"The Warmth of Other Suns"

[fiefoe]

Movements:

• They hated that there was a war, but they knew that it made them indispensable for once, and deep inside they wished it would never end.
• "Baby," she said, "always be independent. You don't want to be dependent all your life and have to depend on someone else for a drink of water."
• The Blye brothers, being colored and walking a fine line themselves, didn't put it like that. They just said the pickers were refusing and they didn't know what in the world had got into them.
• Steel mills, railroads, and packinghouses sent labor scouts disguised as insurance men and salesmen to recruit blacks north, if only temporarily.
• The chief of police in Meridian, Mississippi, ordered copies of the Chicago Defender confiscated before they could be sold, fearing it was putting ideas into colored people's heads.
• Like other mass migrations, it was not a haphazard unfurling of lost souls but a calculable and fairly ordered resettlement of people along the most direct route to what they perceived as freedom, based on railroad and bus lines.
• "Migratory currents flow along certain well-defined geographical channels. They are like mighty rivers, which flow along slowly at the outset and after depositing most of the human beings whom they hold in suspension, sweep along more impetuously, until they enter one of the great reservoirs."
• Sometimes parents tried to superimpose glory on their offspring with the grandest title they could think of.. White southerners who would not call colored people Mr. or Mrs. were made to sputter out Colonel or Queen instead.
• "How a colored man, or a white man either, for the matter, can be expected to know all the intricacies of segregation as he travels in different parts of the country is beyond explanation."
• ...southern counties and towns with seemingly random northern cities that, other than the train lines and sometimes in spite of them, made little practical sense but nonetheless made sister cities of the unlikeliest of pairings.
• The draft (for the Civil War) began July 11, 1863. Two days later, on the morning of July 13, mobs began assaulting blacks on the streets.
• The South, totalitarian and unyielding, was at that very moment succeeding at what white Harlem leaders were so desperately trying to do, that is, controlling the movements of blacks by controlling the minds of whites. 

<<