Migrations

  "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." Isabelle Wilkerson

Isabelle Wilkerson’s “The Warmth of Other Suns” is an oral historian's delight - based on literally hundreds of interviews with folk who left the South for greater freedom and opportunity between 1915 and 1970, but it concentrates on three main African Americans – Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Pershing Foster. Most had no clear idea what awaited them. Ida Mae, for example, had never been out of Chickasaw County, Mississippi. While some had relatives who had proceeded them, others had family urging them not to leave. Most everyone knew about victims of lynching and feared that one misstep could be fatal. As Laura Arnold said two weeks before leaving North Carolina for Washington, D.C.: “You sleep over a volcano which may erupt at any moment.” Families often worked for farmers or employers who did not pay them adequately and kept them in debt as a means of control. Typical was the experience of George’s sharecropper grandfather, who at harvest’s end would be told, “Boy, we had a good year. We broke even. You don’t owe me nothing. And I don’t owe you nothing.” Pershing Foster, whose father had been a principal in Monroe, Louisiana, and became a physician, ministered to black soldiers while in the army and wasn’t properly respected within his profession until he took an assignment in Austria after World War II.

 

Pershing Foster

Ida Mae Gladney

Mahalia Jackson

Gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, who grew up in a segregated ward in New Orleans, wrote in “Movin’ On Up”: “Our mattresses were made of corn shucks and soft gray Spanish moss that hung from the trees. From the woods we got raccoon, rabbit, and possum. And I’d whisper to myself that someday the sun was going to shine down on me way up north, in Chicago or Kansas City or one of those other faraway places that my cousin always talked about.”

 

Lewis Hine, Ellis Island

During the 35 years prior to 1915, the year of the onset of the “Great Migration” of African Americans from the American South, nearly six times as many Southern, Eastern, and Central Europeans, approximately 28 million, spilled into industrial metropolises and burgeoning cities in Northwest Indiana such as Gary, East Chicago, Hammond, and Whiting in search of a better life and to escape Old World hardships and discrimination. In Gary many shared a cot with a fellow laborer working the other 12-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week shift at United States Steel’s Gary Works. Though the integrated mill was located adjacent to Lake Michigan, most newcomers never got to swim in its waters or relax on its beaches.

 

The original residents of Miller Beach were a motley mix of squatters, fugitives from the law, nature lovers seeking escape from smokestack America, and affluent Chicagoans looking for weekend retreats. With the coming of a South Shore commuter rail line linking Gary to Chicago and South Bend and mass production of automobiles, Gary officeholders, recognizing its vacation and tourist potential, annexed Miller in 1918. This led to a rapid growth spurt in the following decade, as historian Steve Spicer noted on his Miller website:

The first five years of the 1920s were an exciting time in the newly annexed town of Miller: Marquette Park was built, telephone service was established, Gay Mill Garden was operating at full tilt, and the population was rapidly expanding onto new streets north and south and east of “old town” Miller.

South Shore train in 1920s

These items appeared in the September 16, 1920 issue of the Chesterton Tribune:

George O’Malley of Chicago lost his life when his canoe capsized east of the Lake Ave. bridge while he was paddling in the Miller lagoon. Scores of people witnessed the drowning. A mile away from the boardwalk at Miller Beach, between two monster sand dunes, three Gary policemen uncovered the first real “moonshine” still ever operated in Gary [since Prohibition went into effect]. The “moonshiners” evidently took their cue from their brotherhood in the Blue Ridge Mountains, for a hut, ingeniously contrived, furnished the shelter for their operation. Inside, a 25-gallon still was leaking white mule at the rate of 30 gallons a day.

 

Not until the mid-1960s could African Americans use Marquette Park beach without fear of harassment nor purchase homes in Miller, many whose deeds contained restrictive covenants not officially outlawed until 1968. In 1973, when my family rented a Hoosier home in Miller, within a year the neighborhood racial composition had almost completely changed from white to black.