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The Pear Orchard
BEAUMONT, TEXAS, 1947
It’s called the Great Migration. Tens of thousands of Black families, millions of people, were on the move. If you’re a Black man or woman in the United States and you dig down into your family tree, you’ll probably discover that some of your people came from the Mississippi Delta, the Louisiana backwater, Alabama and Arkansas, rural Tennessee, the Black Belt of central Georgia and South Carolina. Their destinations were just as varied as their points of origin. Tens of thousands, including my ancestors, moved from rural life to cities not far away—from Louisiana, Texas, or Tennessee farmland to Houston, Memphis, or Nashville. Some went west to California. Millions made the journey north to America’s industrial and economic centers: Detroit, Chicago, Boston, and New York City. This movement of Black folk out of the rural South reshaped the country. Its legacy still resounds through American life today in ways large and small. This is why my writing about Beaumont starts with it. The Great Migration shaped Beaumont profoundly, and through Beaumont, it shaped me.
The reasons for this incredible movement of people were many, but the roots of the migration can be found in the legacy of the slave society that remained powerful in the South after the Civil War. For a fleeting moment after the war, the prospect of the emancipated former slaves acquiring ownership of Southern farmlands was a glimmer in the national imagination. Most people know the phrase “forty acres and a mule.” This was the idea of breaking the power structure of the South by raising up the former slaves, allowing them the chance at self-sufficiency. It should have happened, but it didn’t. This failure to compensate the former slaves, to give to them what they deserved—and what was by any decent measure a small step toward justice—laid the foundation for the development and growth of slavery’s grotesque twin: the hierarchical, exploitive, violent, segregationist society called Jim Crow. At its heart, Jim Crow society was based on the exploitation of Black workers by white planters. This is critically important, and no one should misunderstand it: wealth throughout the South, meaning white planter wealth, was not based on the value of what came out of the soil, it was extracted from the Black workers’ bodies, just as it was under slavery.
After the Civil War, slavery turned into sharecropping and tenant farming. These models of labor were constructed precisely to maintain the conditions of slavery by trapping Black people on the land through a combination of debt peonage and lack of opportunity. To rebrand and continue slavery, the white South dismantled the reforms that came in the wake of the war. The war and its aftermath had provoked the federal government to guarantee Black male suffrage. With the vote, Black communities in the South during Reconstruction gained political power. In the decades after the end of Reconstruction, as the federal government turned away, the white South launched an assault on the political and legal status of Black people across the region. For Black men, voting rights were destroyed. Only hundreds out of hundreds of thousands of Black men cast a ballot. Black representation vanished throughout the South.
The loss of political power meant Black folk in the South had no protection from the abuses of law and order. The law in the South, together with the institutions of law enforcement—courts, state and local prosecutors, sheriffs, state National Guardsmen, police—became the key tool for the enforcement of white supremacy. It was through its systems of “law and order” that Jim Crow society was built and maintained. Let’s make no mistake, the Jim Crow South was a violent, racially hierarchical, terrorist state.
White Southerners used every possible legal channel to exercise power over Black people, and when these “legal” operations were deemed not enough, they formed vigilante groups like the Klan to carry their violence deep into the heart of Black communities. Thousands, maybe even tens of thousands, of Black people were lynched during the decades before and during the Great Migration. Lynching—whether the actual murderous event or the threat of it—became a shadow that hung low over Black life in the South. Some Black people were targeted for economic reasons. For example, they might have dared to buy land or open a shop that threatened white interests. The majority of lynchings, though, related to white fear about racial mixing, especially Black men having or desiring sexual relations with white women. Again, as with the issue of economics and labor, white terrorism was directed at the Black body.
To the political and legal campaigns to debase Black folk, Jim Crow added economic oppression and exploitation. The impact of this oppression is still evident in our communities today—it is history as current event. Black schools went unfunded or underfunded. Universities, colleges, and professional schools remained closed to Black students. Black people were denied access to ownership of businesses in the more economically prosperous white neighborhoods of towns and cities. White businesses hired Black workers only at the very bottom levels of pay and then prevented them from rising. White residential neighborhoods were off limits, and Black ones received sparse public investment. Bank lending was deeply prejudiced. Few Black members of the community owned substantial tracts of land, and if they did, they were under constant threat from the white mob.
Beneath all of this—beneath the violence, the disenfranchisement, the enforced segregation, the miscarriage of justice in the courts—was the vast campaign by the South’s white planters to bind Black workers to the land through an unending spiral of debt. In this way, the Southern planter tried to blot out the most potent site of resistance to his power: people’s hope for the future.
The Great Migration is the name for millions of individual and family stories. Taken together, these interwoven stories forever changed the United States. Each act of migration was a heroic tale of struggle and survival—we shouldn’t forget this. The Black people, like my family, who left the rural South had nothing, and it was a kind of nothing that might be hard for some of us to imagine these days. They had no money. They had no property to sell. They had little or no formal education and few specific skills beyond agricultural ones. They had no health insurance and no welfare programs to get them through the transitions and tough times. Added to this nothing, these migrants faced constant danger. The act of leaving itself was opposed, often violently, by the South’s white power structure. White communities in the North met the new arrivals with open hostility, forced segregation, and discrimination of every type.
Throughout the country beyond the Cotton Belt, urban areas witnessed a dramatic growth in their populations of Black residents. Some of the iconic urban neighborhoods rose during this time: New York’s Harlem, Chicago’s South Side, Roxbury in Boston, Houston’s Third Ward. Wherever—Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, Los Angeles, etc.—Black communities grew, violence and oppression followed. The spirit of white supremacy, nurtured at the heart of the South, followed migrants north and west like a looming shadow, permeating every corner of the American landscape. Northern cities became racially segregated, like Southern ones. Real estate agents and banks worked hand in glove to create and sustain white-only neighborhoods and suburbs. Instead of welcoming Black workers, labor unions targeted the new arrivals as enemies of the white worker. White businesses remained stubbornly closed to Black workers beyond the level of the most menial jobs.
Violence followed these migrants out of the Deep South. Klan chapters opened nationwide, harnessing, organizing, and activating white hate. Urban police forces from New York to Los Angeles became fascistic orders largely focused on maintaining racial hierarchy. Rates of Black male incarceration began their meteoric rise, finding ghastly mature form in the U.S.’s prison-industrial complex, the largest penal system the “peacetime” world has ever seen. The South’s terror state was now the size of the nation.
My story—like the stories of Black families throughout this country, like the family histories of most Black players who play or have played in the NBA—includes the Great Migration. Beaumont, Texas, is the center of my family’s migration story. Around 1900, Southeast Texas and the Gulf Coast were in flux. People were moving, and not only from Georgia’s Black Belt to Harlem or Newark. Tens of thousands of rural Texas Black tenant farmers were headed for the Gulf Coast’s cities. Many of these people, and others from Louisiana and the Mississippi Delta, settled in Houston. Houston’s Black neighborhoods—the Third Ward, Sunnyside, Frenchtown, and others—swelled with the new arrivals. Beaumont was no different.
For many readers, Beaumont, Texas, of the 1930s and 1940s might seem like ancient history, but to me it might as well be yesterday. For eighteen years, I saw this history etched into my grandparents’ faces. I saw the effects of it around me. I still do. This history is felt everywhere in our society. It couldn’t be more visible, if we’re paying attention.
On the eve of the Civil War, Beaumont, like the rest of Texas, was slave territory. The town was built around a local sawmill and had a railroad line passing through on the way from New Orleans to Houston. Slaves worked in capacities such as domestic laborers, farmers, and railroad workers. On June 19, 1865—Juneteenth—the slaves in Beaumont gained their freedom. They started to exercise their right to vote. They held local political offices. By the last decade of the century, however, Jim Crow society was being built in Beaumont piece by piece, arresting the progress made by Black Beaumonters, who lost the ability to vote and were subjected to strict segregation, economic and political oppression, and daily threats and acts of violence.
Life changed in Beaumont in 1901, when oil was discovered on Spindletop Hill. The Lucas Gusher transformed Beaumont from a small railway town into a boomtown. The population spiked as people flocked to town in search of jobs and a better life. The oil business formed the industrial core of Beaumont and other cities on the Gulf Coast, turning the once rural area into an important industrial center. To oil drilling, the Gulf Coast added petroleum refining, shipbuilding, chemical production, and a host of related industries and businesses. By 1950, the former small town of a couple thousand people contained well over a hundred thousand inhabitants, a third of whom were Black.
Jim Crow structured life in Beaumont. Strict racial segregation barred Black people from eating in white-only restaurants, drinking in white-only bars, shopping in white-only stores. Schools, of course, were segregated, neighborhoods racially divided, and by the first years of the new century, Black people were forced by law to sit or stand at the back of Beaumont’s buses and to travel by segregated railway cars. Despite the incredible profits generated by oil and related enterprises, Black workers saw none of it. Whether it was on Texas’ oilfields, in its refineries, or elsewhere, white workers claimed the best jobs, leaving the most menial and lowest paying to Black employees. No Black workers were taken into management or executive positions; hardly a Black man or woman held a white-collar post.
The oilfields are a good example of the norm. Black workers were allowed on the field predominantly as diggers, whether it was slush pits, trenches for pipelines, or holes for storage tanks. Earthmoving was the worst-paid work in Texas’ entire oil economy, and even this work, by the 1920s, was prohibited for Black Beaumonters by the increasingly intolerant and radicalized white culture.
To grasp the nature of Beaumont during Jim Crow, we must combine an understanding of the facts with a willingness to imagine the daily reality of both white and Black folk. For white people, this daily reality meant the constant, vigilant enforcement of the norms and practices of social domination.
The foundation of this domination was the policing of the “color line,” the social boundary between the races. For white people, this meant above all the “protection” of white womanhood from the sexual “threat” posed by Black men. If Jim Crow meant any one thing for white America, it meant the control of the Black male body, which it sought to bend and break under unrelenting pressure. For Black people, Jim Crow, beyond the political and legal oppression, meant the performance of subordination and inferiority. “Performance” is a perfect word for it, because beneath the mob violence and lynching, there was a Texas-sized mountain of bows, doffed hats, sidewalks stepped off, streets crossed, back entrances used, seats vacated, faces averted, insults swallowed, undeserved apologies uttered, and unearned respect given.
The performance of Jim Crow, both the performance of domination (always backed up with very real state or vigilante violence) and its mirror image, the performance of subordination, was found on every level, from language to gesture to facial expression. Let’s not be confused: the performance of Jim Crow was not separate from its structures of legal, political, and economic inequality. These elements came together to create a society bent on maintaining and deepening racial hierarchy as a fact of life. It’s complicated—it was a complex system, as all systems are that seek to crush a minority through the oppressive force of a violent and intolerant majority. The Jim Crow South infused racial domination into every possible sphere of life, and the accumulation of these infusions built, brick by brick, the white-supremacist state.
Many aspects of this culture have never gone away, even if the tactics might have changed. There are people today, occupying positions of power in our society, who are trying to reconstruct this system of domination, starting, as in the nineteenth century, by stripping Black Americans of the right to vote. I’ll come back to this later in the book, but it is important to make the point clearly here: these regressive steps must be vigorously resisted. We need to join now in protest and refusal of this vision of life. Anyone who thinks white supremacy will stop at denying Black men and women the vote is badly mistaken. Disenfranchisement is, as it was then, an evil step toward exploitation, humiliation, and sadistic violence. This is why our movement to fight for the vote remains a critical, if by itself insufficient, response to white supremacy. It is part of the bigger struggle for real freedom.
My grandparents were born in the South during the Great Depression. The Great Depression was a crisis for Black America, especially for poor, rural folk, of a magnitude that dwarfed the general crisis the nation was facing. In the 1930s, as now, crisis hits the most vulnerable the hardest—just look at the impact of the 2008 financial crisis or the Covid-19 pandemic. Black folk, especially in the South, were already languishing under Jim Crow when the bottom fell out of the U.S. economy in 1929. During the peak years of the Depression, unemployment among Black workers reached over 50 percent, double that of white workers. Those who managed to hold on to a job were at the bottom of the pay scale.
I like to look at photographs of those years across the South; it helps me better imagine the life my grandparents and great-grandparents must have been living at the time. One of my favorites is of three Black children gathered around a porch somewhere in the Mississippi Delta. In the foreground, there’s a girl standing on the edge of the porch. She’s shoeless, thin, probably ten or eleven years old. She’s wearing a tattered dress, frayed and patched, made of some light cotton fabric with a checkered pattern. The collar of the dress forms a V shape below her neck, exposing the austere lines of her collarbone and upper rib cage, a subtle, though jarring, sign of hunger. There’s a play of light and shadow on her legs, moving up her right shoulder onto her hand, which sits, fingers curled, propped up by the elbow on her waist. The girl’s face is somehow both impassive and highly charged; her eyes, piercing and aware, seek out their object to the left of the camera frame.
Behind and above her in the background, a boy, maybe eight years old, leans against the porch’s post. He’s also without shoes, and he gazes in the same direction as the girl. The look on his face is not one of stoic calm or clear-eyed assessment, as hers is. It is a look of anxiety and fear.
To the girl’s right, occupying the photo’s foreground with her, there’s a third child, a boy wearing a pair of dusty overalls and a gray flat cap that’s tilted down toward his left eye. The boy, around twelve, has his one visible sleeve rolled up to the elbow, exposing his wrist and forearm. His fingers, like those of the girl, are curled halfway into a ball. This boy is not looking off to the left, like the other two. He is looking directly at the camera. There is a confidence, a power, in the boy’s gaze. It seeks out our eyes, demanding recognition, demanding voice, even if his lips are pressed firmly together.
A photograph of three children in the Mississippi Delta in 1936—three stories untold but intersected at a single moment by a photographer passing through the South on her way to California. What became of these kids? What happened to the girl with the sun-dappled face? To the young boy leaning against the post with his mouth agape? To the boy in the foreground with his angled cheekbones and his powerful gaze—the gaze of a knowing man, the gaze of a man with dignity? I look at that boy who’s looking right back at me and feel like I know him. I know him because I am him. I know him because he could be my grandfather. I know him because, like me and my grandfather, this boy had to live a lifetime before he turned fifteen, if he made it that far.
My grandmother, Mary Lewis, was born in Church Point, Louisiana, in 1935. When she was twelve, her parents took her, her five sisters, and her three brothers and moved to Beaumont’s Pear Orchard. It must have been a crazy trip for the family to make in the 1940s. My great-grandparents had decided, like millions of others, to get on out of the rural South, to leave the cotton fields behind and to go in search of another, better life. It is easy enough to take a journey like this from Church Point to Beaumont for granted—it’s a couple hours by car now—but that would be a major mistake. These migrations were acts of tremendous courage and were made in the face of danger.
Unfortunately, much of my family history has been lost to the past. Or maybe that’s not the right way to put it. More accurately, this story and countless others like it were excluded from history, and certainly from most history books that are taught in our schools. History has found little space for the lives of ordinary Black folk like my grandparents and great-grandparents, especially those from the rural South. They appear as groups—slaves, tenant farmers, sharecroppers—but not as individuals, families, and communities. This is one of the reasons I was motivated to write this book in this particular way—to place my story, that of an NBA champion, in connection with these deeper forces that shape our lives. When I think about my grandmother’s journey as the oldest of nine children in 1947, I encounter so many unanswered questions. Why did they leave Church Point? Was the decision made for a specific, immediate reason like job loss, debt, violence, or fear? Was it the result of long deliberation? Did they leave primarily to get out? Or was it, rather, a quest after opportunities, real or imagined, offered by a growing city within geographical reach? Was it hope that drove them—hope that Beaumont would provide the setting for a better life? Or was it exhaustion after generations of fruitless toil in the wake of the Civil War?
When they arrived in Beaumont, my great-grandfather somehow got himself a piece of land in the Pear Orchard. There, he built a house for his family. It was a low, ramshackle structure where nine kids and two adults packed into the small rooms. Eventually, my great-grandfather would build a second house on the land, nothing more than a shack, really, where my grandmother and grandfather raised their kids. This shack was the house I’d grow up in half a century later, a shack built by the hands of a former sharecropper, hands that only a few years before had been picking cotton in a Louisiana field. For me, like for so many people, the past was present.
The Second World War was good to Beaumont—to white Beaumont. The oil refineries, shipyards, and other industries grew to meet the demands of the war, attracting thousands of workers to the Gulf Coast. As people crowded into Beaumont, white residents of the city became increasingly concerned with maintaining the Jim Crow structures of white supremacy. Nowhere in the city was this clearer than on Beaumont’s city buses, where white drivers and riders were focused on policing the color line. On the buses, this meant the division of the space into white and “colored” sections.
On July 27, 1942, Charles J. Reco sat on a Beaumont city bus with his knees over the border. Reco, who was a Black military policeman back in town on leave, refused to retract his knees when instructed by the driver. The driver then called for the police to come and remove Reco from the bus. When four Beaumont police officers arrived, Reco resisted. During the confrontation, Officer Billy Brown pulled his gun and shot Reco three times. Another officer, Ben White, added a fourth shot, while yet another white officer, Clyde Brown, beat Reco with his nightstick. Reco, miraculously, survived the assault. All of the white officers involved in Reco’s shooting and beating were exonerated a month later.
A year after the white officers attacked Reco, white anger seemed to be spiking. On June 15, 1943, a white woman called the Beaumont police to report that she had been raped by a Black man. The supposed violation of white womanhood by Black men was the central white-supremacist justification for terrorism. It played into many of the myths of Southern racial hierarchy. It emphasized the vulnerability and delicacy of white femininity, which, according to the racist ideology, was under threat from the Black man. It brought up notions of racial purity. It created the space for the performance of white “honor,” which was tied closely to white masculinity and white power.
In other words, the issue of sexual relations between white women and Black men contained a potent mix of white delusion and ignorance and was used to justify extreme violence. Throughout slavery and Jim Crow, white accusations of Black men’s crossing of this sexual color line led to tens of thousands of lynchings, beatings, riots, and countless other major and minor injustices, the most famous of which was the case of the Scottsboro Boys.
Word of the alleged rape spread from the police station quickly throughout the city on June 15. By nighttime, thousands of white workers at the Pennsylvania shipyards walked off the job and moved toward downtown Beaumont, intent on exacting mob “justice.” By the time the workers reached the city center, the crowd had doubled in size. After learning that the police hadn’t yet apprehended a suspect, the thousands of white people began to riot.
Copyright © 2023 by Kendrick Perkins and Seth Rogoff