“Over the course of six decades, “wrote Isabel Wilkerson in her Pulitzer Prize book The Warmth of Other Suns, “some six million black southerners left the land of their forefathers and fanned out across the country for an uncertain existence in nearly every corner of America.” The Athens (GA) Daily Herald headline in May 1917 read “18,879 Negroes Leave Georgia in Eight Months.” In June 1917 The Douglas County (GA) Sentinel reported that investigations by the State Commissioner of Commerce and Labor revealed that 50,000 negroes had left in the last ten months. That same year the Brunswick (GA) News stated that the Commissioner of Agriculture saw the “exodus of southern negroes to the north as a state problem” to be solved by the state legislature passing “drastic laws against illegitimate operations of labor agents” who lured Negroes to work in northern factories.” The editor of the Macon (GA) newspaper in 1923 told fellow newspaper publishers to publish stories about Negro farmers in Georgia who have been “conspicuously successful” as one way to curb emigration “because if 40% of our population is enticed away, we shall shrivel and dwindle in greater ratio than is now the case.”
St. Simons Island native and editor of The Chicago Defender Robert Abbott Sengstacke used his newspaper to promote the “Great North Migration.” In her book Wilkerson described Abbott as “the agitator and unwitting chronicler of the movement.” She claimed that his newspaper “seduced” Negroes to come north. However, it may be said that the articles published in The Defender did less to “seduce” than to publish explicit articles that reported the obvious conditions that encouraged Negroes to leave the South: lynchings, labor disputes, sharecropper concerns, the boll weevil, poor pay, poor education >and the desire for better wages, better education and the lust for freedom. Between 1950 and 1960 the director of the U.S. Census Bureau told a House Committee that the South had lost 1.5 million Negroes mostly to large cities. Over 1 million alone went to New York City.
While African America parents on St. Simons Island found work in the local mills, industries, resorts, and private homes, their children saw their future off the island. Going north meant finding a job, finding a bit of freedom off the island, and even finding love. As one woman put it, “My mother said I couldn’t marry anyone of the island because everybody is related.”.
Alfred Sheppard recalled that in the 1970s, “as kids got older, you know they left. As more people left, you know, not a lot of people stayed, so therefore it kind of dwindled dowe…“ Departure came promptly for most youth. Sheppard said: “Like I said when I graduated from high school it was 1966. It was a Sunday. On Monday, my sister and I was on a bus going to New York.”
Where did they go? Usually to Chicago, New York, or Los Angeles wherever there lived an aunt, a brother, or a sister who had left earlier. Ella Sheppard Douglas said that she went to NYC at age 18 because “there were no jobs here that I could really get except house-keeping and I didn’t want to clean houses all the time.” Her aunt took her in in 1959, she said. She worked her “first job ever” in a hospital, then in a factory, and eventually she studied and became a registered nurse. She moved to California where she raised her family. Her siblings followed her to New York and then California. When her brother Alfred left the island in 1966 he got a job with 20th Century Fox in New York City as a messenger between data office and main office. “Free movies” were his perk. Then he was drafted into the Air Force and sent to bases in Texas and Oklahoma. When discharged he headed out to California where his sister had settled. He had a good job as a collections supervisor for a bank. Sociologist Stewart E. Tolnay, a leading expert on the Great Migration quoted in Wilkerson’s book pointed out that “Compared with Northern born blacks…Southern migrants had higher rates of participation in the labor force, lower levels of unemployment, higher income, lower levels of poverty and welfare dependency.”
But it was not all roses and sunshine. Migrants faced discrimination up north. They were teased for their accent and language difference – “pads” for “tablets” and “buckets” were “pails.” Co-workers in Texas always called Chip Wilson “Georgia.” Teresa Powell Malachi had a good job at the post office near her Chicago home. Then she was transferred 17 miles away and then 37 miles away. “I was so tired of slipping and sliding… all that snow and ice…I don’t miss it.” After 50 years she moved back to St. Simons Island even though her children, now adults, stayed in Chicago.
Relatives up north stayed in contact with family back home. Savannah children recalled boarding the train in the summer to visit relatives in New York City with a box of fried chicken and biscuits on their laps and the motherly order to behave. Those who lived up north came back to the island whenever they could, but as Alfred Sheppard put it, “you can’t run back and forth you know.”
After 30 years or so, many moved back to the island to care for family. “Well, Mom was getting kinda old.” A widowed uncle was disabled. A younger sister or older brother needed help. Josephine Follin Porter returned to care for her grandfather. Phoebe Abbott-Johnson moved to NYC to live with her aunt. She finished high school in NY, worked for the Dept of Corrections and then a children’s group home. “My great grandfather was still living in SSI,” she recalled, but then my grandma died and “Aunt Amy was here doing it by herself” so “I decided to pack up my husband and I came home.” Teresa Powell Malachi came back to care for her mother. Asked if she planned to spend the rest of her life on the island, Malachi answered, “Yes. Yes.” Best friend cousins Rosalind Sheppard and Amy Lotson Roberts both left St. Simons Island after high school Ros to New York and Amy to New York and Miami. They attended colleges, had jobs, got married and drew apart. Then, without communication, “we both moved back home on the same day. Our paths came back together.
“At the start of the Great Migration, the Chicago Defender wrote, “If all of their dream does not come true, enough will come to pass to justify their actions.” Some, like Emory Rooks or Natalie Moore Dixon, returned to St. Simons Island as veterans after their military service. They enjoyed being back in their parents’ house and their neighborhood. They were happy to breathe salt air and feel the sea breezes again. Yet they saw how things had changed. Natalie’s mother Elouise had a sign “Don’t Ask Won’t Sell” prominently tacked to a large live oak tree on her property near the marsh. Despite more development, higher taxes, and fewer jobs, St. Simons Island was home. They founded the St. Simons African American Heritage Coalition (SSAAHC) to restore the historic Harrington School and to open a cultural center where their African American heritage is saved and shared. As Mercer University student JoAnna Renzi asked SSAAHC Executive Director Amy Roberts,
