The Warmth of Other Suns:The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

I put off reading this book for a year, because of it's heft. I actually found it to be a very compelling and quick read. Highly reccomend, even if you don't read a lot of history books.
Pat ( )

A must read book about the Great Migration of African-Americans from the South to the North and West. By tracing the journeys and lives of three individuals, Wilkerson turns statistics and reports into portraits of complex people with complex lives. ( )

You say it can't happen here? Well guess what? It did. By that I mean the repressive, nightmarish type of scenario we often see in dystopian fiction like "1984" and "The Handmaid's Tale". After the Civil War, the Federal Government stepped in and regulated race relations in the South. But this regulation only lasted a few years until the bile of the white South became too great to bear. Then followed nearly 100 years of "Jim Crow". Sometimes the words "Jim Crow" are followed by the word "Laws", and yes, there were laws which segregated blacks and whites.Yet if the word "laws" would lead you to infer a system of even-handed enforcement handed down by courts of law, think again. Jim Crow was terror, vigilantism, lynching. Few black men accused of crimes ever made it to trial. Angry mobs would storm the jails, kidnap the accused, and subject him to torture and death. And such accusations often had to do with offending the prevailing caste system, rather than the actual commission of a crime. A black woman was not safe from rape if a white man took a fancy. Slavery had ended in name only, as the agricultural economy continued to function on black labor compensated by bare subsistence (if that),

After WWI, black migration to the North and West began, continuing until the late sixties, after the Civil Rights laws enacted in 1964 began to be enforced. Rather than continue to put up with Jim Crow, blacks moved on to greener pastures. All of this is the subject of Isabel Wilkerson's excellent book. What makes this book special, though, is that it tells the story of the migration through the eyes of three unforgettable individuals. There's Ida Mae Gladney who, with her husband and children, left the cotton flelds of Mississippi for the bustle of Chicago. There's the shrewd George Starling, who couldn't put up with the slave wages being paid to citrus pickers in Florida and for a time, was a de facto labor organizer. He left for New York at exactly the right time to escape a certain lynching, and ended up with a long career as a railroad porter. And then there's my favorite character in the book, Dr. Robert Pershing Foster, who leaves Louisiana, and later, leaves the shadow of his university dean father-in-law in Atlanta, to achieve success in Los Angeles. But no success ever seems to be enough for Foster, who is dogged by the resentments of a lifetime, even though he creates a successful medical practice and becomes the personal physician to Ray Charles. (Music fans: hunt down the Ray Charles single "Hide Nor Hair", which is Ray's tribute to his doc).

Wilkerson, a New York Times journalist, is an excellent writer, and this is one of the best books I've read in the past year. Now only will you learn a lot by reading it, but the stories of Ida Mae, George, and Pershing will resonate with you for a long time to come. ( )

This is an excellent book about a shameful time in our history that still goes on to some degree. The author did a lot of research and followed the lives of 3 people and then also put in a lot of history with the memories of the people she was following. This book was sad in a lot of parts and eye opening but should be read. ( )

The Warmth of Other Suns is about the 50 some years of the Great Migration. It is a fascinating and written in a style that is eminently readable. Wilkerson tells the story of the great migration by focusing on the lives of three different people (and their families) who move out of the rural South and into Northern cities (LA, Chicago and New York City). At times, as you would expect, the material is heartbreaking as these individuals confront the racism and economic struggle they thought they were escaping by leaving the Jim Crow South. My only complaint is that it gets a little repetitive- she writes each chapter as if they were meant to be stand alone pieces of writing. After a point, it didn’t feel like it was really necessary to read the whole book. Overall though, this was a really great book. ( )