Cheesy Grits: Why Did Valeria Leave Savannah?

Above is a graphic depiction of where we've been so far in our exploration of Jane and Jake's cheesy grits heritage. That's Jane's mother (Jake's beloved Nana) highlighted in blue, with her father, the track coach at Brooklyn's Midwood High School, above her and her paternal grandparents, George and Valeria next. Robert Howard and Rebecca Thorne are the names of Valeria's parents that we didn't know until we saw her death certificate. (Although her name doesn't appear on this chart, we have learned Jane's maternal grandmother's name—Audrey—but nothing more so far.)



But before I go further into Jake and Jane's Charleston roots, I want to spend some time exploring Great-grandmother Valeria Howard Ralston Wilcoxson's decision to move from Savannah to New York City. If you remember, the 1900 U.S. census showed her living with her husband, George Ralston, and their two children, George and Mirtle/Myrtle, in Savannah on Herndon Lane. But the 1910 census showed only George in Savannah, with no Valeria and no children. It wasn't until much later that I discovered Valeria and the two children living on Manhattan's W. 59th Street in 1910.

And indeed, one of the nuggets of genealogical gold on Valeria's death certificate is found on Line 1(e) "Length of residence or stay in City of New York immediately prior to death". For Valeria, this item reads "40 years." Given that she passed away in 1947, it means that she moved to New York City around 1907. While she may have returned South for a visit, she resided in New York City until she died in 1947.

Moving from Savannah to New York City was of course life-altering, if only because if they hadn't done so, then Jane's grandfather wouldn't have met and married the woman who would be Jane's grandmother, and the two of them wouldn't have produced her mother, and so on.

So why did Valeria take her children and head north? Since we haven't found any accounts of her story, we can only speculate. I do have the advantage of knowing more of Valeria's history than I've yet covered here, but you'll just have to grant me that for the moment.

The suggestion is very strong that Valeria knew which side of the bread the butter was on, especially when it involved people of color. Around the time she was born in Charleston, the small glimmer of light for African-Americans that was Reconstruction was being extinguished. The Civil War may have ended slavery, but it didn't end racism. The white power structures in the South set about reconsolidating their power, with the deliberate and explicit aim of re-establishing the caste system in which people of color were at best second-class citizens, even if they were no longer slaves.

While the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution had prohibited states from denying African-Americans the right to vote based on their race, Southern states found ways to limit African-American voting via such dodges as poll taxes, literacy tests, and even white-only primary elections.

And in 1905, Atlanta newspaper publisher Hoke Smith ran for governor of Georgia with the promise that, if elected, he would amend the Georgia State Constitution to remove the right to vote for African-Americans in Georgia.

The election was held in August, 1906; Smith won.

A month after Smith took office, some Atlanta newspapers printed wild rumors about white women being assaulted by black men in Atlanta. Some 10,000 white men gathered in the streets of Atlanta and began "search and destroy" missions on random black folks, both men and women.

Walter White, the first executive secretary of the NAACP, was a twelve-year-old boy, living with his family in Atlanta at the time. Here is how he remembered the Atlanta Race Riot of 1906:

"Late in the afternoon friends of my father's came to warn of more trouble that night. They told us that plans had been perfected for a mob to form on Peachtree Street just after nightfall to march down Houston Street to what the white people called 'Darktown,' three blocks or so below our house, to 'clean out the niggers.' There had never been a firearm in our house before that day. Father was reluctant even in those circumstances to violate the law, but he at last gave in at Mother's insistence. 

"We turned out the lights early, as did all our neighbors. No one removed his clothes or thought of sleep. Apprehension was tangible. We could almost touch its cold and clammy surface. Toward midnight the unnatural quiet was broken by a roar that grew steadily in volume. Even today I grow tense in remembering it. 

"Father told Mother to take my sisters, the youngest of them only six, to the rear of the house, which offered more protection from stones and bullets. My brother George was away, so Father and I, the only males in the house, took our places at the front windows of the parlor. The windows opened on a porch along the front side of the house, which in turn gave onto a narrow lawn that sloped down to the street and a picket fence. There was a crash as Negroes smashed the street lamp at the corner of Houston and Piedmont Avenue down the street. In a very few minutes the vanguard of the mob, some of them bearing torches, appeared. A voice which we recognized as that of the son of the grocer with whom we had traded for many years yelled, 'That's where that nigger mail carrier lives! Let's burn it down! It's too nice for a nigger to live in!' In the eerie light Father turned his drawn face toward me. In a voice as quiet as though he were asking me to pass him the sugar at the breakfast table, he said, 'Son, don't shoot until the first man puts his foot on the lawn and then—don't you miss!'"

Ulimately, somewhere between 25 and 40 black folks and two whites died before the violence receded.

The riot was covered nationally, including the rest of Georgia. The Savannah Tribune ran the headlines "Race Riot in Atlanta" and "Negroes Use Guns." Valeria was literate and came from a literate family—and even if she hadn't been, it seems inconceivable that Savannah's African-American community would not have been acutely aware of the goings-on in Atlanta.

So in 1907, Valeria was a 29 year-old mother with a 14 year-old son and an 8 year-old daughter. I suspect that she saw the handwriting on the wall for not only her own future but that of her children—especially that of her son, Jane's grandfather, who was now a young man and therefore much more likely to become a target. In a move that presaged the epic migrations that Isabel Wilkerson has documented so wonderfully in The Warmth of Other Suns, Valeria packed up her two children and moved north to a new and hopefully better life in New York City. (As we would later discover, she didn't move completely into the unknown: she had Charleston relatives who had already moved there.)

Her move northward was prescient: in 1908, African-Americans in Georgia indeed lost the right to vote.

And what became of her husband, George Ralston, who stayed behind?

Sources:

Walter White's lines about his experiences during the Atlanta Race Riot of 1906 are from his autobiography, A Man Called White: The Autobiography of Walter White (University of GA Press, current edition 1995). The lines reproduced above are widely available on the web, e.g., here. White's light skin and blond hair later enabled him to clandestinely attend KKK meetings and planning sessions. His reports on these meetings became a major weapons in the fight against lynchings.

Savannah, Georgia Savannah Tribune. As cited in Blair Kelley's Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African-American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson. (UNC Press: 2010) notes 58-59, p. 229.

Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Greatest Migration (Random House: 2010). Wilkerson's lyrical narrative of pain and hope brings us the full range of humanity and inhumanity that lies at the core of this part of our national story. While she only picks up the story of African-American northward and westward migration in 1917, the dynamics of oppression were the same as those faced by Valeria and her family in 1907. Wilkerson traces the three main migration paths African-Americans took in search of better lives for themselves and their children: South to Northeast, South to Midwest, and South to Far West. This is indispensable reading for understanding modern African-American history.