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

“Still it made no sense to Pershing that one set of people could be in a cage, and the people outside couldn’t see the bars.”

Isabel Wilkerson's book should be required reading, not just in schools, but as a part of being a well-informed citizenry. An inoculation against the inability to 'see the bars' (or the refusal to see) at a time when there is so much resistance and backlash against those who want an honest look at our history.

From 1915 to the mid-1970s nearly six million blacks migrated from the American South, to points in the North and in the West. This epic and vastly under-reported phenomenon, is painstakingly chronicled, in this Pulitzer prize-winning book, written with love and a brutal frankness, that will keep the reader, crying, angry and fascinated, sometimes all at the same time.
The genius of Wilkerson’s approach is that she narrows these millions, into three individuals, putting a face and a personal slant on this story. First, there is Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a sharecropper's wife, who departed Mississippi in 1937 for Milwaukee and ended up on the south-side of Chicago. Next up, is George Swanson Starling, a citrus picker, who in 1945, fled show more Florida, after nearly being lynched and settled down in Harlem NY. And finally, Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, a young physician, leaves Louisiana, in 1953, for sunny LA, where a different type of racism, still persists.
The author follows this trio, through their long lives, touching on every triumph and every painful, heart-rending bump.
The only reason I did not award this book 5 stars, was the last 100-150 pages could have used some editing. It began to drag but this is a must read and I feel it should be taught in every high school in the US. show less

The Great Migration was the movement of Black Americans from southern states to the north and west of the country. It occurred over several decades from World War 1 through the 1960s when the Civil Rights movement demanded change to the Jim Crow laws in the south. Isabel Wilkerson documents this history through the stories of three people - Ida Mae Gladney, Robert Pershing Foster, and George Starling - to illuminate the reasons people left and their experiences in their new, chosen homes.

The three people we follow were very deliberately chosen. They each left in a different decade and settled in a different place. Their stories are compelling and help a large movement become personal. Wilkerson doesn't focus on the chronology, but on show more the emotion and individual experiences, interspersed with narrative that zooms out and gives context with census information, laws, or sociological writings about the Great Migration as a whole. The everyday racism encountered by Ida Mae, Robert, and George was appalling, not just in the south - where Robert couldn't practice medicine in a white hospital in the 1950s, and lynching for the smallest infraction was a real possibility - but once they reached their new location. Because in the north, there may not have been separate water fountains, but there were still unwritten expectations of where Black families could live and work.

Through her narrative, Wilkerson challenges the common narratives of the Great Migration, that there was one simple reason people left or that they brought broken families and crime to the north. In fact, as illustrated by Ida Mae, Robert, and George and shown be recently-released census data, the southern Black families were more likely to be two-parent homes, be better educated, and have a job than their northern counterparts. The children of immigrants and their descendents brought arts, music, and sports achievements we may not have seen without that movement. While it's impossible to say if the Great Migration made life better or worse for the families that moved - or stayed - it profoundly affected the country and their lives in ways that we still see today. show less

If I could give this book SIX stars, I would. I'm not sure I've ever used this word to describe any book I've read, but it's TRANSFORMATIVE!

Before reading THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS, I thought I had a reasonable white person's understanding of the pervasive nature of racism in the United States. But I never fully understood the daily impact racism has on every aspect of life as a black American. And I certainly never before got that, after the Civil War, the lives of freed blacks in the south actually became worse than under slavery.
Part drama, part history, and part sociology text, THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS successfully portrays a hundred years of migration, when blacks left the Jim Crow restrictions of the southern states and, much like show more other immigrants coming to this country, traveled far looking for more and better opportunities. The result is nothing less than the demographic transformation of the United States.

Wilkerson masterfully focuses on the journeys of three people:
• Ida Mae Gladney, a poor sharecropper who left Mississippi in 1937, following her husband on the midwest railroad route taken by millions of others, ultimately landing in Chicago's South Side.
• George Starling, a workers activist and the son of two educators, who was forced to flee Florida in 1945, ending up in Harlem.
• Robert Foster, a talented physician who married into Louisiana's black elite, but had to travel to California and endure long separations from his family, before establishing the medical practice he craved.

Through these three narratives, representative of so many millions of others, and her rich, supporting research, Wilkerson helps readers actually experience so many nuanced aspects of the migration:
• We understand the family, community, and cultural connections travelers sacrificed when they headed north, and the deep hole left inside each one.
• We witness both the new opportunities and new restrictions they encountered when arriving at "the promised land."
• We see the hostility greeting them from already-established black Americans, as well as from other ethnic immigrant groups.
• We explore the overt and more subtle forms racism takes in the north, impacting employment, rents, home ownership, religion, and social life.
• We see the multi-faceted impact of the migration on their own descendants, navigating the challenges of urban crime and drugs.
• We just begin to recognize the myriad ways this migration has left a lasting imprint on contemporary culture, especially in the music we listen to.
• And the ways in which this massive demographic shift continues to play out today in the politics of our country's northern cities and southern states.

Want to understand some of the origins of red states and blue states? I can't imagine any understanding that's possible without this book.

It's a long one, though very compelling and exceptionally readable. And it's a chapter of American history that isn't taught in schools, but ought to be read by every American who wants to understand who we truly are and how we got here. show less

If I could give this book SIX stars, I would. I'm not sure I've ever used this word to describe any book I've read, but it's TRANSFORMATIVE!

Before reading THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS, I thought I had a reasonable white person's understanding of the pervasive nature of racism in the United States. But I never fully understood the daily impact racism has on every aspect of life as a black American. And I certainly never before got that, after the Civil War, the lives of freed blacks in the south actually became worse than under slavery.
Part drama, part history, and part sociology text, THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS successfully portrays a hundred years of migration, when blacks left the Jim Crow restrictions of the southern states and, much like show more other immigrants coming to this country, traveled far looking for more and better opportunities. The result is nothing less than the demographic transformation of the United States.

Wilkerson masterfully focuses on the journeys of three people:
• Ida Mae Gladney, a poor sharecropper who left Mississippi in 1937, following her husband on the midwest railroad route taken by millions of others, ultimately landing in Chicago's South Side.
• George Starling, a workers activist and the son of two educators, who was forced to flee Florida in 1945, ending up in Harlem.
• Robert Foster, a talented physician who married into Louisiana's black elite, but had to travel to California and endure long separations from his family, before establishing the medical practice he craved.

Through these three narratives, representative of so many millions of others, and her rich, supporting research, Wilkerson helps readers actually experience so many nuanced aspects of the migration:
• We understand the family, community, and cultural connections travelers sacrificed when they headed north, and the deep hole left inside each one.
• We witness both the new opportunities and new restrictions they encountered when arriving at "the promised land."
• We see the hostility greeting them from already-established black Americans, as well as from other ethnic immigrant groups.
• We explore the overt and more subtle forms racism takes in the north, impacting employment, rents, home ownership, religion, and social life.
• We see the multi-faceted impact of the migration on their own descendants, navigating the challenges of urban crime and drugs.
• We just begin to recognize the myriad ways this migration has left a lasting imprint on contemporary culture, especially in the music we listen to.
• And the ways in which this massive demographic shift continues to play out today in the politics of our country's northern cities and southern states.

Want to understand some of the origins of red states and blue states? I can't imagine any understanding that's possible without this book.

It's a long one, though very compelling and exceptionally readable. And it's a chapter of American history that isn't taught in schools, but ought to be read by every American who wants to understand who we truly are and how we got here. show less

this is an incredible feat of reporting and data collation, and a really great piece of rich, detailed historical writing. focusing on 3 people and their families to really tell this epic, multigenerational story is a really excellent way to show us what life was like in the south for black people in general and in specific, as well as what it was like to leave, and for them to make their places in chicago, new york, and los angeles. her ability to give us their stories, while integrating a little personal history of her own family as well as bits and pieces here and there from other people, and to incorporate the more general statistical type information as she went, made for such a nice flow (both of narrative and information). this show more is chock full of information and character and will likely be an invaluable resource not just of the great migration, but of life under jim crow and in the south during the time period she covers.

super impressive and beautifully written on top of it all.

there is so much that will stay with me. the way the north wasn't the utopia that everyone assumed it was (and the way we were taught it was). that newcomers didn't live in slum tenements 6 people to a room because they couldn't afford better, but because no one else would rent to them, and actually they paid much much more than the less rundown rooms that white people got for less. the way the entire block cleared within a couple of weeks after ida mae and her family moved in, and how the racial makeup of the neighborhood shifted so quickly. the way that robert had to drive all night and all day because no motel would let him stay, no matter how unsafe it was for him to keep driving. the people who shipped themselves north in a box or in a coffin to get out of the south. because of the way it was made hard if not impossible to leave the south, when the white southerners realized they were losing their work force.

the only negative thing i can think to say is that the endnotes are poorly done. first of all i am in the minority, i guess, in that i much prefer footnotes to endnotes. but there is no notation in the text that there are endnotes at all. no number, no symbol, no indication to flip to the back and find out more. nothing at all. you just get to the end of the book and find a note section, with a page number and a couple of bolded words, indicating what the endnote is referring to. but nothing about those words in the text let us know to go to the back for an endnote. big editing mistake. so for the first time ever, i didn't read any endnotes in a book, and i still found this book superlative in every way.

a few things in particular that struck me as i was reading, early on:

with the trump administration over the last few years, i'd been thinking of the rise of nazism, but hadn't thought of jim crow in the same light. she makes an excellent comparison in how the jews were scapegoated after wwi to how the blacks were treated after the civil war and reconstruction. in both cases the rights they had gained were all stripped away; it was especially poignant that she used the word pogrom for what black people endured.

"Not unlike European Jews who watched the world close in on them slowly, perhaps barely perceptibly, at the start of Nazism, colored people in the south would first react in denial and disbelief to the rising hysteria, then, helpless to stop it, attempt a belated resistance, not knowing and not able to imagine how far the supremacists would go. The outcomes for both groups were widely divergent, one suffering unspeakable loss and genocide, the other enduring nearly a century of apartheid, pogroms, and mob executions. But the hatreds and fears that fed both assaults were not dissimilar and relied on arousing the passions of the indifferent to mount so complete an attack."

an absolutely horrifying statistic:
"Across the South, someone [black] was hanged or burned alive every four days from 1889 to 1929..."

some of them were lynched because they were "suspected of killing cattle, boastful remarks" or "insult to a white person." i know that justice wasn't justice then (or now) so a trial and conviction wouldn't have meant much either, but to be killed because of a suspicion seems particularly awful. and reminds me so much of what is going on today, with so many policemen killing black people because they're suspected of some crime or another, usually something quite minor. and how with lynching so widespread, it wasn't just a meting out of "justice," but a message to all the other black people in the area that if they wanted to live they had to agree to live under the white man's boot. which feels an awful lot like the message being given to communities of color right now, with the way they are killed by police with near impunity.

this really struck me, as someone who has gone into schools to give presentations and often been surprised at some of the names i've come across: "Sometimes parents tried to superimpose glory on their offspring with the grandest title they could think of, or, if they were feeling especially militant, the name of a senator or president from the North. It was a way of affixing acceptability if not greatness. It forced everyone, colored and white, to call their janitor sons Admiral or General or John Quincy Adams, whether anybody, including the recipient, liked it or not. White southerners who would not call colored people Mr. or Mrs. were made to sputter out Colonel or Queen instead." (my italics) show less

There is only one other history book I have read where I was crying at the end and that was McCullough's biography of John Adams.The tears were of similar origin, awe at staggering achievements. Adams, yes, on the macro scale and Wilkerson's on both, although coming through best on the micro scale in the individual stories she gives us, and, in my mind both stories deeply intertwined. What the stories of the Black men and women who migrated out of the oppressive south prove is that the United States, just by managing to come into being, by putting the open-ended language into that extraordinary document "The Declaration of Independence" and by developing a Constitution, body of essential law, that despite our current atmosphere, ARE show more living documents: the former containing, almost miraculously, guidance for continuing to develop and change the latter. Wilkerson's achievement is bringing the decades-long story of the massive migration of Black people from the rural South to the urban North into focus at both the macro and the micro level through alternating individual stories and historical background. Her sense of what the reader can manage (the horrors, that is) and her timing for when to shift and move forward, always returning to press the painful points again, is pitch perfect. There have been a zillion rave reviews and I now add mine, but I encourage the reader to make that connection in hearts and minds between our founding documents and the incredible act of faith and bravery the Black migration story offers. ***** show less