Robert Pershing Foster and the African American Dream

Introduction: Three Stories for Six Million

"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." This Richard Wright passage is the source from which Isabel Wilkerson derives the title of her 2010 ethnography The Warmth of Other Suns. Wilkerson interviewed more than 1,000 people for her research before selecting three individuals 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 it reveals the ways African Americans adopted the American Dream and made it their own.

Push and Pull Forces of the Great Migration

Wilkerson's book illustrates the various push and pull forces involved in the Great Migration. African Americans pushed themselves to escape an untenable 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 had been as slaves, a reality evidenced most clearly by sharecropping — 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 worsened with Jim Crow. African Americans in the South were also pulled northward by the fact that industrialization had created a strong demand for workers. Robert Joseph Pershing Foster was pulled to California for similar reasons, but his motivations were still unique: Pershing was drawn by the allure of California itself. He dreamed big; his dreams were the same as the American Dream. He wanted to make it.

Pershing's Origins and Ambitions in Monroe, Louisiana

Pershing's story begins in Monroe, Louisiana in 1933. His parents were schoolteachers — his father also a principal — but were paid so little that they had to milk cows on the side for extra income. Moving pictures were a new phenomenon at the time, and Pershing had a passion for them. He willingly waited in the "coloreds only" line at the local Paramount Theater to catch a glimpse of movie stars on the silver screen. Pershing also fantasized about possessing fine things — things normally out of reach for a black child living in the South — yet that never stopped him from aspiring and believing he could overcome.

As a child, Pershing was constantly trying to prove himself, drawing personal will from parents whose aspirations were similarly limitless. He had no interest in letting others constrain his ambitions. His dreams inevitably became racialized: "everything you wanted was white and the best" (Wilkerson 86). Yet Pershing understood that on some level his dreams were simply American. He fought for his nation and leveraged his medical degree to establish 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.

For many African Americans, moving meant opportunity. In this sense, the Great Migration resembled the experience of immigrants from other countries moving to the United States. While African Americans in the South surely knew the North was no social utopia, those who moved believed that in the absence of Jim Crow they could push past racial barriers with greater ease. It was not that blacks gave up on the South; the South had simply abandoned any semblance of ethical responsibility and seemed hopeless as a place where one could achieve one's dreams. This was especially true for Pershing, who dreamed particularly large.

Conclusion: Migration as Empowerment

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. Pershing became intent on proving people wrong, and he succeeded by demonstrating how African Americans could access social, cultural, and financial capital even within a white establishment.

Works Cited

Franklin, J. H. and E. Higginbotham. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, 9th 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.