The Warmth of Other Suns

The man didn’t use the term, and nobody had bothered to tell Robert ahead of time, but some colored people who had made the journey called it James Crow in California.

Yes, there was an evil in the air and this man knew it and the woman at the motel knew it

Something in the voice, in the way the man looked into his eyes and touched his shoulder and tried in the middle of a cool desert night to console him, made Robert feel all the sadder. It confirmed he wasn’t crazy, and that made him feel utterly alone.

Thus the Great Migration had more in common with the vast movements of refugees from famine, war, and genocide in other parts of the world

He didn’t suffer the humiliation of seeing a suit he wanted to try on in a store but couldn’t because colored people weren’t allowed that courtesy. He just never went.

Pershing shook his head. The man had lived there since before Pershing was born, and a central fact of colored people’s existence hadn’t registered after all these years.

The war had cut the supply of European workers the North had relied on to kill its hogs and stoke its foundries.

But the masses did not pour out of the South until they had something to go to. They got their chance when the North began courting them, hard and in secret, in the face of southern hostility, during the labor crisis of World War I.

From the panhandle to the Everglades, Florida authorities were now arresting colored men off the street and in their homes if they were caught not working.

So now, far as I’m concerned, this is reckoning day.