Nora Burns White migrated from South Carolina to Harlem by train without her parents and with another girl from her hometown, they were both still minors. Like so many other female southern migrants, she would go on to become a domestic servant. She eventually landed a job further north of New York City in Westchester County. She became a good friend and catering partner with southern migrant Nettie C. Banks of Samos, Virginia, in Middlesex County. At age seventeen banks migrated first to Philadelphia to find work in 1938. In Philadelphia, Banks met her husband George, also a migrant from Virginia. They worked as domestics in Philadelphia until the end of World War II when a wealthy white family in Ossining offered them jobs as sleep-in domestics. “At the time that we came up, it was normal that we were sort of regulated to, doomed to do house work.” As caterers, White and Banks saved enough capital to purchase homes in Westchester County and send their children to college.
