Isabel Wilkerson

What, for that matter, would the South look like? Would it have changed on its own? Or did the black exodus force the South to face itself in ways no one could ever have thought possible?

What binds these stories together was the back-against-the-wall, reluctant yet hopeful search for something better, any place but where they were.

a place so dangerously absurd that it is living entertainment in her old age.

Now, with a new century approaching, blacks in the South, accustomed to the liberties established after the war, were hurled back in time, as if the preceding three decades, limited though they may have been, had never happened.

Each year, people who had been able to vote or ride the train where they chose found that something they could do freely yesterday, they were prohibited from doing today.

why they speak like melted butter and their children speak like footsteps on pavement, prim and proper or clipped and fast, like the New World itself.

Now he done learn how to count and now done jumped up and called my wife a lie, ’cause my wife figured up these books.”

Some people’s pride wouldn’t let them come back at all. So they shoehorned themselves into tenements and made like they were rich or just plain made do and dazzled the folks back home with all the money they wired back.

The palm of her hand started to itch, or so she said.

To the north was the tenant-farming Ozark land of warm springs and hard living in Arkansas, where an attempt by sharecroppers to unionize in the town of Elaine would be crushed with bloody efficiency in 1919.