Sometimes in some places they would actually stop the train - keep the train from stopping at a particular station because they saw that there were so many black people there waiting to board and so therefore those people wouldn't get to leave.
Isabel WilkersonAnything that could be conceived of that would separate black people from white people was devised and codified by someone in some state in the South. There were colored and white waiting rooms everywhere, from doctor's offices to the bus stations, as people may already know.
Isabel WilkersonThe suburbanization and the ghettos that were created as a result of the limits of where [African-Americans] could live in the North [still exist today.] And ... the South was forced to change, in part because they were losing such a large part of their workforce through the Great Migration.
Isabel WilkersonMany immigrants do not talk about what they endured back home. They were fleeing that world, and when they left they didn't want to talk about it because there had been pain and heartbreak under the caste system of the South. They didn't want to burden their children with what they had endured.
Isabel WilkersonAmerica is made up of people who came from someplace else. Even the Native Americans came over the Bering strait... America is what it is because people came from someplace else.
Isabel WilkersonAt the beginning of the 20th century, before the migration began, 90 percent of all African-Americans were living in the South. By the end of the Great Migration, nearly half of them were living outside the South in the great cities of the North and West. So when this migration began, you had a really small number of people who were living in the North and they were surviving as porters or domestics or preachers - some had risen to levels of professional jobs - but they were, in some ways, protected because they were so small.
Isabel Wilkerson