Moving Towards the American Dream: The Story of Robert Joseph Pershing Foster
“I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns, and, perhaps, to bloom” is the Richard Wright passage from where Isabel Wilkerson derives the title of her 2010 ethnography The Warmth of Other Suns. Wilkerson interviewed more than 1000 people for her research, before whittling those numbers down and selecting three individuals who she believed captured the diversity of experiences shaping the Great Migration (“Great Migration: The African-American Exodus North”). Three people cannot necessarily stand in for the six million African Americans who moved from the South between 1915 and 1970; as Lepore puts it, “Can three people explain six million?” (Lepore 1). The answer might actually be yes, though, as the three stories Wilkerson selects offer universal themes of the experience of migration, of the shift from oppression to liberation, of triumph over tribulation. The story of Robert Joseph Pershing Foster is particularly illuminating of the three tales because his reveals the ways African Americans adopted the American Dream and made it their own.
Wilkerson’s book illustrates the various push and pull forces involved in the Great Migration. African Americans pushed themselves to escape an insipid situation, and were pushed away by those who would appropriate their lives, their identities, and their freedoms. What is universal about all the stories in The Warmth of Other Suns is that all oppressed people invariably tire of being born into a “servant class,” (Wilkerson 36). Most African Americans in the South remained no better off economically than they were as slaves, evidenced by sharecropping most of all, an overt extension of slavery. In spite of the lip service paid to promoting equality through Reconstruction efforts, nothing was changing and in many ways, things started to worsen with Jim Crow. African Americans in the South were also pulled by the fact that the North needed workers...
Robert Joseph Pershing Foster was pulled to California for similar reasons, but his motivations for moving were still unique in that Pershing was also pulled by the allure of California. Pershing dreamed big; his dreams were the same as the American Dream. He wanted to make it.
As a child, Pershing was constantly trying to prove himself. He received his personal will from his parents whose aspirations were similarly limitless. Pershing had no interest in letting other people limit his ambitions or his capability of fulfilling them. Of course, his dreams and desires became racialized: “everything you wanted was white and the best,” (Wilkerson 86). Yet Pershing knew that on some level, his dreams were simply American. He fought for his nation and leveraged his medical degree to start a private practice. For Pershing, this was not a “white” path, but an American one. His story shows how blacks during the Great Migration conscientiously shifted narrative discourses about race, socioeconomic class, and access to power. Pershing became intent on proving people wrong, and he succeeded by proving how African Americans can access social, cultural, and financial capital even within a white establishment.
Pershing’s story begins in Monroe, Louisiana in 1933. His parents were schoolteachers—and his father a principal--but were paid so little they had to milk cows on the side for extra money. At the time, moving pictures were a new thing and Pershing had a penchant for them. He willingly waited in the “coloreds only” line at the local Paramount Theater to catch a glimpse of the movie stars on the silver screen. Pershing also fantasized about having nice things, things that were normally out of reach for a black child living in the South. But that never stopped Pershing from aspiring and believing that he could overcome. As for many other African Americans, moving meant opportunity. In this sense, the Great Migration would have been like immigrants from another country moving to the United States. While African Americans in the South must have known the north was no social…
