Blake Gumprecht’s “North to Boston, Life Histories from the Black Great Migration in New England” focuses on ten men and women who grew up in the South and came to Boston in the 1950s and 1960s. (The years of the Great Migration are generally recognized as 1915 to 1970). Some of the ten came to live in Dorchester and Mattapan, and three are still here.
The personal histories begin with thorough descriptions of their lives in the South and end with thorough descriptions of their lives in Boston. Gumprecht lets people speak out and say it like it is. He goes into great detail and pulls no punches. There is a lot to learn from this book.
Following are a few abbreviated life histories.
Geraldine W. was born in rural Clay County, Alabama. Her family was “very very poor.” If Black people went into a store and a white customer came in after them, they had to step aside. In movie theatres, Blacks had to sit downstairs and whites in the balcony. “They’d start throwing stuff on us,” says Geraldine. But her worst experience was being raped by a white man in the house where she was a servant. When a sister already in Boston urged her to come and take a job as a live-in servant, Geraldine moved north in 1963. After marrying, she lived on Blue Hill Ave. in Roxbury until rioting after the Grove Hall welfare sit-in drove her out. She held a variety of jobs – home health aide for 20 years and lunch monitor at the Sarah Greenwood School in Dorchester for ten years. She lived in the South End until it became too expensive and has now lived happily in Dorchester public housing for the last 30 years.
Elizabeth D. was born in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1929. Her mother, a live-in servant in Brookline since the 1950s, encouraged her to move to Boston, which she said was a better place. Elizabeth came to Boston with her husband and son in 1963. In South Carolina, Elizabeth had lived and worked in an all-Black neighborhood and found that pretty much true in Boston as well, but it didn’t bother her. She found Boston provided greater freedom and opportunity. She got a job teaching at the Gibson School, along with Jonathan Kozol. Then she transferred to the Lucy Stone School in Dorchester where she taught for 30 years. She and her husband bought a house in Codman Square and are still here. Her daughter, bused to Wayland with METCO, did well there but when it came to choosing a college, a teacher urged Tougaloo in Mississippi for her, and Williams and Bryn Mawr for the white students.
The way one man from Mississippi put it: “Racism in Boston has diminished over time but still exists, even if it is expressed differently than in the South. “Down there they let you know that they’re racist,” he says. “Here they hide it. They don’t want you to know that they’re racist. They do it in a sneaky way. It wasn’t as great here as I thought it would be, but I learned to live with it.”
Unlike many of the others interviewed by Gumprecht, Elta G., born in Sun, Louisiana, in 1942, didn’t leave her hometown because of its racism even though she taught in a segregated school and, later, in a mostly white high school where the principal had a confederate flag on his office wall.
The Ku Klux Klan was active, and she knew people who had crosses burned in their yards. A teacher, she married a man who had family in Boston and came here in 1969, moving into an apartment on Hansborough Street and, later, Oldfields Road in Dorchester, but she never adjusted to apartment house living; the walls were too thin. She found people in Boston “cold” and “cliquish.” She moved to Roxbury after her husband left her and she returned to teaching in the public schools. A singer from early in her life, she co-founded the music center affiliated with the Charles Street AME church.
In the preface to “North to Boston,” Gumprecht writes, “When I began conducting interviews in 2015, I was immediately inspired by the lives of the migrants I met and realized the value of what I was doing.” Because many of the interviewees were quite old, “I feared that if someone didn’t record some of their stories before long, they would be lost forever.” Rev. Gregory Groover of Roxbury’s Charles Street AME Church helped him enormously, because many of the migrants had found a spiritual home there.
Gumprecht ended “North to Boston” with: “We seldom hear voices like these. The experiences of ordinary people teach us far more about America than any number of histories…These are people like us: Why wouldn’t you care about them?” and his last sentence is: “But their importance and the significance of the Great Migration in Boston are undeniable. Isn’t it time that Boston and Bostonians, particularly white Bostonians, acknowledged the contributions of its Black citizens to making the 21st-Century city, especially Black people born in the South and their kin? It is past time. It’s overdue.”
After teaching geography at universities for more than 20 years, Gumprecht, an El Paso, Texas, resident, became a journalist. This is his third book. A good place to find a copy of “North to Boston” is Frugal Bookstore, 57 Warren Street, Roxbury. Allan Rohan Crite’s 1936 painting “School’s Out” graces the cover.
Alison Barnet is a long-time South Ender and has written four books about the South End and one about her great-grandfather, who lived in Ashmont.
