Healthcare Policy and Evaluation

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 due to the rapid pace of industrialization. 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 utopia, those who moved at least believed that in the absence of Jim Crow they could at least push past racial barriers with greater ease than they were in the South. It wasn’t that blacks gave up on the South; the South had simply given up on any semblance of ethical responsibility and seemed hopeless as a place where one could achieve dreams. This was especially true for Pershing, who dreamed big.
Pershing renegotiates race and racial identities, as did his most famous patient, Ray Charles. As Wilkerson points out, Ray Charles was also a product of the Great Migration. Like Pershing, Ray Charles was highly ambitious and saw California as a heavenly place where one could make any dream come true. Both Pershing and Charles kept their feet on the ground and in touch with common “folk,” even as they envisioned themselves surrounded by wealth, power, and prestige (Wilkerson 330). Pershing’s story shows how African-Americans perceived and pursued the American Dream in ways that were at once similar to and different from their white counterparts. Leaving the South was essential for pursuing the American Dream, just as leaving Eastern Europe or Ireland would have also been essential for pursuing the American Dream for immigrants from other nations. As Wilkerson points out, the Great Migration is a population migration narrative that much more closely resembles the mass movements of people from oppressive states seeking first refugee status and then access to freedom, justice, and opportunity.
Pershing’s story showcases different meanings of African American success, and different methods of achieving that success. Whereas the vast majority of African Americans during the Great Migration did not go on to become a physician to celebrities, many did go on to achieve their goals. Wilkerson’s narrative is uplifting in that all three people profiled meet with their own definition of success; the book might have been more realistic, though, if it had also included some stories of abject failure, of men and women who moved north only to succumb to the constant barrage of racist actions and discrimination that would impede their social and economic progress. Unlike George Swanson Starling, Pershing also was not a civil rights activist who took the personal struggle with racism into the political domain. He is also unlike Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, who exemplifies the intersection between gender, race, and power in America. Taken together, though, these three stories illustrate much of the complexity surrounding the African American experience, which Franklin and Higgenbotham discuss in their text From Slavery to Freedom. The Great Migration was a time of great potency and transformation, not just for black Americans but for whites too, who throughout the nation were increasingly forced to confront their own silence and indifference.
Another unique element of Pershing’s story is that unlike the tales told by other African Americans pulled by the promise of jobs in northern factories, an independent businessman and physician does not experience the same kind of resentment or scapegoating that the working class would have felt. When the Great Depression hit, it hit the working class hard, but working class African Americans the hardest. Labor unions were segregated, and blacks migrating north were viewed with suspicion, resentment, and often outright hatred. The socioeconomic class issues of the Great Migration are not absent at all from Pershing’s story, but they are far more evident in the first half of his life when he is in Monroe than when he is in his mansion in Los Angeles. The success of his business and the way he accumulated wealth and upward social mobility tell the story of how African Americans fought and won their rights to the American Dream.
Pershing’s story is not about a black man’s willingness to reconcile with white cultural, social, economic, and political institutions. In adopting and adapting the American Dream to suit his own needs, Pershing proves how the Great Migration empowered individuals to pursue their own professional paths. The Great Migration signified the rotten intensity of life in the Deep South, which pushed six million people to uproot themselves and enter uncharted territory.






Works Cited

Franklin, J.H. and E. Higginbotham. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, 9 th ed. NY: McGraw Hill, 2011. 
“Great Migration: The African-American Exodus North.” NPR. 13 Sept, 2010. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129827444
Lepore, Jill. “The Uprooted.” The New Yorker. 6 Sept, 2010. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/06/the-uprooted
Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns. First Vintage, 2010.