississippi, but he’d been privileged enough to be disconnected from the horror that those before him had known.
I came in contact with a little piece of Till’s truth some time ago. I had the privilege of visiting rural Mississippi by way of Greenwood, once the center of cotton planter culture and deemed the cotton capital of the world. The city (one could argue “town”) is on the eastern edge of the Delta region in Mississippi and was developed because of the junction of the Tallahatchie and Yalobusha rivers, both of which form the Yazoo River.
Greenwood is an easy drive from Memphis, just two-hours and a straight shot south. Upon arrival, it becomes apparent that if you’re not from there or related to someone living there, there’s really no reason to be there. People in Greenwood still say “hi” at convenience stores and wave in passing. Men call familiar women “gul”, hold doors, and “let the women eat first.” Black women in Greenwood, who would anywhere else be considered “bosses”, fall into a sense of quietness when around menfolk, making their domain the keeping of house, nonetheless run things, keeping the family in place in a covert matriarchal way, just as their maternal ancestors had done before them.
In Greenwood, new faces are met with questions from locals, inquiring of the new being with questions like, “who’s yo Mama?”, and looking for context via trusted comrades with questions like “who’s daughter is this?” Greenwood is the kind of town you know exists, but only because of Grandma’s stories or that indie film you saw that one time. There are more roads than streets, trees are plentiful, the Delta is deep, and the mosquitos are considered “dragons” who wear OFF as body spray and take up so much real estate that it wouldn’t be out of the way for homeowners to consider charging them a little rent.
Interesting enough, though Greenwood was, at one point, the cotton capital of the world, where the slave trade brought in strong bodies with broken hearts to work the land, it’s now home to another dreadful memory. Standing in its all but empty downtown is the only statue of Emmett Till’s likeness. Gated (barely) and partially covered with a tarp and duct-tape in what’s supposed to be considered an effort to deter further damage from what looked to be a sledge hammer, the statue depicts the young boy who’d, just 12 miles away, was abducted, tortured and killed. Twelve miles away is Money, MS, the place that would claim the life of young Till in the summer of 1955.
It’s said that Till’s disconnect from the old ways and the old land played a role in his demise, though I would argue racism played the only role, because, how is it ever the responsibility of any individual to make themselves smaller in order not to offend the insecurities of another? All the same, Till, who’d been warned, simply didn’t know the rules of the Jim Crow south and had never had experiences that meant he’d had to deal with the raggedy reality of the Jim Crow south.
Fast forward to 2024, and the world has modernized and undergone a technology boom, making it so that we’re all just a few degrees separated and able to access just about any morsel of information we’d like. Even still, in 2024, the Deep South still has the lingering undertone of the old ways. Similar to Till, who was reportedly given a pep talk by his mother before leaving Chicago for Money, I was warned of how I should behave in Greenwood, especially “across the tracks.” My ignorance of the old ways of the Deep South and the hold these old ways still have on people in the deep south revealed itself with one trip to Greenwood’s Market Place store. While en route to the checkout, I was met with a display containing thin blue line shirts and pro-2nd amendment attire. Shocked at how openly displayed these items were in the city’s marketplace, I was taken aback, only to be quickly gathered up by a friend and native of Greenwood, who, unlike Till or myself, knew the rules. As I stopped to ponder what I was looking at, I was told to “come on”, because, apparently, “you already know what it is.”
It was then that I realized that even the people from Greenwood, who’d left Greenwood, had to remember the ways of Greenwood upon returning to Greenwood. For them, these unspoken rules that meant accepting things as they were, were about survival. As a native Californian, while I’d always known that I couldn’t play by the exact same rules as “middle” America, I’d never really been made to “mind my manners” in the way the natives of rural Mississippi and the Deep South had always simply known as a way of life. So much so that my innocent questioning of the way things were was seen as a dangerous inquiry into a set of unwritten rules that still has a hold on the hearts and minds of folks in the Deep South.