Great Migration Quotes

“It occurred to me that no matter where I lived, geography could not save me.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

“Our Negro problem, therefore, is not of the Negro's making. No group in our population is less responsible for its existence. But every group is responsible for its continuance.... Both races need to understand that their rights and duties are mutual and equal and their interests in the common good are idential.... There is no help or healing in apparaising past responsibilities or in present apportioning of praise or blame. The past is of value only as it aids in understanding the present; and an understanding of the facts of the problem--a magnanimous understanding by both races--is the first step toward its solution.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

“...they speak like melted butter and their children speak like footsteps on pavement...”
― Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

“We are drawn to the Renaissance because of the hope for black uplift and interracial empathy that it embodied and because there is a certain element of romanticism associated with the era’s creativity, its seemingly larger than life heroes and heroines, and its most brilliantly lit terrain, Harlem, USA.”
― Clement Alexander Price, Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance

“After generations of separations and decades of forgetfulness, the mention of the South brings back to our memories ancient years of pain and pleasure. At the turn of the twentieth century, many African Americans left the Southern towns, left the crushing prejudice and prohibition, and moved north to Chicago and New York City, west to Los Angeles and San Diego.

They were drawn by the heady promise of better lives, of equality, fair play, and good old American four-star freedom. Their expectations were at once fulfilled and at the same time dashed to the ground and broken into shards of disappointment.

The sense of fulfillment arose from the fact that there were chances to exchange the dull drudgery of sharecrop farming for protected work under unionized agreements. Sadly for the last thirty years, those jobs have been decreasing as industry became computerized and work was sent to foreign countries. The climate which the immigrants imagined as free of racial prejudice was found to be discriminatory in ways different from the Southern modes and possibly even more humiliating.

A small percentage of highly skilled and fully educated blacks found and clung to rungs on the success ladder. Unskilled and undereducated black workers were spit out by the system like so many undigestible watermelon seeds.

They began to find their lives minimalized, and their selves as persons trivialized. Many members of that early band of twentieth-century pilgrims must have yearned for the honesty of Southern landscapes where even if they were the targets of hate mongers who wanted them dead, they were at least credited with being alive. Northern whites with their public smiles of liberal acceptance and their private behavior of utter rejection wearied and angered the immigrants.”
― Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter

“Sandra L. West and Aberjhani have compiled an encyclopedia that makes an important contribution to our need to know more about one of modern America’s truly significant artistic and cultural movements. It helps us to acknowledge the complexity of African American life at a time when the nation’s culture was taking on a recognizable shape, when race was becoming less of a crushing burden and more of a challenge to progressive people and their ideals, and when cities and their inhabitants symbolized the end of the past and the seductiveness of the new.”
― Clement Alexander Price, Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance

“Many years later, people would forget about the quiet successes of everyday people like Ida Mae. In the debates to come over welfare and pathology, American would overlook people like her in its fixation with the underclass, just as a teacher can get distracted by the two or three problem children at the expense of the quiet, obedient ones. Few experts trained their sights on the unseen masses of migrants like her, who worked from the moment they arrived, didn’t end up on welfare, stayed married because that’s what God-fearing people of their generation did whether they were happy or not, and managed not to get strung out on drugs or whiskey or a cast of nameless, no-count men.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

“During the second half of the sixties, the center of the crisis shifted to the sprawling ghettos of the North. Here black experience was radically different from that in the South. The stability of institutional relationships was largely absent in Northern ghettos, especially among the poor. Over twenty years ago, the black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier was able to see the brutalizing effect of urbanization upon lower class blacks : ". . . The bonds of sympathy and community of interests that held their parents together in the rural environment have been unable to withstand the disintegrating forces in the city." Southern blacks migrated North in search of work, seeking to become transformed from a peasantry into a working class. But instead of jobs they found only misery, and far from becoming a proletariat, they came to constitute a lumpenproletariat, an underclass of rejected people. Frazier's prophetic words resound today with terrifying precision: ". . . As long as the bankrupt system of Southern agriculture exists, Negro families will continue to seek a living in the towns and cities of the country. They will crowd the slum areas of Southern cities or make their way to Northern cities, where their family life will become disrupted and their poverty will force them to depend upon charity."

Out of such conditions, social protest was to emerge in a form peculiar to the ghetto, a form which could never have taken root in the South except in such large cities as Atlanta or Houston. The evils in the North are not easy to understand and fight against, or at least not as easy as Jim Crow, and this has given the protest from the ghetto a special edge of frustration. There are few specific injustices, such as a segregated lunch counter, that offer both a clear object of protest and a good chance of victory. Indeed, the problem in the North is not one of social injustice so much as the results of institutional pathology. Each of the various institutions touching the lives of urban blacks—those relating to education, health, employment, housing, and crime—is in need of drastic reform. One might say that the Northern race problem has in good part become simply the problem of the American city—which is gradually becoming a reservation for the unwanted, most of whom are black.”
― Bayard Rustin, Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin

“My parents both arrived in New York City after World War II, at different times but for the same reason the search for work. They left a country they loved, but where they could not make a living. About half a million Puerto Ricans made the same journey fleeing economic despair, the result of the US colonization of the island. Government officials blamed the people for the disastrous economic situation claiming that the problem was "overpopulation." They promoted the mass exodus of Puerto Ricans and implemented policies that sterilized thousands of poor and working women. The Young Lords are the sons and daughters of this Great Migration. As young people growing up in the United States, we witnessed how our parents were exploited, degraded, and humiliated. We felt their suffering, and we too had experiences with poverty and racism. All of this propelled us into action to fight for justice.”
― Iris Morales, Through the Eyes of Rebel Women: The Young Lords, 1969-1976

“I have often pointed out to students that the Jim Crow order had a specific and relatively brief life span. It was not completely consolidated until the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. All of my grandparents were fully sentient and aware of their social environments, if not full adults, before the order's features took definite shape and assumed the form of normal politics and everyday life. And during the roughly three decades or so between the regime's consolidation and its slow, painful unraveling, the system was placed under considerable strain and reorganized internally by the Great Migration of black people out of the South or to cities within it, the Great Depression and the New Deal, the emergence of the industrial unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the war. And in large and small ways, black people never stopped challenging its boundaries and constraints–from the struggle over its imposition to its eventual defeat.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr., The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

“From steel-town Youngstown to the crumbling marble of Rome — Earl Jenkins ain’t no ordinary knight. He drinks monk-brew, fights Huns, and cracks jokes while the Empire burns.
Book I, How I, Earl Jenkins, Got Mixed up with a Bunch of sword-swingin´ Saints”
― Tapio Tiihonen

“Where the Devil Loses His Lawn Ornament
From marble to mudbrick, after stirrups & shock, Jenkins/Aëtius and his ragtag knights — with blue blades & purple quills — haul back to Rome and seed Europe with Lady Concordia’s grandeur, the Invincible Blaze.”
― Tapio Tiihonen, From Youngstown to Rome´s Fall: How I, Earl Jenkins, Remembered What the Empire Forgot

“There is a Roman knight out there,
in armor too bright for this word,
runnin´ with Mars´ sons like he was born
of both Rome and thunder.
Book I, How I, Earl Jenkins, Got Mixed up with a Bunch of sword-swingin´ Saints”
― Tapio Tiihonen

“Said he was patient. Said he was humble. Disciplined.
A man made for peace, carved through war.
Book I, How I, Earl Jenkins, Got Mixed up with a Bunch of sword-swingin´ Saints”
― Tapio Tiihonen

“And that, my friend, is how the Huns write history — with hooves, hide, and a hell of a throw. Καὶ οὕτως, ὦ φίλε, ἱστορεῖ τὸ γένος τῶν Οὕννων — πόδεσίν, δέρματι, καὶ ῥίψει τις ἐκ τῆς κολάσεως.
Book I, How I, Earl Jenkins, Got Mixed up with a Bunch of sword-swingin´s Saints”
― Tapio Tiihonen

“Gentlemen," she says, "wherever y’all go, plant these early in the season. Wait a couple of weeks and watch. They’ll survive sun, shade, and drought. And come the second year? They’ll bloom, and that cross’ll shine. It’ll mark your victory. Every seed’s got a soul, and that soul lives in another world. These lil’ brown specs — they’re stardust with roots."
We kiss the air above her hand — as one does — and that’s the last we see of her. But Lord, how could we ever forget her?
Book I, How I, Earl Jenkins, Got Mixed up with a Bunch of sword-swingin´ Saints”
― Tapio Tiihonen

“And Romulus? The lad who once wore the crown of Caesar drank the holy water, bowed to Severinus’ spirit, and put on the sandals of the monks. No big speeches. No lightning bolt from Jupiter. Just quiet steps in a ruined garden. That’s how the last emperor of Rome became the first Knight of the Twilight — a monk without cloister, walking the broken empire with memory in his satchel.”
― Tapio Tiihonen, From Youngstown to Rome´s Fall: How I, Earl Jenkins, Remembered What the Empire Forgot

“State land shrank. Bit by bit, province by province, diocese by diocese, Rome was selling itself away. Wouldn’t be long before we’d sold every field, every vine, every memory.”
― Tapio Tiihonen, From Youngstown to Rome´s Fall: How I, Earl Jenkins, Remembered What the Empire Forgot

“Faunus? That merry old spirit who once filled the glens with whispers and wild birds and good honest fruitfulness? Gone. Chased out like a rat at a monastery banquet.”
― Tapio Tiihonen, From Youngstown to Rome´s Fall: How I, Earl Jenkins, Remembered What the Empire Forgot

“Once she’s dressed — radiant and armored like Venus in court shoes — she floats into her litter or down the palace hall, face veiled just enough for mystery. She’s crowned with a diadem, or sometimes a turban twist, or that curious cone-shaped tutulus that juts from the forehead like a temple spire. There’s a neck-scarf for grace, a handkerchief for dust and sweat (and occasional nose-blowing), and a peacock-feather fan to shoo away flies and men alike. On bright days, an umbrella flutters above her, green as spring, carried by a maid or gallant. And of course — the sacred handbag.”
― Tapio Tiihonen, From Youngstown to Rome´s Fall: How I, Earl Jenkins, Remembered What the Empire Forgot

“When I emphasized how desperately the Huns needed
trade with Rome — to get iron weapons, real shields
instead of bone, real bits and stirrups instead of wood —
Rome the rooster suddenly reared up, opened its golden
beak, and crowed loud enough to shake the rafters.
The signal horns joined in with a blast. Tubae signiferæ uno
impetu concrepuerunt.
And Honorius... burst into gleeful, childlike laughter.
"My golden-throated Rome crows at the start of the third
hour every day — just as it does at the third hour of night.
My Rome, Roma gallus cordis mei, crows twice, three times
a day! And my Rome... is a prophet. A divine seer!”
― Tapio Tiihonen , From Youngstown to Rome´s Fall: How I, Earl Jenkins, Remembered What the Empire Forgot

“Bureaucracy? Dead on arrival.
Military coordination? Like herdin’ greased geese.
Economy? Flatter than a barmaid’s singing voice.
City systems? Hah. Might as well be carved in fog.
All them noble forms of Roman order? Gone fishin’ — and
forgot their pole.”
― Tapio Tiihonen, From Youngstown to Rome´s Fall: How I, Earl Jenkins, Remembered What the Empire Forgot

“Before I leave that peaceful Latinum hill, I sneak a few Salvan Cross seeds into the earth. ‘Cause someday, when all this dust settles and if the gods got a sense of humor left, I’ll come back here and find a garden of truth bloomin’ where the Empire once bled. Aliquando, cum haec omnia pulvis sedebit, et si dii adhuc risum habent, hic redibo et inveniam hortum veritatis florentem ubi olim Imperium sanguinem fundebat.”
― Tapio Tiihonen, From Youngstown to Rome´s Fall: How I, Earl Jenkins, Remembered What the Empire Forgot

“The eagle is not dead. He’s just learnin’ how to fly again.
Aquila non periit — sed artem volandi iterum meditatur.”
― Tapio Tiihonen, From Youngstown to Rome´s Fall: How I, Earl Jenkins, Remembered What the Empire Forgot