CHAPTER 2

Nowhere Else to Go

Jessie James’s life in Sanford, Florida, contained a contradiction that she never understood.

Weekdays were for school. Her parents were educated and active in the local Black community, including the NAACP. Jessie and her five younger siblings were encouraged to read the newspaper and Bible and to become leaders wherever they went. Education was a highly prized commodity. After school was out, though, they dropped their books and headed for the fields to pick beans or cut celery, to plant and to harvest, year after year through the relentless summer heat.

“There were many questions raised in my mind as a child, and as I worked after school and when school was out during the summer,” she said. “I asked myself why I would complete high school when there were no jobs available and I would have to continue to work on the farm.” She graduated high school in 1952 and already was engaged to be married. One day she and her fiancé were discussing their future plans. “He said to me, as soon as we were married I was going to go into the celery field,” James said. “I did not want to spend the rest of my life on the farm. . . . So the marriage was out.”1

Instead, James packed her bags and embarked on what was already a well-traveled route from Sanford to Rochester. Like thousands of Floridians, Mississippians, and South Carolinians before and after her, she weighed the apparent certainty of a lifetime of farm labor in the South against the prospect, however dim, of a better life in the unknown North, and chose the latter. James arrived in the summer of 1952 and within two days found a job as a maid at Rochester General Hospital. Just as quickly, she was confronted with a new, nebulous type of racial discrimination, different from the stark Jim Crow laws of the South but no less pernicious. She sought to buy a house on the west side of the city, only to learn that she had inadvertently strayed over Genesee Street, a bright red line that Black people could not cross. She asked for information on a program to become a nurse but found it was not available to her. Instead she took second and third jobs cleaning, cooking, mending clothes, operating a telephone switchboard, and working in a canning plant. On weekends she picked potatoes. “Many of us coming off the migrant farms had little knowledge, little skill and little interest in what was going on,” she said. “We were constantly trying to make it from day to day with what little pennies we had.” James eventually earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees and spent seventeen years working as an administrator at Rochester Institute of Technology, helping coordinate the college’s programming with community needs. She was involved in school integration efforts and small business assistance for minorities.2

James’s path to New York and her early struggles here, as well as the focus of her professional life, reflect a momentous cultural and demographic shift in Rochester in the decades after the end of World War II and its far-reaching impact on the arrangement of work, housing, and educational opportunities in the area. As late as 1940, Rochester’s 2,700 Black residents made up just 1 percent of the total city population. Although the majority of Black families lived in the Third Ward, others were scattered across the rest of the city without too much outward friction with white neighbors.3 Over the next half century, the city’s Black population grew by more than 2,000 percent while the white population fell by more than half. This constituted a clear threat to the established social order in both the white and Black communities. The conflict was first apparent in the issue of housing; only later did it manifest most strikingly in the city’s educational system. Racial segregation in twenty-first century schools cannot be understood without reference to the Great Migration and in particular the systemic discrimination Black people faced in their search for housing.

In the early twentieth century, most of Rochester’s Black community descended either from residents who had been present since the city’s founding or those who had been had been drawn by the presence of Frederick Douglass and the city’s broader reputation as what he called the “most liberal of northern cities.”4 A third source was a stream of Black migrants who had come from Culpepper, Virginia, via Mumford, southwest of Rochester, after the end of the Civil War. This “Culpepper Connection” was forged by Benjamin Franklin Harmon, a Mumford-area native and captain in the 140th New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment. Harmon was stationed at Culpepper Courthouse at the close of the war and saw an opportunity in the mass of those recently emancipated from slavery. “He knew the need of farm hands at home and offered to send up . . . a car load of slaves,” his niece later recalled. “They were the first colored people to come to this community and formed the [basis] of the colored population now here. It was a [hard] job to train them to use horses . . . but with patience they finally became trusted servants.”5 About twenty-five Black Culpepper families eventually settled in the Mumford area and their presence in turn helped facilitate a flow of migrant farm workers for the next several decades. As in Rochester, Black residents both permanent and migrant were largely hemmed in by the prejudice of their white neighbors—Harmon himself told his mother he was worried “that you should be left alone with those darkies,” and Black people were carefully segregated into camps or certain sections of town—but it was nonetheless a more congenial environment than the one they’d left, with higher wages for farm work and the ability to attend school and buy land.6

FIGURE 2.1. City of Rochester population by race and ethnicity, 1830 to 2010.

Source: US Census data, 1830 to 2010.

Even with the infusion from Culpepper, the early twentieth-century Black population in Rochester was small compared to those of other northern cities. As late as 1950, Black residents in Rochester made up just 2 percent of the overall population; the proportion in Buffalo, New York City, and Chicago by then had risen to 6, 9, and 14 percent, respectively. There were 36,600 Black residents in Buffalo then compared to 7,600 in Rochester. This slow start to growth in the Black community led to the impression among some Rochesterians that the city was somehow immune to the racial strife happening elsewhere. As Evelyn Brandon, born in 1917, put it, “In the early days it was kind of a paternalistic town. White people in town thought they were good to their negroes, and they were good to us as long as we stayed in place and didn’t make waves.”7 Indeed, a boom in immigration from Italy and central and eastern Europe was greater cause for alarm from the perspective of the old Rochester gentry. By 1890 first- and second-generation immigrants made up more than two-thirds of the growing city population, and that was before Italian immigration began in earnest after the turn of the century. These immigrants faced a great deal of prejudice and difficulty in finding work and housing. Within a few generations, however, those Italians, Poles, and Germans had been more or less folded into the evolving category of “white.” This happened just as immigration from the South began to spike after World War II.8

Thus an uneven and occasionally uneasy détente developed in early twentieth-century Rochester regarding the proper geographical, social, and economic place for Black residents. Because the conceptual bounds of the Black community were well understood, and as long as its size posed no great threat to the white power structure, there was relatively little outward racial tension in Rochester, and Black leaders seldom saw fit to agitate publicly (though there were occasions when they did so). The city’s genteel brand of racism kept most Black people in tight physical quarters and menial jobs but nonetheless fostered the slow growth of a stable Black community. This community was compact and constrained but, by the same token, proud and nearly self-sufficient. Nearly every member of the Third Ward enclave who ever went on to document his or her experience could recite the names of all the Black doctors, dentists, teachers, morticians, and lawyers in the city. Chief among them was Charles Lunsford, Rochester’s first Black doctor and an active member of the local NAACP chapter. Barbering, too, was a common and respected profession for men. “We knew every colored family in town and they knew us,” Evelyn Brandon recalled. “There was a sense of strength and support. It was an extended family, as it were. . . . You didn’t have to worry about if you got stuck downtown and you didn’t have a nickel for the streetcar. Someone would always take care of you.”9

FIGURE 2.2. Percentage of Black residents in selected US cities, 1910 to 2010.

Source: US Census data, 1910 to 2010.

Of course, this was not the same as equality. “To all appearances, Rochester is the perfect Northern city,” R. Nathaniel Dett, a local Black leader, wrote in 1936. “The discrimination as practiced here is of a subtle kind, to which I sometimes feel that certain of our so-called Negro leaders are party.” The situation was particularly striking for those arriving in Rochester from elsewhere. A visiting Black politician observed in 1934 that Rochesterians, Black and white, “live in a whirlpool of prejudice. . . . I must add that the Rochester Negro is far behind other cities in social, economic and political progress.” A migrant who arrived in Rochester after World War II later told a state investigator: “When we first came here we were under the impression that most whites in Rochester had never seen Negroes who could read and write, and that one who could was automatically in a favored position. Evidently the long-term Negro residents have never asserted themselves, so that a pattern has grown up in which they are—without realizing it—deprived of their normal rights and privileges.”10

To fully explore why Rochester lagged in Black racial consciousness and as a destination for southern Black migrants would require a much fuller treatment than belongs here. In general, though, migration was spurred chiefly by the opportunity for a better quality of life—in regard to housing and education, yes, but most importantly in regard to jobs. In Rochester, the distribution of good, secure jobs with generous benefits was closely concentrated in the hands of a select few industrialists, an arrangement that did not prevail to the same extent in larger cities. And up until the Civil Rights era, the Eastman Kodak Company, Xerox, Bausch and Lomb, and other major employers almost never hired Black people.

The 1939 State Commission on the Colored Urban Population showed that Black employment at major factories in upstate New York, particularly Rochester, was “practically non-existent”:

In Rochester, for example, our survey showed that of 35,120 employees in private firms, only 70 were Negroes. The largest firm, [Eastman Kodak], employing 16,351 persons, reported one Negro porter and 19 construction workers engaged by a subsidiary corporation. Another firm manufacturing optical goods reported 3,000 employees—no Negroes; two clothing manufacturers reported 4,000 employees and not one Negro because they “are supplied with workers by the union upon requisition.” . . . Your Commission was at a loss to understand how Negroes in these and other communities in the up-State region managed to make a living and avoid starvation.11

None of those few business elites were more important than George Eastman of Eastman Kodak. The self-made inventor was an admirer of Booker T. Washington and gave generously to Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, believing strongly in “proper education of the Hampton Tuskegee type, which is directed almost wholly toward making [Black people] useful citizens through education on industrial lines.” In at least one case he protested that racial discrimination “would not be tolerated for an instant” in his realm of control.12 And yet despite the magnificent legacy of philanthropy that Eastman and his namesake company left in Rochester and abroad, his record on racial equity in hiring was woeful. In the decades before the Black Power movement arrived in dramatic fashion at the company’s iconic State Street headquarters, Black residents knew better than to bother seeking anything but the most menial employment at Kodak. One Black job seeker described the common reception at the hiring office: “We don’t have any colored jobs. [We] got some jobs, but nothing for you.” Eastman, like many white industrialists of his age, was an enthusiastic supporter and major financial contributor to the racist eugenics movement. He confided to friends that he wished for “some humane way of eliminating the hopelessly insane and fourth-offender criminals.” His one significant Black employee was his longtime valet, Solomon Young, a North Carolinian who was hired at age twenty-five after Eastman advertised at one of the Black schools he supported that he needed “a good boy to go north and work.” Young would later tell his niece, Alice Young: “George Eastman was a lot of good things, but it was never his intent that African-Americans would be working in a factory in Rochester.”13

Two incidents from 1924 neatly encapsulate the point, as well as the way local Black leaders found themselves powerless to object to discrimination. In the first, a Black person attempting to purchase a ticket for a show at the Eastman Theater was told he could only sit in the balcony. When the issue was brought to the local NAACP, the leaders there decided to let it slide. The local leader Franklin Bock wrote, summarizing a joint decision: “If the matter is not [dropped], the monied interests, of which Mr. Eastman is the leader, may make it tremendously hard for all the colored people in the city whether they are involved in this controversy or not.”14

At about the same time, Bock and the local NAACP received a letter from a Black Massachusetts dentist named Irving Gray, who explained that he had signed a contract to become an internist at Eastman’s Rochester Dental Dispensary but was strongly encouraged to look elsewhere once the clinic director, Harvey Burkhart, learned his race. “[Burkhart] proceeded to try to discourage me by relating a sad story of their past experiences with a colored man who was . . . mistreated by his fellow internists. They also say that colored people do not come there in sufficient quantities to keep a colored doctor busy.” Charles Lunsford and Van Levy, the only Black dentist in the city at that time, immediately recognized the “sad story” as a lie—they surely would have heard about another Black physician in town. Nonetheless, they advised Gray to take Burkhart’s advice and try his luck elsewhere. Burkhart, they noted, served on the New York Board of Dental Examiners, and so “it would not be wise for us to do anything that would make it difficult for colored men to pass the State Board Examination.”15

Bock, a white man, boldly summarized both situations in a letter to national NAACP Secretary Walter White: “It is very easy to explain. Mr. Eastman controls the Dental Dispensary as he does the Eastman Theater.” The theater manager and Burkhart, he wrote, “have been informed by some very prejudiced person that if they do not curb the colored people in this way they will overrun the town. . . . So far it is very difficult to get a direct statement from Mr. Eastman about his own attitude toward the matter.” Bock sought, but never obtained, an audience with George Eastman himself, and both matters were dropped. He wrote to White: “The colored people are not many here in Rochester and our financial interests bow so completely to Mr. Eastman’s judgment that it would be disastrous to get his severe enmity.”16

Multiple similar situations occurred over the next several years. In 1927, a Black medical school candidate from South Carolina was “told flatly by Dean [George] Whipple that Negroes and Japanese would not be admitted.” In 1930, a Black female student was ejected from the dormitories at the Eastman School of Music once the dean realized her race. “As you must certainly know, this University, as well as many institutions in this city, is dominated by George Eastman,” Lunsford and other local NAACP members wrote pointedly to the national branch. Walter White tried to get an audience with Eastman but was told by George Burks, then the acting NAACP branch secretary: “I have been very much in doubt as to whether there could be any one here in our City who could possibly be in touch with Mr. Eastman.” White then wrote to Eastman directly and received a curt reply: “I am sorry that I am unable to meet your wishes in regard to an interview because the work of your organization is outside the scope of my activities.”17

This racist legacy persisted at Kodak after Eastman’s death. The company inserted racially restrictive covenants into property deeds through its employee realty corporation and would face a public reckoning after Rochester’s racial uprising in 1964. The University of Rochester (UR), which Eastman had helped grow into a world-class institution, was equally culpable. Over its early history it consistently discouraged Black students from applying for admission.

The acclaimed singer and Rochester native William Warfield was an exception. He enrolled in the University of Rochester in 1936 and professed to having experienced racial harmony. He acknowledged, though, that he “may have missed some unpleasantness, too, through sheer obliviousness . . . I didn’t know until years later that I had been recommended for the music fraternity, Phi Mu Alpha Symphonia, and turned down because I was black. ‘Don’t you remember that time we all resigned from Phi Mu Alpha?’ a former classmate later asked me. ‘There was a clique that didn’t want to pledge a Negro, and a bunch of us resigned in protest.’ Now that he mentioned it, I did remember that there had been a batch of resignations; at the time I didn’t focus on it.”18

In a prominent 1937 case, the local NAACP protested against the university’s medical school, saying that it “consistently discourage[d] the admission of Negro students” either as doctors or as nurses, and that it did not allow those who were admitted to serve as interns or residents at Strong Memorial Hospital. This was no idle conjecture. The dean, George Whipple, had a form letter he sent to Black applicants informing them that they would not be allowed to work at Strong. “Under the circumstances, therefore, we feel it would be much wiser for you to apply to several of the schools who can, and do, give adequate clinical training to Negro students,” the letter read. The protesters, led by Lunsford, attempted to persuade the city council not to renew a contract for UR to run the municipal hospital unless it changed the policy. The city councilors instead heeded the advice of Whipple, who recommended that they not “get mixed up with politics.”19

The issue resurfaced two years later during a hearing before a state commission on racial discrimination. Whipple, a close personal friend of George Eastman’s who for many years dined once a week at his mansion, told the commission that Black doctors and nurses working at the hospital “would cause wholesale objection on the part of white patients” and would lead all the white students to quit. The commission responded in its report:

When informed of the fact that a Negro woman had been admitted to the Nurses’ Training School of the Buffalo Municipal Hospital, not very far from Rochester, and that not one student nurse had resigned or even voiced an objection, these officials could do no more than shrug their shoulders. And, when further confronted with the testimony that in the city of Rochester itself there were three Negro physicians whose practices were 60 per cent, 75 per cent and 95 per cent white—involving all types of cases including obstetrics—these officials were at a loss for a reasonable explanation of their opinions. Obviously these were simply conjectures, and the entire situation is an example of flaunted discrimination against Negroes.20

The report recommended stripping the university of its tax-exempt status if it didn’t change the policy, and the threat had its desired effect. Four years later, Lunsford and the NAACP hailed UR for having admitted one Black student each in the medical and nursing schools, thereby “recognizing its interracial responsibilities.” Most in the Black community, though, saw that the problem persisted. “When I first arrived in Rochester [around 1949], I wouldn’t even think of going to the University of Rochester,” James Christian, a Black man, said. “Unless I was a person who was just extraordinary and outstanding, they wouldn’t even consider me.” In 1958 the UR’s NAACP campus chapter was obligated to protest a whites-only clause in the charter of the Sigma Chi fraternity. The UR president, Cornelius de Kiewiet, said he was “distressed” by the publicity resulting from the protest and advised the student chapter to “confine [themselves] to quiet intra-campus activities.”21

Episodes like the fight over admission to the medical school were the exception to nearly a century of mostly listless race relations. The city’s few thousand Black residents were reasonably well situated in the growing but stable Black neighborhoods in the Third and Seventh Wards. If their prospects were dimmer for being Black, the situation was at least tolerable. By necessity they were accustomed to staying clear of the white power structure and knew to pick their fights judiciously. For several generations, staying in place and not making waves was a viable strategy.

The seeds of change were planted in 1929, when brothers Hal and George Fish traveled from their farm in Wayne County, east of Rochester, to Sanford, Florida, looking for labor to expand their celery crop. They met a man named John Gibson and asked whether he could pull together a local crew to help them harvest in New York in the summer.22

Sure, he told them.

Across the United States, farmers like the Fishes were converging on the same concept in response to common economic factors. As historian Dorothy Nelkin wrote:

With industrialization, the local labor supply in rural areas, once able to handle the harvests, was drained into urban industries. At the same time, southern workers became available as a result of economic and technological changes during the Depression—in particular, the decline of the share-crop system and the mechanization of cotton picking. The migrant labor system as it gradually evolved was also affected by increased development of technology in agriculture, which limited labor needs to brief but highly intensive manpower-demand periods.23

Migrant farm workers traveled by the thousands along established South-North circuits, hopscotching from farm to farm as crops came ready for harvest. They came to the Rochester area as part of the Atlantic Coast Stream, harvesting beans in Florida in February, strawberries in Virginia and North Carolina in June, tomatoes in Maryland in August, and potatoes and apples in New York in September.24 The exact itinerary depended on the crew leader, who served northern farmers and southern laborers as a contractor, chaperone, and go-between of uncertain scruples. Many weary itinerants eventually “settled out,” leaving Florida for good and starting a new life in a northern town or city they’d come to know.

These agricultural workers were one strand of what became known as the Great Migration, the most monumental domestic demographic shift in US history. Tens of millions of Black men, women, and children left their mostly rural southern homes for the economic and social promise of the increasingly urban North. The movement was at heart a search for work and progressed in distinct pulses when jobs in northern industries were plentiful, particularly during the world wars. Migratory connections in specific northern cities were established via word of mouth from friends and family who had already made the move, with the result that some southern Black communities were essentially reconstituted in new cities thousands of miles away. “A time was in the 1950s, if you met a Black person downtown, the chances were two to one that they’d be from one of a few communities in Florida,” longtime Rochesterian Walter Cooper recalled.25

Seasonal migrant workers had been coming to the agricultural region surrounding Rochester ever since emancipation and transportation technology made it feasible, and particularly once the Culpepper natives had established a foothold. As early as 1904 the Democrat and Chronicle made note of the departure of dozens of farmhands returning to Virginia at the end of the growing season. A brief surge of migration to Rochester itself occurred during World War I. “The problem was solved automatically, so to speak,” the Rochester Post Express wrote, when those jobs dried up after the armistice.26 It took many decades before significant numbers of those migrants began to settle down in upstate New York and then to transition from agricultural work to industrial or service jobs in the city of Rochester.

Wayne County’s evolution into the pre-eminent fruit-producing region in the Northeast began thirteen thousand years ago with the final retreat of ice-age glaciers and the slow draining of Glacial Lake Iroquois. A thick layer of silt was deposited on the land between the southern boundary of that glacial lake, now roughly marked by New York State Route 104, and the current southern shore of Lake Ontario. The Cayuga Indians were the first to plant apple and cherry orchards; by the early 1800s they had been largely supplanted by European settlers who in time expanded from small family operations to spacious plantations with thousands of trees. Farther south, bottomlands between the glacial drumlins along the Clyde River were drained beginning in the 1880s, leaving rich humus well suited for growing vegetables. By 1970 over thirty thousand acres were devoted to fruit, mostly apples, and another thirteen thousand to vegetables, more than anywhere else in New York.27 The entire operation was “a never-failing source of wonderment,” journalist Arch Merrill said: “To the north . . . there are thousands of bushels of cherries, apples, peaches, pears, apricots, plums and other fruits to be picked. To the south, there are the mammoth crops of an amazing variety of vegetables to be taken from the rich, black muck land.”28

The job of harvesting this huge amount of produce quickly surpassed the capacity of the local workforce. German prisoners of war were put to work picking apples during World War II.29 A more reliable vein of workers, though, was found in Black migrants from the South. One such laborer, Alex Brown, arrived in Wayne County in 1945, finished with school in Florida at age sixteen and looking for something new in life. He came north with his father and the rest of a migrant worker crew, driving two days in the back of a truck, huddled beneath a canvas tarp to keep off the rain. When they arrived they were housed in a renovated chicken coop and paid from ten to twenty cents per bushel of apples, picking from dawn until the sun went down. “It was terrible to raise a family when you’s in the migrant stream,” he said. “Sometimes the conditions you be living in would be unsanitary. . . . We didn’t have any social activities at all unless we know some people and we visit them at their camp, and some Sundays we go to a church occasion.”30

Brown settled in Wayne County after 1948 and became an organizer for the AFL-CIO on behalf of migrant workers. He carried a gun for his protection and documented evidence of Ku Klux Klan activities while teaching apple- and cherry-pickers their rights under the law. It took decades for this persistent and courageous work to yield practical results. In the meantime, the annual cycle for the typical southern migrant worker remained the same. The season started in April or May with a local Black entrepreneur, the crew leader, selling a fresh pack of lies: Fifty or seventy-five cents for every bushel of produce picked, with the fruit already hanging ripe on the vine. A string of reputable farms mapped out on the seasonal itinerary, each with renovated housing and schools for the children. Reliable transportation for the thousand-mile journey from Florida to upstate New York and back. Fiction, all of it, in the majority of cases.

In fact, the contract between the farmer and the crew leader was usually not signed until the broken-down bus of fifty or more migrants arrived, having left whatever minimal bargaining power they started with back home in Florida. Housing was often a converted chicken coop or barn with little protection from the elements and no indoor plumbing. The crew leader was paid for the number of bodies he brought and had no incentive to insist on fair wages or conditions for his workers. They, in turn, had no recourse of any kind—no transportation, no money, no effective protection under local, state, or national law. As Julius Amaker, a farm agent with the US Department of Agriculture, put it: “It’s a sin on every one of our lives to permit human beings to live the way migrants do.”31

Dale Wright, a Black journalist who spent a summer as a migrant laborer, concluded: “The illiterate, unskilled migrant farm worker exists to be cheated, overworked, underpaid, and exploited for work honestly done. . . . The body of minimal laws designed to govern the operations of crew leaders are chronically, purposefully ignored, frequently with the knowledge and approval of farmer-employers and just as frequently with the tacit permissiveness of the authorities charged with their administration and enforcement.”32 Wayne County, with its vast apple orchards and proximity to markets in Rochester and Syracuse, received more migrant workers than any other county in the state. Overall, the farming communities surrounding Rochester took in more than ten thousand migrant workers each summer at hundreds of camps, licensed and unlicensed. These camps regularly lacked flush toilets, either indoor or outdoor; adequate cooking facilities; clean water for handwashing, bathing or drinking; and housing in line with state health and building regulations for size, safety, and construction. “Shacks of squalor,” a newspaper reporter called them, “revolting in their ugliness and inadequacy, [violating] any but the basest concepts of the dignity of man. . . . The tales and records of personal hygiene and health bring chills to the squeamish.”33

Growers consistently balked at demands to improve their facilities, citing both economic necessity and the purported preferences of the workers themselves. “Most growers and officials insist that migrants do not know how to use flush toilets, do not want them, and destroy them when they are provided,” one investigator wrote. “This argument is not supported by the observed facts.” In the fields where workers spent most of their days, there often were not even outdoor privies; instead people were forced to relieve themselves in the open air beside the crops they were picking.34

Ruby McCants Ford was born in Haines City, Florida, in 1956, and first came to Wayne County to pick apples in 1965. She recalled her family of nine sleeping in one room on two beds—one for her parents, one for the seven children.

Back in the old days, before they started inspecting camps, the farmers, to me, really didn’t care what you slept on. They went out there and found a mattress some child done pissed on or whatever, drag it on in there. Your mama beat it out and try to sort it out the best she can and throw a sheet on it, and you get in it. . . .

Sometimes we used to find rats’ beds in the mattress in our bed, little pink baby rats. . . . It would be a hole with a nest in it with the cotton all out of it, and they just flipped the mattress over. You can’t throw it away; if you throw it away, you ain’t got none.35

In 1941, journalist Howard Coles had gone with his family to Mumford for a few weeks to escape the bustle of the city and to do some writing. He came upon a number of migrant bean pickers from South Carolina and asked them to show him where they lived:

What a place for human habitation! From the physical appearance of the place, one got the impression that the first good wind storm would blow it down like a deck of cards. Even inside, one found little protection from the elements, for through large cracks in the walls, I could see the men moving around outside. All the window panes were broken out and most of the rooms were without doors. The floors swayed and creaked under our weight; dust, dirt and an accumulation of cobwebs were much in evidence and the whole place reeked with mustiness and the dampness of decay.36

Even the white residents of the village had become alarmed, Coles wrote, because the men “appeared to be not hungry, but weak and ill.” It turned out their crew leader had not paid the grocery bill and the men had been reduced to panhandling. They wouldn’t drink from the pump near their ramshackle house because they believed it to be contaminated, and they didn’t have coal for the stove on which they relied for cooking and heating. This, in return for a promise of thirty cents an hour to pick beans. Perhaps because their squalor had spilled over into the rest of the town, the farm owner in question was reported to the state and arrested for operating a labor camp without the proper permits. In the meantime, a number of the men were hustled into a van and driven back south where they came from without being paid their wages or given a chance to collect their clothes.37

More frequently the official response to abject housing and health conditions, illegal employment practices, and unpaid wages was silence. Workers were prevented from accessing social services because of a lack of transportation and a well-founded distrust of the northern power structure. The people responsible for code enforcement in northern rural communities were often the friends and neighbors of the farmers and contractors themselves and had little desire to scrutinize the situation too closely. As a Rochester-area planning agency wrote: “[The migrant worker’s] abilities are needed but he is not wanted, and the sooner he moves on the better the local community likes it.”38

Predictably, the consequences were worst for children. The educational experience for migrant children in upstate New York farming communities presaged their later experience in the city of Rochester in several ways. During the short time the children were in northern schools, they quickly became accustomed to overt and implicit discrimination from white teachers and administrators, who were a novel change from the strictly segregated professional staff in southern schools. The students’ race was just one strike against them and conceivably could have been overcome; their transience and ostracized position in the community were, in many cases, insuperable.

As important, being on the move for as much as eight months a year meant that the students missed an enormous amount of time in school. As one observer wrote of a woman he interviewed: “Her children have attended school, at various times, in Florida, Virginia, Delaware, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. . . . Her daughter and her sons have gone to elementary schools in those states and stayed in those schools maybe a few weeks, maybe only a few days, then moved on to another school, or to no school ‘for a while,’ even though during the period of time called ‘for a while’ other children all over the country are at school.”39 Such inconsistent education did not encourage students to persevere through graduation, particularly when their parents had little experience with education and no resources to advocate for it. Boys often transitioned into full-time farm labor before they reached adolescence; girls were under pressure to care for younger siblings in the absence of quality childcare or else had children of their own. “If a girl in the muck can get past 13 or 14 without getting pregnant, then she is doing all right,” one young mother said.40

The most significant effect of migratory farm work on children—one that persists to the present generation—was constant exposure to emotional and physical trauma. A more harmful environment could hardly have been engineered. Children of poor, uneducated parents, removed from any sense of community, were shuffled, mostly unsupervised, through a never-ending procession of unsafe living conditions embedded in hostile, culturally foreign communities, without benefit of the educational and social services provisions on which they might otherwise have relied. The psychiatrist Robert Coles found the “essence” of migrant labor to be “the wandering, the disapproval and ostracism, the extreme and unyielding poverty.” A child living under these conditions for months or even years at a time, he wrote, would inevitably form “a self-image . . . of life’s hurts and life’s drawbacks, of life’s calamities—which in this case are inescapable and relentless and unyielding.”41

Early childhood education was almost nonexistent. Childcare facilities and prekindergarten classes were rare, and rarely of high quality, until after the southern migrant labor movement had mostly concluded. A 1944 survey of more than a hundred labor camps found just seventeen nurseries. Parents were occupied working in the fields all day and in any case were in no position to provide the stable environment necessary for normal child development. “Frequently no one patiently answers a migrant child’s questions; he does not have toys, books and scribbling paper,” one observer wrote. “No one in the family gives him basic instruction about sounds, shapes or colors.”42

Basic social services, especially health care, were largely inaccessible. Applying for welfare usually meant traveling into town to fill out the application, and most migrant workers lacked the wherewithal, time, and transportation to do so. Local officials, meanwhile, had no motivation to increase their own social service expenditures on nonlocals who would be moving on to the next job within a few weeks.43 Laborers were paid piece-rate and seldom had access to workers’ compensation, two powerful disincentives to missing work to seek medical care. Illness, injury, and lack of appropriate clothing or other resources, in addition to the barriers discussed above, caused children to miss school.

This intensely negative experience with the mechanisms of governmental and social assistance was not unique to migrant workers, even if it was more concentrated than in other industries. It goes a long way toward explaining a cultural skepticism in the Black community of the medical profession, for instance, that continues with powerful consequences to this day. Ivory Simmons worked on Wayne County farms as a child and recalled watching his mother die delivering a child at home after being denied at a hospital for lack of insurance. “The doctors would not take my mother in the hospital because we didn’t have money, so she stayed home and tried to have a baby and she died of childbirth,” Simmons said. “That day, that time never left me—and therefore that experience made me hate doctors, and made me hate hospitals.”44

Focusing only on migrant workers’ deficits risks neglecting traits of resilience that the same difficult conditions often instilled: self-sufficiency, for example, or work ethic. Still, a growing body of research shows that traumatic experiences in childhood, particularly early childhood, cause greater damage than previously understood. An unstable living situation costs a child more than a few nights’ sleep; physical abuse from an adult leaves more than physical scars. These experiences interfere with the development and functioning of the brain. Without appropriate intervention, children who face such trauma are likely to grow into adults who struggle to control their impulses, concentrate on work, or properly raise children of their own. As Robert Coles warned in 1967: “I fear it is no small thing, a disaster almost beyond repair, when children grow up, literally, adrift on the land, when they learn as a birthright the disorder and early sorrow that goes with virtual peonage, with an unsettled, vagabond life. In other words, I fear I am talking about millions of psychological catastrophes.”45

Even as the use of southern migrant labor peaked in the 1950s and 1960s, it was obvious to observers that the men, women, and especially children in question faced potentially disastrous long-term harm. Eyewitness accounts crowded the front pages of northern newspapers and the programs of sociology and public health conferences. In 1967 US Senators Robert Kennedy and Jacob Javits toured two Wayne County camps and declared the conditions “deplorable.” Housing at one consisted of twelve immobilized buses with no running water. The owner appeared with a shotgun and accused the senators and their coterie of “do-gooders” of trespassing. The poor conditions, he said, were the migrants’ own fault.46

Sustained pressure from religious and civil rights organizations as well as the Black and mainstream newspapers eventually resulted in incremental improvements, including better access to health care and education and closer attention to sanitary code violations and unfair employment practices. At the same time, the advance of farm technology and other market forces led to a decreased need for migrant workers. In any case, much of the prospective labor pool had relocated to Rochester or other cities by the late 1960s and was not likely to return to the road.

That overwhelming generational experience of isolation and uprootedness—now mostly shifted onto people from Mexico and Central America—had a profound impact on the people who would come to constitute the majority of Rochester’s Black population in the last quarter of the twentieth century. With conditions on Wayne County farms as hopeless as they were, southern migrant workers inevitably looked to the small, respectable Black community in Rochester as a step up. That second leg of the Great Migration, from farm to city, accelerated after World War II as industrial and service jobs—still low-paying, but at least better than itinerant stoop labor—abounded. One migrant later recalled his decision to move from Wayne County to the city as a simple one: “Who wants to work on somebody else’s farm for nothing anyway? I knowed the place [Rochester]. The farms was close by. . . . I thought I could make a good start here.”47

More than seventy years after Black migration to Rochester first gained steam, it is easy to overlook the multilayered dissonance that the arrival en masse of Black southern migrants created in the city. To northern Black people, the new arrivals from the rural South seemed backward and unsophisticated, a threat to their already tenuous social status in a majority-white city. A social worker captured in a few poignant words the horror of established Black families: “They are beginning to be classified again as Negroes.”48

Conversely, the migrants found their new northern neighbors distant and aloof, lacking in hospitality at precisely the moment the migrants badly needed experienced social guides. A white reporter summarized, shortly after World War I: “The Southern negro still found music in the mouth organ and the banjo and pleasure in clog dances. The Northern negro had a piano in his home and perhaps his son or daughter played the violin, and he and his family were well dressed—high toned and ‘stuck up’ from the standpoint of his Southern compatriot.”49

A 1951 master’s thesis by the University of Rochester sociology student Laura Root gives a fascinating illustration of the dynamic as it played out geographically, with the older, more stable Black population in the Third Ward and many of the newly arriving migrants in the Seventh Ward, including in the Baden-Ormond neighborhood. In dozens of interviews, residents from each territory portrayed the other with disdain and downright hostility. “(These) newcomers are a bunch of rough loose living n——s whose actions reflect upon our status in Rochester,” one Third Ward, or west-side, resident said. Another added: “Those loose livers coming in here will make it troublesome for us who (have) lived here a long time. We have decent names and people respect us.”50

The Seventh Ward “bean pickers,” meanwhile, derided the self-proclaimed Black gentry as “biggities” obsessed with social status and white mores. They noted that the same white and Black moralists who clucked their tongues at the rampant organized vice in Baden-Ormond could often be seen partaking in it on Saturday nights. Regarding the charge that they underappreciated the need for education, they noted that many of those maligned Baden-Ormond sex workers had arrived in Rochester with college degrees but been unable to find suitable employment. “They’re so damn smart with their silly clubs,” one Baden-Ormond resident said of the Third Ward. “They’re just trying to act like white folks and they’re n——s same as me. Everything the white man does, they try to do.”51

White residents, meanwhile, observed both factions with growing alarm and a rapidly changing perspective on what was delicately referred to as “the negro question.” Throughout Root’s interviews, the white gaze was never far from the surface. “This is the crux of the conflict,” she wrote. “West Siders desire to maintain their superior reputation in the eyes of the White population of the city, and the [Seventh Ward] folk are indifferent to what the Whites think, since they are not striving to achieve ‘respectability.’”52

Bobby Johnson, a Rochester poet and journalist, was born in the city in 1929 and thus watched the southern migration with the perspective of the existing social hierarchy. Still, he recalled: “There were always some people who said, ‘There’s no racism here, everything’s fine; the only problem is these ignorant bean pickers coming from the South. They’re the ones that make everything bad, but otherwise it’s fine.’ That was not true at all. Almost any Black person could take up the Sunday newspaper, look at the want ads for apartments for rent—a great, big, thick paper—and you try to find an apartment, and when you [call], they weren’t available.”53

In just a few decades the carefully tended equilibrium of pre–World War II Rochester was blown to pieces. One scholar wrote: “The Negro migrant was strange; soon he became the object of ridicule. Ultimately he was feared.”54 This fear manifested principally in the matter of housing.

If the Great Migration was the signal demographic event of the twentieth century for northern US cities like Rochester, the dissolution of a comparatively equitable housing pattern was its most significant consequence. It opened the way for targeted disinvestment both public and private, calcified prejudice on a personal level, and facilitated later, damaging criminal justice measures. Housing segregation was established and enforced by a series of mechanisms ranging from defiant neighbors and deceitful landlords to official policies of the federal government. Local and personal opposition to Black homeowners in white neighborhoods was codified by real estate boards and, crucially, given the strength of law by the Federal Housing Administration. By the time these racist practices were formally disavowed in the 1968 Fair Housing Act, several generations of discriminatory groundwork had already been laid. And at a time when nearly every child in the United States walked to school, segregated housing inevitably meant segregated education.

Rochester’s Third Ward has been an identifiable Black neighborhood since before the city’s founding, yet housing segregation did not achieve its current severity until well into the twentieth century. As late as 1950, no census tract had more than 50 percent Black residents.55 This was because of common technological and socioeconomic factors hindering strict segregation in cities across the United States. As the historians Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton wrote:

In most cities, to be sure, certain neighborhoods could be identified as places where blacks lived; but before 1900 these areas were not predominantly black, and most blacks didn’t live in them. . . . Land use was not highly specialized, real estate prices were low, and socially distinctive residential areas had not yet emerged. In the absence of structural steel, electricity and efficient mechanical systems, building densities were low and urban populations were distributed uniformly. Such an urban spatial structure is not conducive to high levels of segregation by class, race or ethnicity, and the small African American population that inhabited northern cities before 1900 occupied a niche in the urban geography little different from that of other groups.56

Policies of segregation did not bear full fruit in Rochester until Black migrants began arriving en masse after 1950, but the segregative structure was in place well before. Journalist Howard Coles, one of the most prominent figures in local Black history in the twentieth century, sounded the earliest alarm. Coles was born in 1903 in Belcoda, a hamlet near Mumford, and raised among the Culpepper contingent there. His grandfather, Rev. Clayton Coles, had been born in slavery in Tennessee and served as body servant to the famous Confederate general Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson during the Civil War before arriving in Mumford in 1888 and starting a church for its Black residents. After high school Howard Coles left home and worked as a messenger and delivery man for the Herald Tribune in New York as well as a waiter at a Long Island seafood restaurant, studying journalism and sales at the YMCA in his free time. On a trip to Chicago he visited the newsroom of its monumental Black newspaper, the Defender, an event that helped form in his mind the idea of founding his own newspaper for Rochester’s Black community. He returned to Rochester in 1934 and published the first edition of the Voice, later renamed the Frederick Douglass Voice. The newspaper’s name signaled his enduring devotion to Douglass; he also pushed for a US Postal Service stamp commemorating Douglass and organized memorial events at his statue in Highland Park. “I always felt like Frederick Douglass lived with us, because my father talked about him so much and [his picture] was everywhere,” Coles’s daughter, Joan Coles Howard, said.57

In 1938, Coles and the Voice undertook a survey of housing conditions encompassing several hundred Black residents. The houses surveyed were in large part damp, overcrowded, and underserved with gas and electricity. Many people lacked furnaces and relied on their cooking stoves for heat. Damp earthen cellars, leaky roofs, and communal toilets for a dozen people or more were common, particularly in the Seventh and Eighth Wards. “In many cases, we found that the houses were unfit to live in,” Coles wrote. “The majority of places surveyed need major repairs to the stairways, floors and walls; also the plumbing was bad. . . . Rats, mice, roaches and bed-bugs were found in many homes, even large and offensive sewer rats.” Coles’s findings could hardly be dismissed as partisan allegations. A 1940 municipal survey largely supported them, showing for example that more than 40 percent of residential buildings in the Portland Avenue area lacked central heating.58

FIGURE 2.3. Howard Coles was publisher of the Frederick Douglass Voice and a licensed realtor in Rochester. From the Howard W. Coles Collection, Rochester Museum and Science Center, Rochester, NY.

Incredibly, Coles’s survey also found that despite these fetid conditions Black Rochesterians often paid more rent than white tenants. This was strictly a matter of supply and demand, as Coles described it:

Here as in other cities similar to Rochester, the Negro population is severely handicapped in respect of its housing problem not only with lack of income, which of course is basic, but also with a strictly practiced policy on the part of realtors and renting agents of segregating Negroes in the most undesirable and deteriorated districts as well as with uniformly high and exorbitant rents . . .

In the Seventh Ward, a great number of ramshackle houses and outmoded apartments are rented to the Negro people that are not fit for human beings at any time. Yet rents of $2.75, $4.00, $5.00 and $5.50 are charged weekly. We have cases proving that one pretext or another is used to raise rents, when landlords know that Negro tenants must submit due to having nowhere else to move.59

The policies that caused these conditions were created and upheld by the most powerful layers of society, including the local and federal governments. The most visible instruments of segregation were real estate agents and moneylenders, who quickly arrived at a common understanding of their professional and social responsibility when it came to Black people buying houses. Real estate agents, as a rule, refused to sell houses in white neighborhoods to Black families. A local NAACP investigator wrote in 1960 of the Nothnagle Realty Company, the largest firm in the city: “They are firmly committed to a policy most likely to incur and retain the good will of the general Rochester house-buying public, the bulk of which is white—ergo, their tendency toward evasiveness, duplicity and subterfuge designed to dissuade Negro families from penetrating any farther into the whitelands than a safe ‘fringe’ area.” John Nothnagle ran for the Rochester school board in 1961 and sat for an interview with an NAACP committee that pressed him on his service as “a silent and active participant in the Rochester brand of apartheid.” He responded, according to the committee’s report, with “the time-worn argument that whites were fearful of their neighborhoods being invaded by wife-beating, knife-wielding, illiterate Negroes.”60

Real estate agents may have blocked Black homeownership out of personal prejudice or social pressure; perhaps most important, they did so on threat of expulsion from their professional organization. The National Association of Real Estate Boards in its official code of ethics declared: “A Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood . . . members of any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood.” In case any confusion remained, in an educational text the association gave as an example of an objectionable presence “a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled to live among whites.”61

FIGURE 2.4. Monroe County population by geographic area, 1910 to 2010.

Source: US Census data; “Monroe County Population by Municipality and Decade,” Pete Nabozny, December 12, 2018, www.petenabozny.com.

In addition to his career as a journalist, Howard Coles was also a licensed realtor, giving him unique insight into both housing conditions for the Black community in Rochester and the real estate practices that helped sustain them. He ended up resigning from the Rochester Real Estate Board in protest in 1960:

These are my reasons for resigning: I am tired of winking at shady deals and of being asked to sell through third parties; I am tired of being asked to show houses at night; I am tired of trying to sell houses that are priced three and four thousand dollars [above] their true value; I am tired of telling falsehoods to people about where they can and cannot buy; I am tired of selling old houses and of never being able to sell new houses to the people with whom I am identified. . . . Most of all, I am tired of supporting American prejudice that is rampant here in Rochester in this necessary field.62

If a real estate agent faltered in his or her professional obligations, banks and other lending institutions remained as a bulwark against Black encroachment. They in turn relied on the formal guidance of the federal government, which, through a series of massive aid programs before and after World War II, put a lasting, official imprimatur on racist housing patterns and practices. The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) was established in 1933 to save Depression-era homeowners from foreclosure; the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was established one year later to insure bank mortgages. In both instances, and later in appraising home loans for the Veterans Administration, local appraisers were engaged to rate properties’ loan viability. They received guidance from the FHA Underwriting Manual, which stressed the need for vigilance against “adverse influences” on a neighborhood’s stability: “Generally, a high rating should be given only where adequate and enforced zoning regulations exist or where effective restrictive covenants are recorded against the entire tract, since these provide the surest protection against undesirable encroachment and inharmonious use. . . . Restrictions should [prohibit] . . . the occupancy of properties except by the race for which they are intended.”63 In regard to schools in particular, the underwriting manual warned appraisers that neighborhoods should be viewed as “far less stable and desirable” where children would be “compelled to attend school where the majority or a considerable number of the pupils represent a far lower level of society or an incompatible racial element.” The relationship between housing and school discrimination, then, was self-perpetuating, even at this early stage.64

The brightly colored maps that HOLC appraisers produced stand as striking visual documentation of federal participation in housing segregation. White-only Rochester neighborhoods in Maplewood, Charlotte, the southeast quadrant, and the developing suburbs were coded green or blue, the safest for investment. Most of the city was coded yellow, or “definitely declining.” The worst rating, red, was reserved for the areas just southwest and northeast of downtown where the small but growing Black population was concentrated. Banks categorically refused to lend in those redlined communities, driving crippling disinvestment. The written descriptions of certain neighborhoods were more specific in their assessment. Talking about Corn Hill and the Third Ward, the appraisers wrote: “Negroes have come into the area and today it is the poorest section of the entire city. Pride of ownership is lacking. . . . The most that can be said for [the neighborhood] is that it is convenient.” Comments in other cities were even more explicit. In Camden, New Jersey, for instance, appraisers wrote of one mostly Polish neighborhood: “Negro district on edge of section, but splendid cooperation of all residents in this section will always prevent spread.” Eighty years later, the redlined Rochester tracts are part of the area known as “The Crescent” and stand as the most impoverished and unsafe neighborhoods in the city. They were the location of the 1964 uprising and, as of 2022, have some of the lowest performing schools in New York.65

Another, related line of defense for white homeowners came in the form of deed restrictions and racial covenants. Both real estate agents and banks encouraged homeowners to insert clauses into their deeds and to join covenants with their neighbors, setting restrictive terms on future use or sale of the property. These were enforceable contracts that prevented sales to purchasers of a targeted race, most often Black people. They were in effect on much of the development happening throughout the Rochester metropolitan area from the 1920s to the mid-1940s. Even governmental entities, including Monroe County, the town of Gates, and Gates School District No. 1, wrote restrictive clauses for property they sold or occupied. Major economic and political organizations, including the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rochester and Eastman Kodak, did the same. They used a thinly veiled code in advertising to alert potential white buyers: “rigid restrictions” were in place to ensure only “particular people” would be considered—those whom “you would enjoy having as neighbors.” The Gannett newspapers carried countless such advertisements and reinforced the message from an editorial perspective as well. Not until 1948 did the US Supreme Court invalidated racially restrictive covenants. They remain visible on countless deeds in the Monroe County clerk’s office and in government repositories across the country.66

Rochester’s growing suburbs were particularly inaccessible to would-be purchasers or renters of color. Realtors declined to show properties there and the towns themselves stiffened zoning restrictions, reinterpreting their previously liberal codes to prevent poor Black people from moving in. Black people seeking to buy houses in the suburbs were regularly confronted with slurs, death threats, and petitions demanding that they go away. “The voices were different but the message was always the same,’” one Black man said in 1960. “‘N——, go back where you belong. . . . Go back to [the slums] where all n——s belong.” The Rev. Quintin Primo, an Episcopal pastor who served as president of the NAACP in the late 1950s, faced a petition from more than a hundred angry residents of Irondequoit, a Rochester suburb, when they learned the church was planning to purchase a rectory in the town for him and his family to live in. “His children are unruly and uncontrollable,” the petition read. “The Primos plan to throw all-night, weekend drinking parties; our neighborhood and properties will be destroyed!”67

Black families were thus penned into an artificially restricted, systematically neglected geographical area—a ghetto—at the same time that the Black population was booming, particularly in the Seventh Ward around Joseph Avenue. The only way to accommodate the new arrivals was to subdivide the existing housing stock even as buildings and neighborhoods deteriorated through overcrowding. “Today we have twenty-four thousand Negro people crowded into two major ghetto areas which once housed seven thousand people,” a local Congress of Racial Equality representative reported in 1962. John and Constance Mitchell recalled seeing twenty mailboxes outside one former single-family home across the street from their house in the Third Ward. Overcrowding became a chronic condition in the Third Ward in particular, as urban renewal in the Baden-Ormond neighborhood northeast of downtown had pushed many Black families to the southwest. As one researcher put it rather floridly: “Block after block of regal ruins inadequately house a tumescent humanity whose very proliferation causes outrageous crises, not the least of which are elementary sanitary problems.”68

The roach-ridden tenements in the Third and Seventh Wards could only be subdivided so many times, though, and still Black migrants kept coming from the South. Spillover into previously exclusive white enclaves became inevitable and it, too, was managed by real estate agents and banks for maximum profit. Their practice was known as blockbusting and was common throughout the United States. Real estate agents knocked on doors in a white neighborhood, cautioning families to flee before a Black invasion began. Nellie King was eight years old when her family moved from the Clarissa Street area to Frost Avenue, farther in the southwest quadrant. They were the third Black family on the block, but more would soon arrive. “The real estate agents started coming through all that area—Woodbine, all those streets—and they started [telling people], ‘The n——s are coming,’” she said. “So those people started giving away those houses in the 19th Ward.” In 1969, the Nothnagle Realty Company sent a letter to homeowners on Warwick Avenue in the 19th Ward, “introducing” them to a Black couple who had recently bought a home on the street. The letter continued: “While negotiating this transaction, we received a number of inquiries from qualified buyers who desire to locate in your area, ONE OF WHOM MAY BE INTERESTED IN YOUR HOME!”69

White homeowners almost invariably took the hint, often selling their homes for less than market value. The agent could then turn around and resell the house at a significant markup to Black families desperate for safe, respectable accommodations. This engineered panic was predicated on what Coles called “the octopus, color prejudice,” and it worked. “I remember well the 1960s mindset of ‘impending doom’ in the parish as the racial makeup began to change,” a parishioner at the mostly white St. Augustine Church in the 19th Ward recalled. “The flight to the suburbs—and truly it was a flight, a fleeing, motivated chiefly by fear. I wonder what was gained and what was lost by all those flights. And what was there to be afraid of ?”70

When all other barriers failed, violence against Black homeowners remained as a fallback option, in the form of a well-aimed gob of spit, brick, or bullet. Because Rochester’s Black population began to expand later than that of Chicago, Detroit, and other northern cities, it was spared the horrific violence that swept across them in the years following World War I. Nonetheless, Black families who crossed the color line reported vandalism and threats of violence; the first Black family on Genesee Park Boulevard was greeted by a burning cross on their front lawn.71

James and Alice Young sought to buy a house in the 19th Ward but were denied, and their real estate agent faced death threats. Instead the Youngs had white friends buy the house, hold it for a month, and then transfer it to them. Before moving in they would visit after work; one day they decided to bring their baby’s crib and set it up in their new home. “That was Thursday night,” Alice Young recalled. “Friday we got there after work, and in the mailbox was this letter: ‘You G—D—N—s have two weeks to move out of this neighborhood or else the house will be destroyed by fire [elisions in original].’” It was signed, “the Ku Klux Klan of Millbank Street.”72

The Ku Klux Klan was indeed active in Rochester and its suburbs. The organization boasted of having more than two thousand members in the city in 1926, and as many as nineteen thousand people gathered that year at a Klan rally in East Rochester. Jasper Huffman recalled being in class at Monroe High School in the early 1960s when a white teacher explained that the Klan simply advocated for the rights of white people and didn’t deserve its negative reputation. A Black classmate sat at her desk, crying. “She stood up and said, ‘The Klan killed my father. Don’t tell me anything about that,’” Huffman said. He stood up as well, in support of the girl; he believes it cost him the final half credit he needed to graduate. As late as 1980 Black residents in Rochester and the suburbs of Chili, Henrietta, and Irondequoit were confronted with cross burnings, harassment, and racist graffiti, and Klan recruitment signs were posted at Monroe Community College. After a cross was burned on the front yard of the only Black family on one street in Chili in 1980, police and neighbors concluded it was a “late-adolescent mindset that’s probably behind this,” rather than racism.73

Of course, some Black people did succeed in purchasing houses in white, middle-class neighborhoods. Many did so like James and Alice Young, through subterfuge and the assistance of sympathetic white friends who would purchase a house in their own name then transfer it to them. William Jacob Knox was a Harvard- and Massachusetts Institute of Technology–educated chemist who had been instrumental in the top-secret Manhattan Project. He came to Rochester in 1945 as a research scientist with Kodak. When he sought a house for his family, a real estate agent offered only an abandoned brothel on Joseph Avenue in the heart of the growing Black ghetto. Knox eventually succeeded in purchasing a house in a middle-class neighborhood after giving power of attorney to a white Kodak colleague.74

More commonly, the combined opposing forces to quality housing for Black people translated as an incontrovertible social norm. It didn’t particularly matter whether the sale of a certain property might be blocked by a restrictive covenant, a real estate agent, or a bank. A 1968 Urban League report, summarizing scores of housing complaints it had brought to the state Division of Human Rights, concluded that housing discrimination was “less direct, more subtle” in Rochester than in other cities, indicating “an advanced state of perpetuation of discrimination.”75 Black people knew better than to go house-shopping in the white Maplewood or Highland Park neighborhoods in the first place.

The city of Rochester did attempt one solution other than subdividing and blockbusting: urban renewal, a term encompassing a generously funded national strategy of clearing aging, mostly nonwhite neighborhoods and replacing them with either bleak housing projects or highways, convention centers, or other inducements for white residents. In Rochester, the first urban renewal project razed a wide swath of the Seventh Ward, the Baden-Ormond neighborhood, to the ground and built in its place a set of seven public housing towers, seven stories each, at a cost of $5 million. They were called Hanover Houses and opened to their first tenants in December 1952 following years of debate over the creation of a public housing authority. “It’s a turning point,” said Irving Kriegsfeld, director of the Baden Street Settlement, a social services provider, eighteen months before the first unit was even occupied. “This neighborhood had been given up for lost. It is no longer lost.” The towers had 392 apartments ranging from $39 to $48 a month, all “tastefully decorated” and outfitted with new appliances. “The public had a right to be impressed with what it saw,” a reporter concluded after an open house to show off “the slum-clearance magic that has been wrought in a once substandard area.”76

The original problem in the Baden-Ormond neighborhood, of course, had not been the fault of the houses themselves, and the city failed to act to address the worsening effects of poverty and segregation. Within five years a grassy courtyard in the Hanover Houses had been paved over, leaving children with nowhere to play but the hallways and elevators. These stank of urine because there were no bathrooms on the ground floor and young children couldn’t make it back upstairs in time. As early as 1958, a consultant hired by the city reported: “Hanover Houses can scarcely escape the impact of its neighborhood, and many of its problem arise from the environment.” The housing project was at the center of the 1964 uprising and afterward rapidly deteriorated into what housing authority officials conceded to be “a vertical ghetto.” Tenants went on a rent strike in 1969 and succeeded in obtaining some improvements, but these did not prevent an exodus of all but the most destitute residents. A FIGHT publication in the early 1970s described the site as “characterized by rats, roaches, broken benches, falling fences, asphalt playground, inoperative elevators, stopped-up sinks, exposed wires, . . . unsecurable windows seven stories above ground level and exposed steam pipes.” One longtime Rochester real estate agent put it succinctly: “No one in their right mind would give consideration to tenancy in Hanover Houses.”77

Luis Burgos grew up in Hanover Houses, the son of two Puerto Rican transplants among many in northeast Rochester. Their apartment overlooked Joseph Avenue; Burgos recalled watching through the window as National Guard troops marched down the street in 1964. His father worked in a bakery on Joseph Avenue before becoming the first Puerto Rican to work in the city parks department in January 1959, two months before Luis was born. He often cut grass as part of his job and would sometimes take his children with him to different parts of the city. To them—seven children living with two adults in a three-bedroom apartment—the modest single-family houses they saw became the stuff of dreams. “We’d go to these homes that were just beautiful, and we really realized what it was like for other people, more fortunate people financially,” he said. “For children who lived in that kind of environment to see one of those little residential streets off East Ridge Road—those little Cape Cod houses seemed like mansions to us.”78

Even given serious poverty and progressively worsening housing conditions, people who grew up in Hanover Houses’ during the buildings’ earlier years described a sense of community that had not yet faded. “For me, [Hanover Houses] was like a huge community of people who just helped one another,” said Velverly Caldwell, who lived there for several years as a child in the early 1960s. “We did things together with all the neighbors; we played together; the adults cooked together during the holidays.” Burgos recalled the same feeling of community support, particularly around the nearby Baden Street Settlement, but also described seeing three men bleeding from gunshot wounds while he played outside with his friends at about age seven. “It was a terrible, violent thing for a child to see,” he said. “I’m not looking back at it with rose-colored glasses. There were aspects of the poverty that weren’t good.”79

The result of all the events described in this chapter—the unprecedented migration of Black people from the South, the shifting and hardening of racial prejudice, the restrictions on the Black housing market, motivated by racism and supported at the highest level of government—was, by 1960, a city more segregated and unequal than at any time since, perhaps, the abolition of slavery in New York in 1827. Black families were stacked in oppressive high-rises or jammed into unsanitary subdivisions, penned into two neighborhoods on threat of violence. This was happening at the same time that white families were enjoying an unprecedented array of federal subsidies aimed at helping them into the middle class and beyond. That disparity would lead to, among other things, the deadly unrest of 1964.

Clarence Ingram arrived in Rochester in 1953 with a bachelor’s degree, four years in the US Army and a well-paying job under his belt. He recalled inquiring about an apartment he had seen advertised for rent on Clifton Street, on the western boundary of the Third Ward:

The lady answered the door and when I mentioned what I was there for she immediately closed the door in my face and said she didn’t have anything that she wanted to rent to me. . . . I can remember that face. I can remember that lady very, very, very well.

The same lady owned a grocery store down on the corner of Prospect and Clifton street. I remember I went out on Sunday morning following the Saturday night of [the 1964 uprising], just looking at all the area. I approached that particular store and she was sitting out in front of the store with all the rubbish and spoiled food and torn-up trash, and she was in a very despondent mood, she was crying, and wondered why this would happen to her. She cited the number of years she’d been in the community, the type of person she was, and didn’t understand why it would happen to her. Immediately I remembered the face that had closed the door in my face when I went to the apartment. I can imagine how these sorts of things over the years create problems and brought us to this explosive point.80

Worsening residential segregation was, of course, reflected in the neighborhood schools. By the 1962–63 school year there were five elementary schools with more than 80 percent minority children, led by School 3 in the Third Ward with 95 percent. At the same time, twenty-three elementary schools had 1 percent minority children.81 The premigration status quo was irreparably broken.