Other Black people were not always helpful or understanding of the new comers.
Excerpt page 287 : In the receiving cities of the North and West, the newcomers like Ida Mae had to worry about acceptance or rejection not only from whites they encountered but from the colored people who arrived ahead of them, who could at times be the most sneeringly judgmental of all.
The northern-born colored people and the long-standing migrants, who were still trying to keep their footing in the New World, often resented the arrival of the unwashed masses pouring in from the very places some of the old-timers had left. As often happens with immigrant groups, some of the old timers would have preferred to shut the door after they got there to protect their own uncertain standing.
The small colony of colored people already in the New World had made a place for themselves as an almost invisible minority by the time the migration began. Many were the descendants of slaves the North had kept before Abolition or slaves who fled the south on the Underground Railroad or were among the trickle of pioneers who had migrated from the South in the decades after the Civil war.
A good portion were in the servant class - waiters, janitors, elevator operators, maids, and butlers to the wealthiest white families in the city. But some had managed to create a solid though tenuous middle class of Pullman porters, postal workers, ministers, and businessmen who were anxious to keep the status and gains they had won. The color line restricted them to the oldest housing in the least desirable section of town no matter what their class, but they had tried to make the best of it and had created a world within a world for themselves.
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Some of these people, even in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles experienced being unwelcome and a different version of outright prejudice.
When writing our family history stories, we need to include the testimonials of relatives as those stories are told, even if what we hear or learn makes us uncomfortable. We are here not to rewrite history but to be as accurate as we can. Our references to documents must be titled as they are titled in the archive. When or if we come across conflicting stories, we can include them both, and let the reader know there are conflicting stories - opinions - or viewpoints that differ. Research can add to or prove or dismiss a story, but I say that telling it as it was told to you helps us also understand that person's life, as they lived it.
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