Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/26748
The Great Migration of Six Million Southerners by D.G. MARTIN “He had to walk a thin line between being a man and acting a slave. Step too far on one side, and he couldn’t live with himself. Step too far on the other, and he might not live at all.” Isabel Wilkerson is describing the all too common di- lemma of blacks in the South during the early and middle part of the last century. Her book The Warmth of Other Suns is a compelling chronicle of the exodus of Southern blacks to Northern cities between 1915 and 1970. During this “Great Migration,” six million African Americans moved away from the South. In 1915, 90 percent of American blacks lived in the South. By 1970, 47 percent lived outside the region. The impact on American life, culture and politics, Wilkerson asserts, was and is monumental. She gives the facts and figures to show the importance of the migration. But the power and appeal of her book are its stories — like the “thin line” that the Mississippi sharecropper husband of Ida Mae Gladney had to walk when he quietly and respect- fully “registered his discontent” to “Mr. Edd,” his landlord and boss. Mr. Edd and a group of men had barged into the Gladney shack one night. One of the men had threatened and terrified Ida Mae. Then the group severely beat a man they had mistakenly accused of stealing turkeys. Ida Mae and her husband were convinced that they could be the next to suffer a beating, if they stepped the least bit out of line. “This is the last crop we making,” he told Ida Mae. Getting out of Mississippi — or any Southern state — in 1937 was not as easy as I would have thought. Sharecroppers were usually in debt to the landlord. That debt effectively attached them to the land as if they were serfs. The out migration of blacks created a labor shortage for farm owners in the South. When their workers tried to leave, they did everything they could to per- suade them or intimidate them to stay. Ida Mae and her family successfully slipped out of Mississippi and made their way to Chicago, where they faced another set of racially based discrimination in housing and workplace opportunities. But it was nothing like what they had had to fear back home. In Mississippi, Ida Mae had not thought of voting. In Chicago, she quickly became a voter and a political worker. Late in her life, a young state senator visited her local orga- nization. She paid him little attention, not knowing that he would someday be President of the United States. Wilkerson shares the stories of two other migrants. George Starling grew up working in the Florida orange The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. groves. When his plans for continuing his college educa- tion were disrupted, he went back to picking fruit. When he stirred up trouble by demanding more pay, he became a tar- get of the local sheriff, an unapologetic. Fearing a lynching, he hid and snuck away to New York City. George became a railroad porter and took care of passengers who, like him, were fleeing the South. Professional people, like Dr. Robert Foster, a surgeon, left because the doors to the operating rooms in Southern hospitals were not open for use by black doctors. In Los Angeles, Foster found another set of closed professional doors. Over time he knocked down most of them. When he saved the injured hand of musician Ray Charles, he became famous and wealthy. Ida Mae, George, Robert and six million others left the South. But when they left, they took the South with them. They brought their food, their music, their religion and their ways of speaking to the North. And the North would never be the same. D.G. MARTIN, Columnist COMMENTS? editor@upandcomin- gweekly.com Are Natural Gas’s Eco-benefits Overstated? Dear EarthTalk: I heard someone say that the environ- mental benefits of natural gas for electricity generation were overstated and that it is not as green-friendly as the industry would have us believe. What is your take on this? — D. Montcalm, Brewster, NYA From the Editors of Environmental Magazine In our increasingly carbon-constrained world, natural gas (also known as methane) does keep coming up as a po- tentially cleaner fuel source for electricity generation than coal, currently the nation’s primary source of electrical power. Natural gas advocates argue that it generates 50 percent fewer greenhouse gases than coal when burned. And since natural gas is more widely available than ever, thanks to newer, more efficient — though in some cases environmentally damag- ing — extraction techniques, some think it should be playing a larger role in a transition away from coal, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels. Today over 50 percent of electricity generated in the U.S. comes from coal; natural gas accounts for less than 20 percent. But scientists aren’t so sure natural gas should play any part in solving the climate crisis. A 2007 lifecycle analysis of natural gas pro- duction, distribution and consumption found that when one factors in the total emissions associated with not only the end use of natural gas but also its extraction and distribution — much of it can leak when it is pulled out of the ground and then piped to power plants and other customers — it doesn’t seem so much cleaner than coal after all. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says that loose pipe fit- tings and intentional venting for safety purposes on natural gas lines cause an- nual greenhouse gas emissions rivaling that produced by 35 million cars each year. The World Bank estimates that emissions from natural gas extraction op- erations alone account for over a fifth of the atmosphere’s total load of climate- changing methane. WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM “When scientists evaluate the greenhouse gas emissions of energy sources over their full lifecycle and incorporate the methane emitted during production, the advantage of natural gas holds true only when it is burned in more modern and ef- ficient plants,” reports Abrahm Lustgarten on the investigative news website, ProPublica. “But roughly half of the 1,600 gas- fired power plants in the United States operate at the lowest end of the efficiency spectrum.” He adds that, while the median U.S. gas-fired power plant emits 40 percent fewer greenhouse gases than a typical coal plant, some 800 inefficient plants offer only a 25 percent improvement. The fact that methane is an extremely potent greenhouse gas — the EPA says methane is 20 times more effective trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon diox- ide (CO2) — makes it even less appealing as a replacement for coal. “The problem is you build a gas plant for 40 years,” James Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy, one of the largest power com- panies in the U.S., told ProPublica. “That’s a long bridge. What if, with revelations around methane emissions, it turns out to be only a 10 or 20 percent reduction of carbon from coal? If that’s true, gas is not the panacea.” Rogers himself is an advocate for limiting greenhouse gas emissions. But with the Obama administration still keen on mining domestic natural gas reserves versus upping our reliance on foreign oil, natural gas will likely continue to play a role in the energy mix for some time yet. CONTACTS: ProPublica, www.propublica.org; Duke Energy, www.duke- energy.com. EarthTalk® is written and edited by Roddy Scheer and Doug Moss and is a registered trademark of E - The Environmental Magazine (www.emagazine. com). Send questions to: earthtalk@emagazine.com. Subscribe: www.emagazine. com/subscribe; Free Trial Issue: www.emagazine.com/trial. MARCH 9-15, 2011 UCW 17