The East Coast Migrant Stream

During the 1950s, war veteran Robert F. Williams migrated to Rochester, lured there by the promise of factory work at the Eastman Kodak Company. He spent several weeks pounding the pavement in search of work, to no avail. He would later testify to the limited industrial opportunities in Rochester for Black men: “I walked that place inch by inch, and there was no job to be had.” Without money to return home, Williams went to the nearby orchards and fields to secure work picking beans, cherries, and apples. Unlike many migrants to Rochester (and other northern cities), Williams stayed only long enough to earn money to return south, in his case, to his native North Carolina.² Once there, he went on to become the famed activist and author of Negroes with Guns.

Williams’s story reflects the larger trajectory and the impact of the Great Migration on the urban landscape.³ Black migrants were drawn away from the South to industrial opportunities frequently during times of war, when labor shortages were exacerbated by restrictions on immigration.⁴ This Black migration changed the complexion of the nation’s largest cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, and Pittsburgh. “In the 1900s,” James Gregory offers, “only 8 percent of the nation’s total Black population” lived outside the South. By 1970, more than 10.6 million African Americans lived outside the South, 47 percent of the nation’s total.⁵ Gregory further notes that while this changed the face of the nation’s major cities, the migrants “were also going to regions that previously had known little racial diversity.”⁶ Though sensitive to minor differences in sex, familial circumstance, and time and route of departure, the migration narrative remains largely the same whenever it is told. Large numbers of Black southerners left behind the segregation and violence of the Jim Crow South in search of industrial job opportunities—or in the case of women, domestic service positions—in the North, thus improving their economic stability.

Rochester was not exempt from these forces. An economic boom placed Rochester in a much better position economically than other upstate New York cities. The Eastman Kodak Corporation, headquartered in Rochester, continued to dominate the film and camera industry and served as Rochester’s leading industrial employer. The city also benefited greatly from the expansion of the Haloid Company, which became Xerox, as it capitalized on new xerography patents. While Kodak and Xerox commanded international attention, other manufacturing industries also fueled this local boom. For many reasons, however, Rochester’s labor shortage did not translate into industrial opportunities for Black migrants.

Rochester did provide opportunities for agricultural migrants. A less studied and less understood facet of the Great Migration is the trickle-down effect industrial expansion had on rural and agricultural areas in the North. Take for example the more than 40,000 African Americans who moved to Rochester between 1950 and 1970, which more than tripled the Black population (see table 1). As the story of Robert Williams demonstrates, their presence was not the result of an open industrial labor market grateful for their presence. Rochester’s corporate world relied on a highly skilled and technically trained workforce. Kodak and Xerox required laborers to have at least a high school diploma whether the job in question required this level of education or not.⁷ They also preferred to fill industrial openings with local, white agricultural laborers eager to abandon the grueling work and long hours in the fields in exchange for stable, year-round work that promised better wages and benefits.⁸ The absence of white laborers, of course, created substantial openings for field hands to maintain and harvest crops throughout the summer and fall. At the same time, increasing mechanization in the southern agricultural landscape had left many Black agricultural workers jobless.⁹

The East Coast Migrant Stream fashioned a solution for both the short-staffed farms and the underemployed or unemployed Black southerners. This stream of migrants originated in Florida, ultimately depositing workers throughout thirty-six rural counties in New York State; the bulk were concentrated in western New York, including the area around Rochester.¹⁰ It was common for farm owners in the area to instruct a trusted employee to return to his (women were rarely, if ever crew leaders) hometown to recruit twenty-five to eighty more people to work the season. In this way, migrants were frequently acquainted through familial or communal networks with one another prior to leaving the South. Once a migrant had an agreeable experience on a particular farm, he or she often traveled to the same farm yearly, sometimes as an individual working with a crew, other times as a member of an independent family unit. While it was not a lucrative undertaking, families could make enough to support themselves if they worked through the myriad crops. One migrant remembered that in upstate New York, “you could start in June and work right straight through until November because you had tomatoes, you had beans, you had cherries, you had apples, your pears, your prunes, you know, all of those things would keep you busy all the way through.”¹¹ While those were central agricultural crops in New York, migrants also planted, tended, and harvested strawberries, potatoes, cabbage, celery, and onions.

Unlike most migrants whose travel was restricted by the rail system, agricultural migrants were not limited by the tracks; rather, they came in migrant trucks, owned cars, or traveled North with friends or family who owned vehicles. The car afforded greater flexibility in traveling and returning, and it became the source of fond family memories. Ruby Ford, born in 1956 in Haines City, Florida, recalled coming “with my father and mother, sisters and brothers; there was ten of us then. We all came up in one car.”¹² Emmarilus McCants Jenkins, born to migrant parents in North Rose, New York, remembered preparing to return to Florida for the first time as a married woman; pregnant with her first son, she went into labor the night before they were to leave the camp. The family car allowed them to stay until both mother and son were able to travel safely.¹³

This flexibility in movement also facilitated economic flexibility. Families could determine when and where to stop along the stream. Pandora Tinsley Cole, born in 1940, traveled the circuit for twenty-five years before permanently settling in upstate New York. She traveled with her mother as a child, first to Hendersonville, North Carolina, then to Dover, Delaware, where they picked beans, and then on to Wayne County (next to Monroe County, where Rochester is located), where she picked cherries and apples in the orchards. Like many migrants who remained in the stream, Cole eventually “started working in [the] canning plant where [she] worked on machines, canning beans and beets, and applesauce.”¹⁴ The fields and orchards yielded such a large quantity of produce that canning factories for companies such as Mott’s, headquartered at the time in Rochester, were often built on site.¹⁵

Some families moved directly from Florida to New York each year, avoiding working along the way. Migrant crews, particularly those comprised of families, found it undesirable to set up camp at more than two farms throughout the season.¹⁶ Montrose Cole, born in 1969, worked the migrant stream alongside her father, who taught her to pick apples. She recalled coming to Wayne County from Haines City, Florida: “I’ve been coming up here on the seasons all my life.… It usually takes us a day and a half to come; we leave in the morning, and should get up that next night—late that next night.… We always go to this truck stop in Pennsylvania, which is nice.”¹⁷

The yearly rituals that families developed, remembered so fondly by some migrants, demonstrate both familial order and communal organization. They further suggest that families were attuned to their own economic and educational needs, and the various obstacles that could prevent progress in either of these areas. While many migrants continued to work the stream by returning to Florida each winter, a growing number of migrants “settled out” in the Rochester area. These settled-out migrants, or “stagrants,” sought better opportunities by choosing to remain year-round, significantly altering the racial demography of upstate New York by 1960. Agricultural work was often the only option available to many laborers. While some recalled the rhythms and routines of migrant life fondly, structural forces made it a difficult way to make a living. Working the fields of upstate New York satisfied wanderlust, offered a respite from southern heat and violence, and provided marginally better pay. However, federal legislation and corrupt farm owners tipped the scales against the migrant workers.

The unpredictable conditions in which migrant families lived and worked, combined with abysmal housing, exacerbated negative perceptions of agricultural migrant work, including by migrants themselves. As one former migrant stated, “This isn’t a man’s work. This is just too dirty. I’d like to see people doing other work, not like this.”¹⁸ Other migrants saw honest work made unpredictable and therefore unprofitable. Another reported, “This traveling stuff is not good. You can’t predict the weather, you can’t predict what’s going to happen, you can’t predict the good days or the bad days, so nine times out of ten you end up with some kind of complication and no work. You do pretty good for a week and then have no work at all so it just doesn’t add up to anything.”¹⁹

These difficulties prompted migrants to look for alternatives whenever possible. Ivory Simmons, a migrant born in Vero Beach, Florida, in 1929 came to New York State in the 1950s to work in the camps. He left the migrant stream as quickly as possible, highlighting the decision many migrants made. “There are a lot of disadvantages in being a migrant,” he offered. “I guess that’s why I decided to not be a transient. I started to stay because I wanted to put some roots somewhere, and if I was going to be in this part of the world then I might as well stay here permanently instead of coming back and forth.”²⁰ Wayne County resident Charles Jackson recalled, “I had to leave Florida because I owed my children a better future. I needed more money. The farms up north did pay more than the southern farms. With my educational limitations, it would have been hard to find work even in a factory.”²¹

While Simmons and Jackson viewed leaving the migrant stream in personal and familial terms, structural forces made migrant agricultural work precarious, transferring the risk of doing business to the employees rather than the employer. Two decades earlier, in the 1930s, the acquiescence of the southern ruling class to Roosevelt’s New Deal programs required that both farmworkers and domestics, who were disproportionately Black, be excluded from many initiatives, including social security, which provided benefits if an employee was injured or became disabled. Likewise, federal legislation that guaranteed overtime and unemployment benefits excluded farmworkers.²² Individual states compounded these federal structural inequalities, requiring permanent residency in order to qualify for services such as Medicaid and food stamps. If a state did not exclude farmworkers from their programs in theory, migrants were often prohibited in practice. On one Wayne County farm, for example, 124 individuals qualified for food stamps after being without work for an extended period of time. The farm where they worked, however, was only approved to house eighty-six migrant laborers that season.²³ To protect himself from reprisal for overcrowding, the owner simply removed thirty-eight individuals from the list provided to the food stamp caseworker. Frequent migration also frequently hindered recertification for aid after a family had crossed state lines, given the extensive paperwork and documentation required.²⁴ Practices such as these prompted many to consider alternate arrangements.

Agricultural migrant workers did not make the decision to remain in the North lightly or without forethought. The decision was made only after gaining familiarity with the area and weighing the benefits and drawbacks of northern living. Migrants who worked the fields in western New York often traveled to Rochester on Saturdays to purchase supplies unavailable in the rural towns, to hear jazz and blues in a city club, or to get their hair cut or styled. This contact with the urban center convinced many agricultural workers that leaving the migrant stream and settling permanently in Rochester would improve their lot. As increased numbers made this decision, they eventually sent for wives, children, and extended family members. At certain moments, the decision seemed universal.

Though never an agricultural farmworker himself, Eugene Barrington provides an interesting case study of the group migration process. Barrington arrived in Rochester from his native Sanford, Florida, the single largest source of Black migrants to Rochester.²⁵ As a child, Barrington was deeply affected by stories of Rochester. He recalled that his friends eagerly awaited the return of the migrant children every winter so they could hear new stories about Rochester. The cultural currency migrant children accumulated with travel to the Rochester area came to be called “the Rochester Mystique.” Such was the migrant flow that Edward Blacksheare, the principal of the Black Croombs Academy in Sanford, claimed that by 1969, roughly thirty years after the relationship between the two cities began, thirty to forty of 150 high school graduates would leave for Rochester each year.²⁶ Barrington himself was a case in point. After completing high school in Florida, he attended Syracuse University, where he completed his doctorate in social science in 1976.

Barrington was so taken with the power of the Rochester Mystique that he titled his dissertation “New Beginnings: The Story of Five Black Entrepreneurs Who Migrated from Sanford, Florida to Rochester, New York.” The text highlighted the importance of the migrant stream in his upbringing and in the development of his worldview but also in the group experience of Sanfordians. He argued persuasively that large numbers of African Americans made the conscious and informed decision to depart Sanford permanently because they perceived better opportunities in Rochester.²⁷ In the course of his research, Barrington explored migrants’ perceptions of their decisions to relocate permanently to Rochester. One reply is instructive: “Couldn’t git ahea’.… Who wanna work on somebody else’s farm for nothing anyway? Most of us wuz working for nothing. I knowed the place [referring to Rochester]. The farms wuz close by. We’d come into the city to have a good time. A lotta people started moving here from Sanford and around. Jobz was plentiful. I thought I could make a good start here.”²⁸ Another recalled, “Money was the main reason. You could git a little security up here witout a whole lotta education. It was better than home.” Still another offered, “I wanted to git off that farm. Ain’t never liked that damn farm. It got hot. You didn’t make no money. Had to leave that shit. Got out when I could.”²⁹

While most hoped to improve their own prospects, many believed their children would make use of educational opportunities to better their life chances. Thus, the migrant stream did not drop dislocated Black families prone to social pathology on upstate New York. Individuals and families who had resided in the area for many years believed they could work to support and improve their familial situations by making the situation permanent.

Migrants turned stagrants, Sanford-born and otherwise, believed their fortunes would improve in Rochester, but they were largely disappointed. Many found unscrupulous landlords waiting to profit from their arrival. Constance Mitchell and her husband, John, homeowners in Rochester’s Third Ward, realized something was very wrong when twenty mailboxes appeared on a single dwelling across the street from their home. They recalled, “Slumlords had taken great big old mansions and cut them all up. And made what they called, ‘efficiency apartments’ which was just a refrigerator and a two burner little stove and a room.”³⁰ Landlords then rented these efficiency apartments to entire extended families and charged twice the rent one would expect to pay elsewhere in Rochester. The city was expansive enough to accommodate the 780 percent increase in Black residents; however, real estate agents and landlords refused to show Black tenants and potential homeowners housing options outside the two city wards where ethnic immigrants and African Americans had traditionally resided (see figure 1.1). Between 1940 and 1960, these practices created a housing crisis of astronomical proportions. The increased strain on housing also taxed community services: uncollected garbage increased; wear and tear on housing, parks, and streets increased; and tensions ran high.

For many African American residents, the abominable housing situation was a defining feature of their lives. Buddy Granston moved to Rochester in 1947 as an eight-year-old child. He recalled more than sixty years later, “When I got here I lived in what they called ‘the bottom’ over in the Joseph Avenue, Ormond Street area.… The housing was horrendous and it was rough; it really was rough. And we called that the bottom and we didn’t feel bad about it because when you’re at the bottom you have nowhere to go but up.”³¹ Daryl Porter, who grew up in these overcrowded neighborhoods, remembered the conditions similarly but highlighted the sense of community among the residents. He recalled that when a family’s gas and electric were shut off for nonpayment, the community came to their aid. A walk through any of these neighborhoods would have revealed extension cords strung from one apartment to the next through windows and over fire escapes.³² Communal aid aside, such housing conditions created health problems for many residents. Trent Jackson, an Olympic athlete who grew up in Rochester, remembered, “It was a time when your mother and father would wake up in the middle of the night and come to your room to check on you because of rats.”³³ Indeed, his younger sister was hospitalized because of a rat bite.

While it was the agricultural migrants who most often ended up in these “efficiency” apartments, the influx of migrants and the practice of redlining reduced available housing for African Americans of all socioeconomic levels. When Earl Caldwell, a young Black reporter recruited by the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, arrived in 1963, he expected to move into a promised “apartment in a luxury building” near the press offices. Once in Rochester, no one at the press seemed to recall this promise. Instead, Caldwell was asked to participate in an investigative news story. The paper had received numerous complaints from “Black activists” regarding housing discrimination. In fact, the NAACP’s Walter Cooper, a research chemist at Eastman Kodak, had answered advertisements for sixty-nine apartments and was refused by each.³⁴ Claims such as Cooper’s had been difficult for the newspaper to investigate prior to Caldwell’s arrival. With Caldwell on board, the paper could send both Caldwell and a white reporter, Bill Vogler, to answer advertisements posted in the paper. Caldwell recalls the experience:

After we had visited about five or six apartments, Vogler asked me, “Are you sure you’re actually going into these places?” He did not understand. I would just reach the door and promptly be told, “The apartment has already been rented.” Right after I was told that no apartment was available, Vogler would visit the same place and be invited inside. He’d get a whole spiel on how great the apartment was, why he’d like it and what the neighborhood had to offer. My experience was so different that at times it would be downright embarrassing. We visited apartment after apartment. It was always the same: no to me, yes to him. I just kept making notes of everything that happened.³⁵

Caldwell described his experiences in a front-page story. He was later offered an apartment, which he accepted, but what most surprised him was the response of those Black activists. “The day after the story was published,” he explained, “Blacks began showing up in the newsroom ‘to meet Earl Caldwell.’ Some people called these visitors troublemakers. They called themselves activists, which meant they were in the forefront of stoking, shaping and channeling the anger they said was growing in Rochester’s two Black communities.”³⁶

This defining feature of Black life in Rochester—the burgeoning housing crisis—was not the only one the stagrants found in their new city. While the city leaders relied on real estate agents to corral the newcomers, Rochester’s Black leaders produced a strong web of institutions, churches, and social networks throughout the years. For generations, these folks had worked tirelessly to take care of each other and to push bit by bit for Black opportunity, justice, and equality.

Black Leadership in the Flower City

Local journals, organizations, and histories pay annual tribute to the Black community’s long experience in Rochester. These tales proudly begin with Frederick Douglass’s adoption of Rochester as the place he “shall always feel more at home … than anywhere else in the country.”³⁷ They continue with the elaborate tracing of Harriet Tubman’s great nieces and nephews, who resided in the Rochester area, and then catalog myriad examples of ordinary African American leaders who made a contribution locally, and in some cases, nationally.³⁸ Here, even the casual observer is struck by a strong sense of racial purpose and pride. The oral tradition and the written word chronicle both the strivings and accomplishments of Black Rochester despite the pervasive racism and segregation. To cope, Black leaders turned inward to build strong, stable Black institutions ranging from churches to athletic clubs. When African Americans faced exclusion from a Rochester institution, as they frequently did, they often built their own, as in the cases of the Elks Lodge and the Masonic Temple. If building their own institution was impractical or improbable, as in the case of an African American equivalent to the University of Rochester’s School of Medicine and Dentistry, Black leaders would quietly and gently agitate for admission, as Dr. Charles Lunsford and Dr. Van Levy did for decades. In short, Black Rochester proudly looked to itself and to its leadership to solve its problems and to meet its ongoing needs.³⁹

Throughout the twentieth century, the leadership styles present in Black Rochester reflected the times. As the times changed, so too did the leaders and their styles. In the first half of the century, Black luminaries adopted a conservative path, turning inward to lift as they climbed. Turning inward did not necessarily mean disengagement from the white community, however. On the contrary, it often meant adopting an accommodationist stance with white leaders. The aforementioned Dr. Lunsford, for example, came to Rochester from Macon, Georgia, in the early part of the twentieth century. A veteran of both Howard University Medical School and the Freeman’s Hospital in Washington, DC, Lunsford brought with him to Rochester a deep appreciation for Black institutions. As Rochester’s first licensed African American physician, he established a joint practice with dentist Dr. Van Levy, also an African American. Over the years, the two built a thriving practice in Rochester, serving both Black and white clients. Lunsford and Van Levy made house calls, provided free services to the poor, and developed a reputation as community leaders. Lunsford served as long-time NAACP president, while Van Levy helped to form Rochester’s Negro Business League, becoming its first secretary.

While the pair made a considerable impression on Rochester, they too faced institutional segregation and racism. In 1922, Van Levy applied to the University of Rochester’s School of Medicine and Dentistry to study specialized surgery, but the school’s dean refused to consider his application on account of his race. Rather than take to the streets, picketing or protesting at the medical school, which both Van Levy and Lunsford felt would be vulgar, the pair arranged several meetings with George Eastman, founder of the Eastman Kodak Company and, more importantly, the University of Rochester’s most generous benefactor.⁴⁰ The two doctors privately took Eastman to task for his racial hypocrisy, believing he held the key to desegregating the medical school. They demanded to know why “he was willing to give money to Tuskegee, Hampton and Meharry and then would not employ the graduates of those institutions in his factory.”⁴¹ In one meeting with Eastman, Lunsford and Van Levy also threatened to raise the stakes. Van Levy recalled, “I told him I thought it would be interesting news for the New York papers to get hold of and finally things began to happen.”⁴² Slowly, throughout the following two decades, the University of Rochester’s School of Medicine and Dentistry began to admit Black students, and Eastman Kodak, for its part, hired a handful of Black scientists. While the initial numbers were negligible, the doctors’ accomplishments proved important.⁴³ Their targeting of Eastman for his racist hiring practices is instructive: where George Eastman led, Rochester would follow. It was a lesson well learned by the Black community.

While in that instance Lunsford and Van Levy did not go to the press, they did make good on their threat of a public hearing. Between 1922 and 1939, Lunsford organized a citizens committee comprised of both Black and white members to bring clergy and professionals into formal dialogue in order that they might increase brotherly love while initiating gradual change in Rochester. In 1939, New York State provided them a public venue to air their grievances. Black Harlem had risen up in rebellion in 1935, a first for that neighborhood. In response, state officials had formed the New York Temporary Commission on the Urban Colored Population and charged the new committee with visiting various cities across the state to hold public meetings. Lunsford ensured that Rochester would be included.

At the hearing in Rochester, Lunsford demonstrated his perfectly honed diplomatic skill. The citizens committee did not attack Rochester’s corporations or its government in any systemic form. Rather, its members accused Rochester teachers of diverting Black students from pursuing higher education and encouraging them to join the labor market instead. When so accused, the superintendent of schools claimed he had no knowledge of this practice. Rather than further embarrass the superintendent in front of the statewide committee or damage his own relationship with city leaders, Lunsford created an opportunity to save face, offering that the superintendent likely did not know of this practice. He cautioned the superintendent, however, that he knew about it now and reminded him that his teachers were under his command.⁴⁴ Shortly thereafter, a token handful of Black teachers were hired in the public school system. These were important strides in a city that was just beginning to witness increased numbers of African Americans, drawn to the city primarily to improve educational opportunities for their families.

Lunsford agitated in Rochester, but he did so in accordance with the status quo. He located the source of power and arranged a meeting. He quietly but firmly put forth the needs of the community as he envisioned them. Despite his long track record of uplifting the race, Lunsford would disapprove of the direction of the modern civil rights movement at midcentury. He became one of the first to speak out against the organization over which he once presided. It seems he opposed the burgeoning militancy of the NAACP.⁴⁵

Like Lunsford before him, Father Quintin Primo, who would later become Bishop Primo in Chicago, came to Rochester to serve. In 1947, during Lunsford’s term as NAACP president, Primo was called to convert Rochester’s Black Episcopal mission church to a parish church. Once settled in Rochester, Primo immersed himself in the religious, social, and political fabric of the community. As a Black minister heading a Black church in a white diocese, Primo quickly learned that much of his time would be spent navigating Rochester’s racial politics. One of a handful of Black churches at the time, St. Simon’s, under Primo’s care, emerged as a formidable community institution and Primo as a central community leader. In fact, within a few short years, he capitalized on his standing in both white and Black communities to succeed Lunsford as president of Rochester’s integrated NAACP. As in Lunsford’s time, the NAACP was a clearinghouse for all things African American. There were many white members; by some counts, the organization was majority white. When the city leadership wanted Black representation on a committee or for an issue, they generally turned to the president of the NAACP. For these reasons, the president was typically someone agreeable to the white community and accepted by the Black community.

Father Primo’s popularity as a community leader was no accident. He self-consciously sought avenues to connect with community members and to nurture their civic and religious involvement. When Constance Mitchell first relocated to Rochester in 1950, she encountered Primo one afternoon at an intersection near his church. Primo immediately recognized that Mitchell was new in town. Identifying her as such, he engaged her in conversation, inquiring after her opinion of the city. She informed him, rather tartly, that she did not care for the city at all. Years later, Mitchell fondly recalled that it was a fortuitous meeting with Primo, who had only been in Rochester for three years himself. Interpreting her distaste for the city as loneliness, Father Primo saw an opportunity to mediate Mitchell’s isolation and to enlist a new foot soldier in his church and community projects. Primo invited Mitchell to work with the Baden Street Settlement, then in a transition to serve the burgeoning African American population, as a chaperone at their youth dances. Mitchell consented to serve, which eventually led to her involvement in the Delta RESSICs (Recreational, Educational, Social, Special Interest and Civic), a group organized at Baden Street, which taught literacy classes, organized clothing drives, arranged childcare and offered various forms of tutoring in the migrant camps on the farms surrounding Rochester.⁴⁶

Father Primo took great pride in this ability to engage his community in unique and unexpected ways and to make coalitions with civic groups. Just as he engaged Constance Mitchell on the street corner, he sought ways to ingratiate himself with a new congregation skeptical of his worldliness. At the church guild’s annual community card party, Primo proved to be quite the pinochle player, causing “the word [to] spread like wildfire in the community. ‘The new priest at St. Simon’s plays cards.’ ”⁴⁷ Primo’s willingness to play cards, an activity that some in the church considered a sin, garnered respect from the larger community. Primo pitched his card playing as symbolic of the worldly work he was doing to integrate white neighborhoods, to improve professional opportunities for African Americans, and to provide access for them to professional training and postsecondary education. Organizations such as the Masonic lodge took note of this community engagement, applauded his efforts, and then joined him to build community cooperation. These alliances undoubtedly assisted Primo in his 1959 bid for the presidency of the Rochester NAACP, then the second-largest NAACP local in New York State.

Though Primo believed himself a popular president, he soon created a host of problems for himself in his role as a race broker. Primo, it seems, relied heavily on a group of relatively new members to prepare him for public events. These newcomers were like-minded: young professionals who had been politicized by the winds of racial change blowing in the South. One newspaperman dubbed these new arrivals, Constance Mitchell and Walter Cooper among them, the Young Turks, a name that stuck. From identifying relevant community issues to writing speeches, the young men and women served as NAACP committee heads and performed much of the organization’s legwork. In return, they expected Father Primo, as one of Rochester’s “powerful actors who served as an intermediar[y] between the races” to represent their best interests and mediate their concerns with white leaders.⁴⁸ Community activist Glenn Claytor, a new face in Rochester, recalled that someone like Primo was not “an uncommon figure in many American cities in the early ’50s, where a small number of people sort of interfaced between the authorities—whether it be the banks or the police or whomever.”⁴⁹ In Rochester, Primo, like Dr. Lunsford before him, “was the person you went to for just about anything that involved a non-white dealing with the power structure. These individuals sometimes were accepted by the power structure as spokesmen, and of course, that was an accommodation. And it was better than no accommodation.”⁵⁰ In his role as NAACP president with an educated and aggressive new membership, Primo walked a precarious path.

Unfortunately, Primo misjudged the changing needs and desires of his constituency as they entered the 1960s. He was not prepared to engage in large-scale confrontations with the white power structure, as his changing Black constituents would increasingly demand. Instead, Primo approached racism one issue at a time. The reverend earned his stripes primarily for work on housing desegregation, facilitating the purchase of homes in white neighborhoods for African American families with the means to do so. Importantly, Primo did not challenge the structural forces that reinforced redlining. Instead, he sought individual opportunities for middle class Black families. Primo recalled that during his presidency, white NAACP members, or white intermediaries, would purchase a home and hold it for sixty to ninety days before transferring the deed to the rightful Black owners. In this way, Black families were able to integrate white neighborhoods that resisted their presence. In fact, Father Primo himself faced great difficulty purchasing his own home in a white suburb when he arrived in Rochester. Perhaps it was politically expedient, but Primo credited the white members of the NAACP for their steadfast efforts.⁵¹

The new group of Black activists, the Young Turks, challenged both Primo and the traditional ways of negotiating power in Rochester. Rather than dismantle housing segregation one house at a time or serve as a supportive NAACP auxiliary for southern struggles, they hoped to address the growing concerns in their own city. The Young Turks further believed that many of the old methods were outdated and ineffective. They refused to negotiate modest or incremental change behind the scenes with white power brokers, as both Lunsford and Primo had done. Instead, they believed the time was ripe for structural, large-scale initiatives that would bring better opportunity to more people, most importantly the Black migrants then entering the city. They used their positions as committee heads to advance their agendas.

In 1962, Dr. Walter Cooper, a research scientist at Kodak, head of the local NAACP education committee, and one of Primo’s speechwriters, began to collect statistics on de facto segregation in Rochester’s city schools, segregation that depended upon housing discrimination.⁵² His efforts greatly reflected his interests. Cooper came from a large, low-income family in a Pennsylvania steel town. Education, highly valued among his family, provided an escape route for poor young people seeking opportunities. After meeting with Paul Zuber, head of New York State’s NAACP Housing Committee, Cooper moved from fact finding to initiating a desegregation lawsuit against the city of Rochester. Zuber had just won the famous New Rochelle case, wherein a federal judge established legal precedent by ordering a northern community to desegregate its schools. Energized, Zuber encouraged Cooper to continue his work.⁵³ Cooper was elated to hear that his evidence collection surpassed New Rochelle’s and that a legal challenge from Rochester would likely be successful given that New Rochelle’s segregation issues paled in comparison. Buoyed by this news, Cooper took the information to Primo and informed the president-priest that he would “like to report out these findings to the executive committee of the NAACP.” On Cooper’s telling, Primo responded that he did not “want to embarrass his [white] friends downtown.”⁵⁴ Primo ultimately blocked a legal challenge from the NAACP.

This was not an isolated incident between Father Primo and the heads of the various NAACP committees. At about this same time, Rochester’s city council belatedly accepted federal funds to build Chatham Gardens, a low-to-moderate-income public housing complex that the city desperately needed. To oversee the project, the council formed a special committee and asked Father Primo to represent the Black community. This position put him at odds with his constituency once again. The council intended to build the new project adjacent to existing public housing rather than spread it evenly throughout the city, across traditionally Black and white neighborhoods. Council members believed this would elicit the least amount of (white) public resistance. One council representative reported that he had personally gone through various communities and discussed the issue with his constituency. He found that “they were in unanimity of opposition” to putting the new project in their neighborhoods.⁵⁵

Primo accepted this reasoning without argument, believing that one should not look a gift horse in the mouth. The city needed more public housing, and Primo was willing to compromise on its location to ensure it was built. Rochester had resisted public housing much longer than any other city in New York State, the need was urgent, and he feared the council would refuse to build if challenged on the location.⁵⁶ The more militant committee heads of the NAACP, however, were not accustomed to capitulating to councils. Led by Glenn Claytor, brother-in-law to Walter Cooper and the head of the NAACP housing committee, these members refused to let Primo speak on their behalf. They publicly challenged both the legality and the wisdom of concentrating public housing in a single ward. This confrontation between city hall, the traditional Black leadership, and the Young Turks marked a new dawn in Black Rochester.

Ignoring the concerns of his Black constituency on multiple occasions became a fateful decision for Primo and for the local NAACP. Primo quickly learned that despite his community engagement and his challenge to housing segregation, his dedicated foot soldiers were loyal to the cause, not to him. When Father Primo’s membership came to believe that their president was more interested in preserving his relationship with white leaders than in large-scale, structural change, the Young Turks in the NAACP largely transferred their energies to an organization more suited to their needs. Though they maintained their NAACP membership, Cooper and Claytor, accompanied by several other young and energetic race men and women promptly formed the Monroe County Non-Partisan Political League, an organization committed to public agitation on race issues. The Rochester branch of the NAACP had one further hurrah left in it—a later challenge to police brutality—but Primo’s presidency set in motion a series of events that severely weakened the organization by 1964.

Dr. Lunsford’s and Father Primo’s leadership and experience in Rochester demonstrate two important facets of Black leadership in Rochester at midcentury. The Black community relied upon Black professionals, particularly those who had inroads to the white community, to navigate opportunities and to resolve issues. Primo’s story also demonstrates the fallibility of leaders who did not negotiate the new militancy of civil rights activists. By 1963, Primo had become ineffective as a power broker between the white city government and the Black community. His Black constituents undermined him by protesting committees upon which he sat, and white officials could no longer count on him to represent Black Rochester. As a result, he resigned without protest “after the formation of the Monroe County Non-Partisan League, citing a pressing workload of activity outside of the NAACP.”⁵⁷ He left Rochester months later, having been transferred by the Episcopal diocese to Chicago.

Throughout their years in Rochester, it is likely that both Lunsford and Primo would have encountered Virginia Wilson and her daughters, Lydia and Mildred, other examples of the city’s Black mainstays. As founding members of Rochester’s Mt. Olivet Baptist Church, arguably the most respectable of Rochester’s Black churches, the Wilsons positioned themselves as a welcoming committee of sorts, helping newcomers get acquainted with the city. Where Lunsford and Primo concerned themselves with brotherhood and promoting positive race relations, the Wilsons concerned themselves primarily with improving the lives of Black people. In many ways, they were a social agency unto themselves. They visited jails, took children to the hospital when the need arose, and in general provided for the weakest elements of the Black community, demonstrating an altogether different type of leadership. Their method allowed them to navigate the changing times and the various social movements with little interruption.

In time, Virginia Wilson passed the torch to her youngest daughter, Mildred Johnson, who gladly took up the family mantle. In her many roles in the community, formal and informal, Johnson consistently advocated for the poor and the dispossessed. One case in particular highlights Johnson’s “dedicated reign of ‘speaking for the little people and holding the big people in account,’ ” a practice that earned the attention of New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, who subsequently gave Johnson the moniker “Ambassador of the Inner City.”⁵⁸ At a time when the justice system did not yet include a public defender’s office, Johnson brazenly appointed herself public defender throughout Rochester’s city courts. Whenever a young African American appeared before the court, Johnson accompanied the family and frequently served as legal counsel, though she had no formal training in this area. City court judge Reuben Davis recalled,

Mildred would appear on behalf of some seventeen year old who had gotten in trouble and Mildred was there with his mother wanting to get him out without bail because they had no money. Mildred would ensure that he would make every appearance that was required of him. And you can bet Mildred would see that he was there. Mildred would be at that kid’s house at five o’clock in the morning, take him to her house and wait ’til it’s time to go to court and then she’d bring him to court. And she would not hesitate to say, “Your honor can I approach the bench?” She got legal language and law. And you dare not to refuse her, ’cause Mildred was such a strong personality she would tell you off right then, you know. And she didn’t just do it in my court, she would do it in every city court, the judges—they all say “Oh, here comes Mildred!”⁵⁹

In 1968, under the aegis of the Black Power organization FIGHT, Johnson would go on to establish the city’s first formal public defender’s office.

Instruments of Change

By the close of the 1950s, the Young Turks took it upon themselves to set up new organizations to advance their causes, as Mildred Johnson and her family had done. If the NAACP would not represent their interests at city hall, they would begin to petition the city council on their own behalf. Among the grievances was the absence in Rochester of an office of the State Commission Against Discrimination (SCAD), the agency designated to record and investigate housing and employment discrimination complaints in New York State. Despite Governor Harriman’s 1958 approval of a Rochester SCAD office, no such branch had yet opened. It appears that “Republican legislative opposition reduced the appropriation [to fund the Rochester office] and stalled the approval.”⁶⁰ As a result, if a Rochester resident wished to file a discrimination complaint, he or she had to travel to Buffalo (approximately seventy miles away) or Syracuse (approximately ninety miles away) to do so.

The absence of a SCAD office changed the nature of Black organizing in Rochester. It convinced the Young Turks that, given their inability to influence local politicians, they needed to elect their own leaders. Several such organizers, including Walter Cooper and Richard (Dick) Wade, a white professor at the University of Rochester, toyed with running a Black candidate for Third Ward supervisor. Recent migration had tipped the racial balance in the Third Ward, and if registered to vote, African American residents could successfully elect a candidate to represent them in city government. The Democrats, for whom majority control had remained out of reach for several decades, were willing to run a Black candidate if it would gain them another seat. Two major obstacles presented themselves: Who would run for the office? And how could enough voters be registered to ensure a successful election? After several conversations, Cooper and Wade approached the Delta RESSICs. Cooper recalled that the Delta RESSICs “comprised … the most forward looking and fundamentally better educated Blacks in the community” and would likely provide a suitable man for the job. Instead, when they talked it over with the Delta RESSICs, “the men said ‘Well, you know, I’d face pressure from my employer.’ ” After much conversation, Cooper, betraying his class position, suggested, “It would be logical if we chose a woman because she would not come under any economic pressures—she was not in the work force.” Cooper eventually asked Constance Mitchell to run against the Republican incumbent Lester Peck.⁶¹ Mitchell recalled, “The men were primarily concerned about their jobs, because Rochester was a Republican city and they were really looking for Democrats. And they knew that the men weren’t going to jeopardize their jobs. ’Cause there was a lot of intimidation during that time, I mean, I can tell you, you know, a long story about what I went though, just being a Democrat.”⁶² Mitchell, who was a new mother, agreed that a woman needed to run, and she agreed to the task.

In many ways, Mitchell was an ideal candidate, well placed to address the deteriorating conditions in the Third Ward. Having settled in Rochester in 1950, she had become an integral member of several institutions but was still relatively new to the city. Though not an agricultural migrant (Mitchell had moved to Rochester from New Rochelle with her husband, John), she spent a great deal of time working with the settlement houses and tutoring in the migrant camps. Because she was not entrenched in Black Rochester’s old-time politicking, many believed Mitchell could make history as “the highest elected official among Black women in the United States.”⁶³ Mildred Johnson, that straight-shooting, self-appointed public defender, visited Mitchell as soon as she learned of her campaign. Mitchell fondly recalled the women’s conversation that day:

[Johnson] came to my house and she said, “I had to come to see you. Now, I have to tell you something: You’ll make it.” And I said, “Why?” And she said, “Well, for one thing, you’re the right color—you’re not too Black and you’re not too light. Second thing is that I understand you’re Catholic, you’re not Baptist. ’Cause you see, you get caught up in the churches—if you don’t belong to the right church you’re going to have some problems, so I’m glad to hear that you’re Catholic.” She was really hilarious, you know. And so we became like this [crosses her fingers], because I always came to her for advice about the community that I didn’t know about, you know. And I respected her because Mildred was much older than I was.⁶⁴

The campaign focused on bread-and-butter issues affecting both the migrants and long-time residents alike: garbage pickup, parks and recreation, overcrowded schools, poor housing, and importantly, the creation of a Rochester SCAD office. Despite Johnson’s prediction that Mitchell would “make it,” the campaign was an uphill battle all the way.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of Mitchell’s campaign, however, was not the positions she took on the community’s most pressing issues. Instead, race-based enforcement of literacy tests, alive and well in the North, took center stage in Mitchell’s bid to become Third Ward supervisor. If Mitchell were to be successful, Rochester’s new Black migrants first needed to register to vote. New York State, however, still had literacy laws on its books, requiring that all new voters demonstrate an ability to read and write English.⁶⁵ To register to vote in New York, an applicant had to have a high school diploma, a discharge from the military, or take and pass a literacy exam. Many of the migrants could not meet any of these requirements. Mitchell characterized the problem: “Many of my voters, you know, were just one step off the migrant train and had very limited education. Some of them only had first, second, third grade education coming out of Florida, because they were bean pickers.”⁶⁶ While this may have been the case, many of those migrants arrived in Rochester from communities with long traditions of Black organizing, and they valued education, despite their limited access to it. Mitchell and her supporters spent most of their time in grassroots voter education and registration campaigns, which created new opportunities for community education.

In order to prepare these newcomers for the literacy test, Mitchell and others had to learn how to teach. Through trial and error, Mitchell and her campaign staff ran a voter registration school in her living room. Mitchell always had a pot of food on the stove and her daughter on her hip.⁶⁷ Teachers at the “Mitchell school”—Cooper and Wade, Dr. William Knox (a research chemist and fellow NAACP member), Obadiah Williamson (a former migrant himself), Mitchell, and others, found that voter registration introduced them to new possibilities for Black Rochester. As Mitchell explained, “The thing about that was that once a person found out that they had a little bit of knowledge, they’d want more.”⁶⁸ According to Mitchell, these living room sessions expanded into night classes at a local high school. Mitchell and her husband, John, remembered that anyone who completed the voter registration class received a certificate: “We would give them a little certificate, once they completed. You’d swear they’d went off and got a PhD.… Everybody wanted to get educated.”⁶⁹

While education took center stage in the campaign, it did not replace the grueling work of canvassing neighborhoods, knocking on doors, asking community organizations to get involved, and alleviating people’s fear of voting. While it was unlikely one would be shot or killed while voting, as in certain southern locations, there were very real forms of economic coercion taking place in Rochester. Mitchell’s Republican opponent, Lester Peck, was remembered as a rather shady and intimidating figure. Peck owned a pharmacy on Plymouth Avenue in the Third Ward where he had long been the ward supervisor. Over the years, Peck used his position in the Republican Party to secure the sole prescription contract for welfare recipients. His central location and his medication monopoly gave him a great deal of influence over his customers. Like many store owners in the ghetto, he also extended credit to his customers, credit that could be withdrawn at will. Peck and his wife reminded their customers on a regular basis of the relationship between voting for Peck and the extension of credit at their store. Community members report that Peck employed a gimmick on Election Day to “check” his customers by shining a light on their hand. The light would reveal if and how they voted, he informed them. The Mitchells countered by sending their voters to the pharmacy to prove that Peck could not discern their vote.⁷⁰

Despite all their efforts and Mildred Johnson’s prediction, Peck defeated Mitchell in 1959. However, the Young Turks found the outcome sufficiently encouraging that they immediately began to organize another run against Peck in 1961. Mitchell’s small grassroots campaign consisted of no more than a dozen people, but their impact was impressive. Claytor, one of Mitchell’s campaign members and later a New York State election inspector, believed they registered more than a hundred people in those short months. While that number was not glaringly significant, he offers a reminder of the context: “In those days there were probably only a couple thousand registered Blacks in the entire city of Rochester.… Mathematically, we had an impact.”⁷¹

By the second run, Mitchell and her supporters had matured politically. They continued their education and registration drives but worked harder to include as many neighborhood people as possible in their efforts. Rather than simply electing Mitchell to serve as their leader, the campaign sought to build clout in the Black community. For her part, Mitchell had improved on the platform and had learned to utilize her personal networks more efficiently. Daryl Porter, a teenager who ran with a local gang, recalled that he got his start in politics volunteering for Mitchell’s campaign. As a youth, Porter frequently turned to Mitchell for guidance and frequently to get him out of trouble with the local authorities. Mitchell was like a mother to Porter, whose own parents were deceased. So when she ran for ward supervisor in 1961, Porter and his gang went door to door handing out campaign literature for her. The result was twofold: Porter and company had a constructive project to occupy their time, and their wide dispersal of literature exposed a broader cross section of Black Rochester to Mitchell’s campaign goals.⁷² Porter would later serve as assistant to the mayor of Rochester.

At the same time, the Monroe County Non-Partisan Political League, which was nonpartisan only in name, undertook a series of town hall meetings to further highlight the Black community’s lack of political representation. The group invited each candidate for every open Rochester office to field questions from their constituency. As Claytor recalled,

We would invite candidates to attend public functions and at first, they tried to dis us, and you know, there was no previous record of this kind of involvement in the Black community, so many [candidates] did not show up. And we made sure that they were punished for that. We would put the old empty chair up there and ask the absent person questions and [we] also point[ed] out to the audience that this was an act of great disrespect and indicated that they don’t care about you, so maybe you shouldn’t care about them in terms of coming to vote. After a while, they did start coming. Candidates were still wary, but the belief that coming to the event was better than not [grew].⁷³

Throughout the course of Mitchell’s second campaign, more than a dozen such meetings were held, some attracting more than 300 people. On Election Day in 1961, these same Rochesterians, a majority of them Black, went to the polls and pulled the lever for Constance Mitchell. She had finally become “the highest elected official among Black women in the United States.”⁷⁴

By this point, a group of young, energetic Black activists had emerged in Rochester. The city’s old Black leaders and organizations either conformed and joined the newcomers or were ingloriously swept aside as Black Rochester remade itself. The new leadership utilized both the national momentum of civil rights organizing and the potential of the massive Black in-migration to confront the racial ills in the city’s policies and politics. By implementing grassroots education and organizing, they put in place new forms of protest and put the city on notice that Black Rochester would no longer be accommodated in the ways of old. If the city did not immediately respond to this message, it was only a matter of time before it would.