21. Voices
from the Letters
Now in addition to having a sense of what these people can see
around them, which is how we can understand them, what's their
life like, what's going on around them, we can also hear their
voices. The letters have patterns. The letters mention higher
wages; there's no question about it, the letters that you have
talk about making more money. But they also, well I don't know
if I gave you the right ones for this, but they also talk about
"tired of being a flunky" as one of them put it. They
talked of voting, they talked of schools, they refer to feeling
like a man, the great chance that a colored person has of making
a living with all the privileges that the whites have. And you
see the word 'privilege' in these letters a lot.
So then what you have to start doing is doing what literary
scholars like Ken hate historians to do which is that we mine
sources,
we don't read the whole text, think about the text, we just look
at these things and we just pull stuff out almost randomly and
use it for whatever purposes we can. And one of the words that
you just see in here over and over and over again is 'privilege.'
And again, in terms of working through these with students is
to ask them, OK, if you see this word all the time, what does
the word mean. What did they mean by privilege? Does it mean
the same thing you would-what does it mean to you? Is it different
for you for what it would be for them? And you could also then
take them--take a set of letters from Polish immigrants, Irish
immigrants, and say, did they use the word 'privilege' or is
there some other word that they used. And if so, why does that
matter?
Well, I think if you read the letters closely, and we also have
some interviews from the period, one gets a sense that during
the first stage of the Great Migration, a small minority of black
southerners, but enough to dramatically affect white people in
these cities, is beginning to shift from envisioning land ownership
as a material basis for citizenship to industrial work. And what
they are saying is that what privilege is, is the ability to make
a wage-a cash wage, and it's that privilege that gives you-in
essence entitles you to the rights that come along with citizenship.
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