Sue’s Reviews > The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration > Status Update

They went to live with relatives elsewhere, studied in church basements, or forwent school altogether. County supervisors relented only after losing their case in the U.S. Supreme Court, choosing finally to reopen the schools rather than face imprisonment. It would take more than fifteen years before most of the South conceded to the Brown ruling and then only under additional court orders.

😡😡😡😡

One county in Virginia—Prince Edward County—closed its entire school system for five years, from 1959 to 1964, rather than integrate. The state funneled money to private academies for white students. But black students were left on their own.

Fewer than one out of five sharecroppers ever saw a profit at the end of the year. Of the few who got anything, their pay came to between $30 and $150 in the 1930s for a year of hard toil in the field,

Like Russia!

When the people kept leaving, the South resorted to coercion and interception worthy of the Soviet Union, which was forming at the same time across the Atlantic. Those trying to leave were rendered fugitives by definition and could not be certain they would be able to make it out.

The southern colonel had no assignment for him, so Pershing had no choice but to wait until the following week. When he returned, he learned there would be no leadership position for him. A white officer would be chief of surgery, as it had always been.

Poor Pershing! “The new colonel was from Mississippi, and, in an instant, Pershing found himself hurled back to the South. The colonel had not been told that this colored surgeon was supposed to be in charge—.The southern colonel had no assignment for him, so Pershing had no choice but to wait.

You sleep over a volcano,
which may erupt at any moment.93 —LAURA ARNOLD, DESCRIBING
THE SOUTH IN A DEBATE
ON THE MERITS OF MIGRATION,
TWO WEEKS BEFORE SHE HERSELF
LEFT NORTH CAROLINA
FOR WASHINGTON, DC

In Louisiana in the 1930s, white teachers and principals were making an average salary of $1,165 a year.70 Colored teachers and principals were making $499 a year, forty-three percent of what the white ones were.

Robert p Foster and I have some thing in common!

It seemed to him that for every good thing about being the teacher and principal’s son there was a bad thing to it. If he was caught running down the street, somebody would stick her head out the window and remind him who he was. “Boy, get on out the street. I’m a tell Miss Foster on you.” To further complicate

Florida’s 1865 law set forth, among other things, that “if any negro, mulatto or other person of color shall intrude himself into any railroad car or other public vehicle set apart for the exclusive accommodation of white people,” he would be sentenced to “stand in pillory for one hour, or be whipped, not exceeding thirty-nine stripes, or both, at the discretion of the jury.”