BOOK MARK : ‘They Wished We’d Go Back to Africa, but Chicago was Close Enough’

Before World War II, the cotton planters of the Mississippi Delta were absolutely opposed to black migration to the North. Author Hortense Powdermaker, enumerating the whites’ “creed of racial relations” in 1939, wrote that one of its main tenets was, “Negroes are necessary to the South, and it is desirable that they should stay there and not migrate to the North.”

Whites kept the black school system in Mississippi inferior in part because they didn’t want sharecroppers’ children to have career options beyond sharecropping. Mississippi Sen. James K. Vardaman once said that educating the black man “simply renders him unfit for the work which the white man has prescribed, and which he will be forced to perform. . . . The only effect is to spoil a good field hand and make an insolent cook.”

In the 1920s, the town of Clarksdale, from which many black people later migrated to Chicago, was supposed to become the site of a new black college called Delta State. But the white planters succeeded in having it moved to the town of Cleveland, 50 miles away, because they didn’t want new opportunities for blacks opening up in town.

As late as the early 1940s, the owners of the King & Anderson plantation, an enormous spread of 17,000 acres just west of Clarksdale that was reputed to be the largest family plantation in Mississippi, sent two of their white managers to Chicago to see if they could get some of the sharecroppers who had left to come back home. The managers first met with John H. Jackson, the pastor of the magnificent yellow-brick Oliver Baptist Church, which was well on its way to becoming the largest black congregation in America. . . . Jackson was willing to entertain the two managers, but he said he couldn’t urge members of his flock to move back South until conditions for blacks improved there.

Then the managers held a long meeting with former King & Anderson sharecroppers in an apartment on the South Side. The managers announced that the plantation had undertaken a series of reforms, including electrifying sharecropper cabins and providing sharecroppers with regular written statements of their accounts so they would not be surprised at the “settle,” that is, when the tenants were told how much they had earned during the year.

The former sharecroppers said they already knew all that, along with all the other recent news from the plantation; the Mississippi-Chicago grapevine was very active. They complained about having been swindled on King & Anderson and other plantations, and about having been abused, degraded and beaten by plantation managers and policemen. They showed no interest in coming home.

When the managers got back to Clarksdale and told the owners of the plantation what had happened, the owners arranged a meeting in Clarksdale to discuss the situation. After the meeting, the white leaders of Clarksdale asked the black leaders of Clarksdale to draw up a list of grievances, which they did. No good jobs. Cheating at the settle. Lynchings. Being denied the courtesy titles of “Mister” and “Missus.” Poor schools. No hospitals. No sidewalks, gutters, or garbage collection in black neighborhoods.

Confronted with all this, the whites did nothing; the list of grievances could have been resubmitted virtually intact in the early 1960s.

When word got around about the demonstration of the mechanical cotton picker on the Hopson plantation, though, the attitude of the whites toward black migration changed almost instantly. A plantation didn’t need hundreds of field hands any more; a handful would do.

It didn’t matter if sharecroppers moved to Chicago. In fact, it helped to solve the problem of where the sharecroppers would go after their jobs were abolished.

Besides, the more far-sighted whites in the Delta had begun to detect a slight crumbling in the citadel of segregation. The New Deal was a generation old by now, and while politically it represented an accommodation between Northern liberals and Southern segregationists, the Delta’s planters perceived President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a threatening figure. During his reign, various critics of the sharecropper system who at least raised segregation as an issue had emerged, and millions of Northern blacks had been recruited into the Democratic coalition.

World War II had exposed thousands of young black men from the Delta to places where segregation didn’t exist, and, having fought for their country, they felt entitled to things they didn’t have in Mississippi. In Greenville, just after the end of the war, four black veterans went to the country courthouse and said they wanted to register to vote. The registrar said they hadn’t paid their poll tax for 1944.

They came back with the money the next day, and the next, and the next, and every day they got a different excuse. Finally, they filed a complaint with the FBI in Washington, and two agents came down to Greenville, interviewed the veterans, had them sign a complaint and got them registered.

The implications of blacks voting were not happy ones for Mississippi whites, especially in the Delta, which was three-quarters black. Most middle-aged whites had been raised on their parents’ and grandparents’ horror stories about life during Reconstruction, when blacks were enfranchised.

All in all, the idea of getting the numbers of blacks and whites in the Delta a little closer to equilibrium began to seem attractive to whites on political as well as economic grounds. The best, the only, means to that end was black migration to the North. As Clarksdale’s Aaron Henry, who would become a statewide NAACP leader, puts it, “They wished we’d go back to Africa, but Chicago was close enough.”

1991, by Nicholas Lemann. Reprinted with permission from Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.