Beginnings

So I'm about a fifth of the way into The Warmth of Other Suns, which doesn't bode well for the likelihood that I am going to finish this book this summer.

That said, I think I am starting into the meat of the book. As I said before, TWOOS follows three different individuals who Wilkerson has chosen as very representative of the Great Migration and the aspirations, frustrations, and hopes of many other migrants. Those are Ida Mae Gladney in Mississippi, George Swanson Starling in Florida, and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster in Lousiana.

In the most recent section I read, titled Beginnings, Wilkerson discusses the experiences that pushed Gladney, Starling, and Pershing to seek out "other suns" in the North. Wilkerson makes a point to note that these characters do not know one another though, in many ways, themes are consistent throughout their respective experiences.

Wilkerson has made a point of using the term "caste system" to describe the Jim Crow South. We often consider caste systems, in their rigidity and allegiance to seemingly-arbitrary rules, with societies in South Asia and perhaps also in South Africa. Her decision to regard the Jim Crow South as a caste system seems to more accurately depict the state of affairs in the South at this time.

I'm thinking most prominently about Pershing's experiences. Robert Pershing was raised by his mother, a teacher, and his father, a principal, in his hometown of Monroe, Louisiana. The youngest of three siblings, Pershing's family held great expectations for him and, unwilling to give him any leeway in school, applied school rules most ferociously to their youngest son.

Wilkerson describes the conditions of the schoolhouse that Pershing attended and the challenges such an education posed to this community. The schoolhouse was egregiously underfunded and most of the students were taught out of the same room, requiring teachers to perform a variety of maneuvers. Almost-too-predictably, Wilkerson explains how a white school was built near the colored school -- funded by the tax dollars of all citizens in Ouachita Parish, the colored citizens included -- and yet none of the colored students were allowed to matriculate. The most tragic component of this was how unsurprising it was to hear that colored students would be prohibited from attending this school.

The section I read today picked up in 1935 and Robert Pershing is traveling to St. Louis to visit his oldest brother, Madison. Pershing, dressed in his finest tweed suit, retells his experience boarding this bus and heading north to St. Louis:

"[Pershing] scanned the aisle to find a place for himself. His eye caught the wooden shingle with the metal prongs on the bottom, the shingle that said COLORED on one side and WHITE on the other. It was set into holes at the top of a seat back toward the latter half of the bus. He didn't like seeing it, but he knew to expect it. He took a seat behind the wooden shingle and looked out the window at the view.
Those white and colored shingles were as much as part of the southern landscape as cotton growing in the field. Each state and city had a different requirement or custom to signal how the races were to be divided. In North Carolina, white and colored passengers could not occupy 'contiguous seats on the same bench.' Virginia prohibited the two races from sitting side by side on the same bench unless all other seats were filled. Several states required that the placard saying WHITE or COLORED be 'in plain letters, not less than two inches high.' In Houston, the race to which the seat belonged was posted on the back of the seat. In Georgia, the penalty for willfully riding in the wrong seat was a fine of a thousand dollars or six months in prison. Colored passengers were assigned to the front of the railcar on the train but to the rear of other conveyances to, in the words of the mayor of Birmingham, do "away with the disagreeable odors that would necessarily follow the breezes.'" (Emphasis added)

These are but two examples that Wilkerson offers of the various ways in which society was severely fragmented between "coloreds" and whites. As Ta-Nehisi Coates (easily my favorite columnist of the past two years) said something similar to arguing that white supremacy keeps whites from every dropping to the level of blacks in society -- a caste system in everything but name. Apologies to The Horde (read: readers) for not having the exact quotation. My WiFi is giving me troubles.

There is more in this section that details Pershing's matriculation to Morehouse. At Morehouse, Pershing begins to court the daughter of the President of Atlanta University, Rufus Early Clement. In retelling Pershing's courtship, Wilkerson also details the fight that brewed between President Clement and WEB Du Bois -- a confrontation that ultimately ended with Du Bois' ousting from Atlanta University. Wilkerson wrote,

"Clement would be at odds with Du Bois almost from the start, perhaps threatened by the long shadow of his celebrity or put off by the elder man's impertinent disregard for Clement, who was thirty years younger than Du Bois. But it was just as likely a contest between the accommodating pragmatism of the souther-born Clement and the impatient radicalism of the northern-bred Du Bois. The two men were the very embodiment of the North-South divide among black intellectuals." (Emphasis added)

This tension is documented in Ellison's Invisible Man as well as in the arguments between Booker T. Washington and WEB Du Bois and with countless other black thinkers from that era until today.

I want to pivot back to the idea of a "caste system," because I think it informs our understanding of Jim Crow laws and discrimination as we move into today's discourse. Anti-racist discourse isn't pre-occupied with white people, white bodies, as much as it is with the privileges granted to "whiteness" -- ergo the phrasing of "white privilege."

For people like Pershing, they existed well within the geographic boundaries of the United States. They were a part of American society. They, indeed, did carry documentation that regarded them as citizens -- lest we forget that they also were called to serve through taxes or in war, as citizens must. Yet, their existence was always circumscribed and bounded by the parameters of race, of their caste. These boundaries were readily accessible in the South, where COLORED and WHITE were written on signs.

The caste system prevailed in the North as well, though, and has continued through more elegant and sinister forms of racism -- housing policy being, as Ta-Nehisi Coates would regard it, the most potent of the 20th Century.

Perhaps we would all benefit from formatting our understanding of race in America to be more in line with Wilkerson's nomenclature. Black -- or blackness, rather -- positioned as the "untouchable" class and white people, therefore, sheltered from ever dipping into that caste by way of their ability to access "whiteness."

"Lifting the Veil" - statue at Tuskegee
University. This statue inspired a statue of
"The Founder" in Ellison's Invisible Man.

PS - I think that Brandon will likely write more about Ta-Nehisi Coates on this blog in this cycle of posts. I have been following Coates as a writer for a couple years now and have always been impressed with his work. I think The Good, Racist, People was the first time I read something of his and zealously sent the URL to friends. That said, I think that everyone should read his piece in The Atlantic titled, The Case for Reparations. It is probably the best journalism I have read in recent memory and also will help contextualize much of where I foresee these posts on The Warmth of Other Suns headed.

- Logan