With Shared Roots: Rubie Bond, the Great Migration, and the Struggle for Black Freedom in Beloit, Wisconsin

In early 1943, six black women sat down at a Kresge's department store lunch counter in Beloit, Wisconsin. Like most restaurants, hotels, and other businesses in Beloit, Kresge's had long refused service to African Americans. The women sought out confrontation with the Kresge's store manager and Jim Crow's grip on the Midwest.¹ In contrast to the more well-documented southern sit-ins of the 1960s, this particular protest did not stir up vitriolic attacks from local whites. In fact, one of the leaders of this sit-in, Rubie Bond, recalled that only the store manager was hostile to their demands and that some white patrons supported the protesters. After an hour of sitting in, the women left the restaurant to appeal to Beloit's city manager, Archie Telfer, to do something about racial discrimination in public accommodations. Telfer dismissed their concerns, telling the women his hands were tied and there was not much he could do.²

The story of Bond and the other women's protest is noteworthy for a few reasons. First, it draws attention to the fact that racial discrimination was embedded in local custom and policy everywhere in the United States, including the Midwest. In recent years, scholars have made efforts to demystify and expose "the ways Jim Crow took many forms, had many guises, and burrowed into the law" and everyday practices throughout the country, not just in the post-Reconstruction South.³ Second, though the Kresge's protesters had grown up in Beloit, they were all originally from the same small corner of northeast Mississippi. During World War I, the city of Beloit drew in more than half of its migrant population from Pontotoc and Houston, Mississippi, as part of the Great Migration.⁴ The six women represented two different Mississippi families: Rubie Bond and Sadie Bell were first cousins from Pontotoc while cousins Ethel Gordon Johnson, Annie Gordon Harris, Estelle Gordon Williams, and Louise Gordon had migrated from Houston, Mississippi. Such kinship networks were a prominent feature of Beloit's black history. Third, the Kresge's sit-in offers a glimpse into the early stages of the modern civil rights struggle in the Midwest and its direct connections to the Great Migration. In Beloit, the city's black population relied on kinship to foster community during the World War I migration years and to challenge midwestern racial segregation after migration.

A close look at Rubie White Bond's story, woven into a broader black history of Beloit, offers important lessons on race, migration, gender, and community building in smaller midwestern cities in the early half of the twentieth century. Bond's intimate network of fellow Mississippi migrants helped catapult her into an important political leadership role in Beloit, a story that shines a light on an often-ignored aspect of the Great Migration. Much of the Great Migration historiography has focused on larger U.S. cities. To be sure, places like Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Philadelphia witnessed "chain migration" a systematic migration pattern that saw southern familial networks relocate in mass; yet, newcomers to those places had relocated from a wide range of origin points.⁵ Beloit's migration presents a unique chain migration story because its black population possessed a concentrated southern origin. This differed significantly from other cities, large and small, whose black populations were comprised of "people of disparate origins."⁶ Through shared roots, Rubie Bond and many black Beloiters summoned a political will to challenge racial discrimination in this small industrial city in the Midwest.

Rubie White was born in Pontotoc, Mississippi, in 1906 to two sharecroppers, Zack and Dora White—both the children of former slaves. Young Rubie and her sister, Laura, began working with their parents on a corn and cotton plantation at the ages of six and five, respectively. Though child labor was a fairly common practice for sharecropping families in the Jim Crow South, the plantation owner, Walt Weatherall, often scolded Zack White for overworking the girls. Weatherall's relative kindness made Rubie and Laura's...