The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson
Flashback to the early 1960s. I’m attending a top-rated high school in a New York suburb and the one subject in which I continue to participate wholeheartedly is History. It’s the only subject in which I’m allowed to remain in the A track of scholars. I’m positive I’m learning everything of historical importance in this percolator of brilliance. After graduation I proceed to even higher learning experiences at a small expensive liberal arts college outside of New York City where I minor in American History. Upon graduation, I consider myself ready to teach that subject area to others, continuing to live with that delusion until I begin to read the works of brilliant scholars, historians, journalists, and researchers like Isabel Wilkerson, who are working tirelessly to fill in great swaths of our ignored history. One of the products of her efforts is The Warmth of Other Suns, which focuses on the exodus of six million African Americans fleeing the rural South to settle in cities like in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Philadelphia, among others. Ms. Wilkerson refers to this exodus as the Great Migration, “the biggest underreported story of the twentieth century.”
The Warmth of Other Suns is a compilation of black migrant stories, but it is much more than that. It is a story of longing and determination that has meaning for people far beyond the stories themselves. The African Americans who fled the rural South from approximately 1915 to 1970 for what Richard Wright refers to as “the warmth of other suns,” had the same hope for a better life as anyone who crossed the Atlantic in steerage, crossed the Pacific Ocean following a dream for a new life, or crossed the Rio Grande to get to this country. Ms. Wilkerson asks: Who among us would be here without someone in our backgrounds who had the courage, the will, and the grit to leave the only place that they’d ever known for a place that they had never seen in the hopes that life might be safer, healthier, and freer, but with no guarantees whatsoever. Individuals taking part in the Great Migration, like immigrants from other countries, were seeking political asylum and fleeing from terror. But what makes this book so moving and tragic is that the Great Migration participants were living in our country already and were supposed to be free. What bound these migrants together, the author explains, was both their need to escape the violent, humiliating confines of the segregationist South and their “hopeful search for something better, any place but where they were. They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done. They left.”
Ms. Wilkerson spent fifteen years interviewing over one thousand individuals who were part of the Great Migration and documenting their stories for us in this detailed yet highly readable treasure of a book. She focuses on three individuals: Ida Mae Brandon Gladney who left the cotton farms of Mississippi for Chicago in 1937; George Starling, who was run out of Florida for organizing fruit pickers and escaped to Harlem in 1945; and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster who left his middle-class Louisiana family in the 1950s to become a doctor, eventually making his way to Los Angeles. The following quote describes Ida Mae Bandon Gladney and compares her with Dr. Foster and Mr. Starling.
She had lived the hardest life, been given the least education, seen the worst the South could hurl at her people, and did not let it break her…She was surrounded by the clipped speech of the North, the crime on the streets, the flight of the white people from her neighborhood, but it was as if she were immune to it all. She took the best of what she saw in the North and the South and interwove them in the way she saw fit…Her success was spiritual, perhaps the hardest of all to achieve. And because of that, she was the happiest and lived the longest of them all. [p. 532]
